MD Lila's Child

From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Thu Jul 31 2003 - 08:43:47 BST

  • Next message: Valence: "Re: MD Lila's Child"

    Hello All Philosophers.
    I have at several occasions expressed my wonder about Pirsig from
    "Lila's Child" who - from annotations presented - I don't really
    recognize. I had till now not read the annotations in any systematical
    way, but did so the other day and have maybe found the answer in #
    102 which says:

    * " I see more clearly today than when I wrote the SODV (Subjects,
        Objects, Data and Value") that the key to integrating the MOQ
        with science is through philosophic idealism which says that
        objects grow out of ideas, not the other way round. Since at the
        most primary level the observed and the observer are both
        intellectual assumptions, the paradoxes of quantum theory have
        to be conflicts of intellectual assumptions, not just conflicts of what
        is observed. Except in the case of Dynamic Quality, what is
        observed always involves an interaction with ideas that have been
        previously assumed.....etc".

    Ah! The "philosophical idealism" that I have spotted in several
    annotations is a mere STRATEGY to get the MOQ integrated with
    science (Quantum Physics). But why not say so to the MOQ readers?
    WARNING now I am acting the role as a SOM idealist!. For instance
    the annotation that Rick presented to me. (I haven't found the
    number)

    * And in this highest quality intellectual pattern, external
    * objects (matter) appear historically before intellectual
    * patterns... But this highest quality intellectual pattern itself
    * comes before the external world, not after, as is commonly
        presumed by
    * the materialist.".

    But is such a strategy possible, or wise? Analyzing the above.

    Pirsig says that SOM says that matter comes before mind, but this is
    only the objective half of SOM, the subjective idealist half says the
    opposite. With this erroneous opening it becomes a bit weird :
    SOM is the highest intellectual pattern, but the MOQ is supposed to
    be still "higher" (are there room at the top?). Still, the problem is that
    the MOQ can't well adapt one half of SOM (the idealist) without
    becoming a subset of SOM.

    This effort to make the MOQ an idealist philosophy is wasted because
    (as he says lower down in # 102) the quantum findings are only weird
    from a SOM p.o.v, but it has succeeded in the creating a lot of
    confusion at this forum. But then, is it really a strategy? In annotation
    after annotation Pirsig takes the idealist position - for instance in # 3 -

    "Without humans to make assuptions, that assumption cannot be
    made ..etc.

    I don't know if this idealism follows from having defined the intellectual
    level as thinking or it's the other way round: intellect must be mind to
    "make assumptions", but any way it nullifies the insight that P. arrived
    at in ZMM, namely that QUALITY is the creator of the Subject/Object
    pair and thereby the materialist/idealist divide. It (idealism) also
    creates problems for the MOQ as presented in LILA where intellect is
    supposed to be a static level - out of the static social level - and in
    conflict with the parent level. But where is the static element in
    "thinking"? One may principally think of everything! And the conflict
    with social value? Totally absent.

    But there is this little sentence in the opening annotation that saves it
    all

    "Except in the case of Dynamic Quality, what is observed always
    involves an interaction with ideas that have been previously assumed"

    DQ is excepted from the closed observer-observed circle, a reality
    outside it.This is the most significant statement of the whole LC: Once
    the Copernican Revolution was made the world became a QUALITY
    existence and the static evolution began with the inorganic.The static
    levels aren't quasi-intellectual patterns, rather the necessary base for
    intellect.

    Sincerely
       
    Bo

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