LS Level 5


glove (glove@indianvalley.com)
Fri, 11 Sep 1998 13:32:42 +0100


hi Horse and squad

Horse wrote:

No offense taken - be as blunt as you want, it's quite hard to offend
me :)
I don't see the emergence that MoQ supports as a ladder form of
evolution. L5 is the combination and interplay of all of the lower
levels - at the moment in an early, nascent state.

Horse, thank you for your graciousness. as Bob Dylan says, people tell me
its a sin, to know and feel too much within. i am glad that TLS offers a
sanctuary from that SO type of thinking, and an openness to exploring new
ideas that the 'real' world sometimes frowns upon.

i sense that progressive type thinking (ladder) is the causal nature of our
disagreement so i would like to focus attention on ladder type thinking in a
MOQ context. it is, after all, an enormous platypus and fits nicely into
this months topic. ladder thinking is the way we are taught to learn, its
called empiricism. it starts with the assumption that we know little or
anything, but by slowly building a construction of knowledge on top of
previous knowledge we can eventually move to knowledge of the truth.

the Platoists were responsible for this type of progressive thinking, as
Pirsig saw in ZMM. it is a common-sense way of thinking and has resulted in
the notion of evolution as we know it. this type of thinking results in
platypi abounding in every corner, but because the system of thinking is an
open-ended system, each platypus can be safely put in its own little
niche...very convenient, but troubling if this system is examined closely.

physicists and philosophers realized this in the first part of the 20th
century as they were developing quantum theory. while i do not pretend to
understand all the implications of quantum theory or even what it is for
sure, suffice it to say that it was necessary to break completely from
classic mechanical physics in order to describe what is happening inside the
atom. again, i dont pretend to know how this was done, but i see a huge
similarity between what those brilliant minds of earlier this century were
doing for quantum theory, and what TLS is doing for the MOQ now.

my own suggestion of an all-space-filling, inside-outingly, rippling wimple
model of the MOQ is a break from the classical empiricist way of viewing
reality of larger porportions than i first realized when i conceived of it,
i can see that now. its very difficult for us to think in terms of
completeness, because we do not feel complete. there is so much we do not
know! how can we be complete? its no longer common-sense classical thinking
to say everything is complete because its clear to the individual that this
is not so.

yet that is precisely Pirsig's message in Lila when he says "If you
construct an encyclopedia of four topics- Inorganic, Biological, Social and
Intellectual, nothing is left out. No 'thing', that is. Only Dynamic
Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent."

accepting this point of view to describe reality requires a drastic shifting
from classical empiricist thinking to holistic MOQ think. instead of
starting with scant knowledge and building it up in a ladder type of
sequence in a hope to become complete, the MOQ starts with that completeness
as a given and looks backward from that point. Pirsig alludes to this in ZMM
as well, in the afterword i believe, when he talks of the ancient Greeks
viewing the future from behind instead of our frontal approach notion of it.

i realize that one liberty i have taken with my wimple model is to depict DQ
and that negates its value immediately. but you could also say that Pirsig
negates DQ value as soon as he names it and he realizes as much. the
limitations of being human i guess. it is that DQ that allows the
completeness to be, however, so i feel it has to be represented in some
manner, within the understanding we can never truly represent DQ in any way.

my disagreement with a 5th level is really secondary in an MOQ context, i
can see that as well. the static levels of the MOQ is only a conceptual
construct and it really makes no difference how many levels there are as
long as the completeness of Dynamic Quality is maintained. still, i think it
helps in the forming of static latches with the MOQ to have some ties that
bind SOM to the MOQ, as i stated in my previous email, and those ties are
the four static levels, IMO.

best wishes to all,

glove

--
homepage - http://www.moq.org/lilasquad
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