From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Mon Jun 06 2005 - 06:52:52 BST
On 3 Jun 2005 at 16:55, Allenbarrows9966@aol.com wrote:
> bo: Som is the intellect every bit of it.
> I have been reading Anthony McWatts book trying to find something
> about this but there is nothing which helps. I began to think why it
> was left out of Anthony McWatts book and it soon became clear that
> intellect is patterns of value of which one is som only. So saying
> som actually is the intellect is making a big mistake it seems to me.
> Here is what i reckon i mean:
Hi Allen
From your last post it sounds like I managed to do you injustice,
you really HAD read my essay, so I turn to your first post (of this
thread).
> However, a fundamental difference between Whitehead and Pirsig is that
> the latter presumes (as observed in the hot stove account in Section
> 2.3.) that the Quality event occurs before subjects and objects are
> aware of each other:
How the Hot Stove insight arrived Pirsig never tells, but I believe
it is a different aspects of the "quality event" one of ZMM.
> ‘The Quality event is the cause of the
> subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the
> cause of the Quality!’ (Pirsig, 1995a, p.12)
I naturally agree with this. Quality (the "event" part can be
dropped) creates subjects and the objects.
> As noted in the
> previous chapter, that does not entail, as an idealist metaphysics
> would have it, that intellectual patterns create experience but
> rather experience creates intellect.
And as intellect (in ZMM) is the "prism" that splits Quality (pre-
intellectual awareness) into subjects and objects ... the
intellectual level of the later MOQ ought to have become the
(value of) the S/O divide.
> In the MOQ, experience is
> categorised by intellect (as noted above, primarily into the four
> static levels and a referring term for Dynamic Quality).
But here I part company. "Categorized by intellect" implies that
the MOQ (that does this categorization) is an intellectual pattern
and that is plain impossible. The system that makes intellect a
sub-set of its own can't be a subset of itself. The MOQ is nowhere
inside itself , it is itself!
> On the other
> hand, Whitehead (1933, p.171) still presupposes ‘that the
> subject-object relation is the fundamental structural pattern of
> experience’ and divides reality between eight categories of
> existence (Whitehead, 1929, p.29) of which ‘prehension’ is only
> one category.
This is surely correct.
> Anthony says here that experience creates intellect and that
> experience is categorised by the intellect. This sounds like a
> chicken and egg problem until you realise that category is another
> word for value and then it makes sense. Intellect is patterns of
> value of which only one is som and there are others all patterns of
> value.
Your conclusion about (this point of) Anthony's thesis is correct,
and its (the thesis) "experience creating intellect" is correct too
...Quality or experience did create the static intellectual level in
its time. But I disagree with this efforts to mix SOM's subjective
"everything in our mind" (mind now called "intellect") with MOQ's
own statement that the inorganic level came first and intellect
last.
I don't know if any more of it will do, but as I see it, this is some
effort (by Pirsig) to comply with ZMM's about theories being
nowhere before invented by some mind (Gravity nowhere before
Newton) but he rails (rightfully) against SOM here. SOM is
replaced by the MOQ and to re-introduce its premises in the
MOQ is disastrous.
Bo
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