Bo, Gary, Scott, All
On July 29th Bo said,
> The good man Gary is inventing the internal/external
> gunpowder over and over while Scott points to the fact that this issue was
> brought to absurdity by Kant. It went like this: Berkeley showed that
> qualities are internal and quantities external, but with Kant even the "filters"
> (time, space, ..etc) that made the external quantities meaningful were
> subjective (qualities) too!!!!. This is only a nudge away from saying that
> quality is all there is, but the time wasn't ripe in the eighteen fifties ... hardly
> in the nineteen fifties.
But Bo, Gary is not suggesting Quality is not the basic groundstuff of
reality just within the realms of static values an internal/external
split is useful. Nor would I guess is he suggests that one realm is more
"real" than the other. I'm sure you recall Pirsig's comment to McWatt
some time ago (which I can't lay my hand on right now) in which he said
in effect that the theory or hypothesis, "that there is an external
world out there" was a good (useful) one. Does this not imply a
corollary theory or hypothesis, that there is an internal world?
In trying to find the quote refered to I ran across this on the website
article by McWatt:
> Pirsig has this to say about probability and preference:
>
> "When the distinction between them is examined an interesting fact appears. Preference
> is always supposed to be subjective. It exists only at the intellectual and social levels. At
> the biological level it becomes controversial as to whether animals such as cats have a
> preference or if they function according to Skinnerian stimulus-and-response
> probability. And at the atomic level it is assumed that only probability exists."
>
> "The MOQ puts an end to this ancient freewill vs. determinism controversy by showing
> that both preference and probability are subsets of value. As the distinction between
> subject and object becomes relatively unimportant in the MOQ, so does the distinction
> between probability and preference. There is no basic difference between mind and
> matter with regard to free will, only a difference in degree of freedom. Subatomic
> forces can express limited preferences too."
>
> (letter from Robert Pirsig to Anthony McWatt, May 3rd, 1997)
The old "B values precondition A" You value, prefer, grey pants. Yet
every birthday your wife gives you a blue pair. In order not to hurt her
feelings you never tell her that you prefer grey ones. Yet if you
finally expressed this preference, this internal pattern of value, to
her and magically next birthday a grey pair showed up would this not
suggest, empirically, some sort of an internal/external split/connection?
Moving on to a more heretical proposition to get your (oops their not
your's, that would be internal) grey cells in an uproar. As you know
I've worked on trying to correlate Pirsig's and Wilber's (Mr
Internal/External) work. One of the problems is Pirsig assigns O to the
two lower levels, S to the two upper which does not jive with Wilber's
four quadrant system. But I've recently spotted another difference that
is more troubling, the one/many or individual/group issue. All of
Pirsig's levels, except social, seem to include patterns which are both
one and many, individual and groups. However social is about patterns of
groups or groups of groups.Or many/many values, instead of one/many.
What Wilber does is treat group values as separate subsets or quadrants
of evolving patterns removing "social" per se as one distinct or
descrete evolving level. So while Jonathan suggests removing the
intellectual level. I see the value in removing the social level in
Pirsig's scheme when comparing it with Wilber in as much as Wilber
devotes half his four quadrant scheme to collective, group, or social
type values.
3WD
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