From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Fri Aug 01 2003 - 09:56:30 BST
Hi Johnny
31 July you wrote:
> I'm not prepared to address your "SOM Idealism" concept (I thought the
> two were exclusive) and was also confused by your "Idealism =
> Subjective" statement in your last post to Joe. Could you explain the
> "half" of SOM that is idealism to me, please?
We have the idealism/materialism camps, which says respectively that
mind creates matter or matter creates mind. The "create" term
perhaps sounds a bit "magical", so there are a lot of more lenient
varieties f.ex. scientific materialism that merely says that when matter
(nerve systems in this case) gets complex enough it starts generating
an illusion of consciousness. What the more "lenient" idealists say I
haven't a ready example of, but not to get lost the gist of it is that the
idealist/materialist chasm is a fall-out of the mind/matter enigma which
is the fall-out of the mother lode: Subject/Object Metaphysics.
> But regarding the Pirsig quote I have a big question. He says the
> objects grow out of ideas, not the other way around. Where do these
> ideas come from. Why do I have the idea that the Eiffel Tower is in
> Paris? If I go there, I suppose I will see it, and it will look like
> the idea I have of it, and grow out of the idea. What if I had no
> idea about it, had never even heard of the Eiffel Tower, and went to
> Paris. Would I not also see it, same as if I had the idea?
Johnny, I'm NOT with Pirsig here, but let me repeat that it is SOM
which is the source of the enigma (if the Eiffel Tower is a figment of
our mind or if the physical tower imprints itself on the our senses and
creates an image in our mind). A silly notion that every toddler know is
idiocy, yet before the MOQ pointed to a SOM nobody knew of any
SOM and everybody was forced into believing that reality was split
from the start in this subjective/objective way ...For the religious
...something God had built into his creation for us to ponder his
mysterious ways. This still applies, except for this small group no-one
know of any SOM ;-)
This is why I am so exasperated by the annotating Pirsig. Why does
he not heed his own MOQ? Follow my reasoning: After having
reached at the Quality conclusion: That Value is the innermost reality
which in the known manner gives rise to the static hierarchy which at
the intellectual stage divides reality in the said S/O way ..... After this
solid metaphysical groundwork to start about "objects growing out of
ideas ..etc." is to return to SOM's idealist position which is just as
poisonous as the materialist to the MOQ. Why does Pirsig do this?
I have wondered ever since this group started to throw the LC
annotations around. I found the said # 102 in which it sounds like a
strategy to get the MOQ aligned with Quantum Physics, but as said
find more of this "all in our mind" stuff in LC - most pronounced as in
the # 37
* "Anders is slipping into the materialist assumption that thre is a
huge world out there that has nothing to do with people. The
MOQ says that this is a high quality assumption, within limits. one
of its is that without humans to make it, that assumption cannot
be made. It is a human specific assumption. Strictly speaking
Anders have never heard of and will never hear of anything that
isn't human specific."
Materialist?! As if THAT is any threat to the Q-idea? The idealist view
that Pirsig himself brings is doubly harmful. He does not say "in our
mind", but "human specific" spells the same. Maybe I lose you here
Johnny, but it all relates to the definition of intellectual level as
"mind/thinking" and that the MOQ is an intellectual pattern, i.e: "in our
minds" ....and why I so vehemently opposes that definition and
maintains that intellect is the S/O divide itself!
One last criticism of the above annotation: Here Pirsig [after his own
great insight that Value creates the mind/matter universe) re-
introduces the mind half in the "human specific" or "everything human
assumptions" forms ...If so THEN "human assumptions" is a new
innermost reality and he may as well make a "Meatphysics of Human
Assumptions": Dynamic Human Assumptions and Static Human
Assumptions of which the first is "Inorganic Human Assumption"
...and so on. which is good enough but QUALITY IS BETTER!!
Conclusion: The Eiffel Tower's reality enigma is a SOM figment, but
why Pirsig keeps talking the way he does in LC has become the new
enigma. However, this sentence (from # 102) sets everything straight
>"Except in the case of Dynamic Quality, what is observed always
>involves an interaction with ideas that have been previously
assumed"
Sincerely
Bo
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