No, i still disagree. Quality begins to look more and more subjective to
me.
in response to Lithien, i dont think the the "man sitting on a hot stove
" argument is satisfactory. the reason we can mostly agree on this being
a low quality situation, we see it as different degrees of
low-qualityness. some people would be much more scared of burning pain
than others. Some, for instance, would find being sliced up with a
broken bottle much more "low-quality" (painful) while others would
prefer the slashing to the burning. therefore, the quality is once more
subjective. As for the "bypassing judgement", i think that this really
only has to do with the way that our bodies are wired. it only works
this way for pain, it seems. theres very few other situations where we
can all agree on the quality unconditionally (and any little change in
perception drops Q into the subjective and away from the trancendant
manifest Q of Pirsig's writings), which brings me to the conclusion
that the agreement on the low-quality of burning oneself is a just
conditionally subjective. all of the subjects, humanity, are wired to
feel pain instantly upon the touch of extreme heat. If they were wired
differently, or raised or trained to not feel this way, they wouldn't.
yogi's can train themselves to not feel the pain of a hot coal or to
consider the pain a doorway to another level of conciousness. therefore
making the flash of extreme heat a high quality situation leading to
enlightenment.
Xcto, i disagree with your statement "But it is clearly obvious that
Quality transcends the 'whatever' idea as subjective; we know somethings
are better than others without necessarily having to make a subjective
or objective argument." Why is this 'clearly obvious'? I'm beginning to
think that Quality doesn't transcend the 'whatever' idea. And we don't
all know that somethings are better than others. there is constant
disagreement over the quality of everything from music to cars to
sculptures to people. the things that i believe you could have been
thinking of, the agreement of most that, say, the Mona Lisa is a higher
quality piece of art than my kid sister's crayon drawings of a unicorn,
is really not known. it is subjective. some might say that the crayoned
unicorn is higher quality because it represents a child's reach to grasp
the concepts of pictorial representation, realized imagination, or
graphic communication (the construction paper as a medium to connect to
her fellow human beings. this is much more important than an old
italien's depiction of a prostitute that hung around his corner. so then
the unicorn could be high quality. we all mostly agree that the Mona
Lisa is higher quality because we are all angled the same way in our
upbringing. our minds are shaped by the same society and values, and
these values affect how we each individually see things, and hence
individually percieve an object's quality. subjectively, but with lots
of majority agreements among people with similarly formed filters of
perception. if we asked a swahili tribesman which piece of art he
prefered, he could just as easily percieve the crayon unicorn as higher
quality than the Mona Lisa. THE QUALITY IS SUBJECTIVE!
the reason that most of pirsig's university students agreed on each
paper's quality or lack thereof was because they were all conditioned to
percieve values a certain way by the same society. and because there
were slight differences in how each of their minds came about
individually, im sure that that is why it wasn't a complete and
unconditional agreement. there were probably some disagreements over
whether a particular paper was high quality or not. but Pirsig only
points to a general concensus. this is due to the similar minds (from
similar western backgrounds) of all the students.
in the rest of your reply you say that if everything is subjective, then
obviously nothing is objective. and you say that this is not acceptable,
that we are then left with nothing but mindless automatons, collections
of electrons and protons bouncing around together "thinking" that theyre
consious beings with individual ideas and philosophies. thinking that
the world is as they see it but in reality (whatever else that may be),
their whole world is in their heads. why is that not acceptable? maybe
that is the case; it can be reached logically. only dosteyevski (with
his "inherent morality over logic of the west") could object to a
logical conclusion like that. No, Quality is subjective, even if that
means a deluded zombie life for us.
now this has gotten kind of long winded so ill send it off while i read
and reply to Platt's response.
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