From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Tue Aug 19 2003 - 08:29:02 BST
Paul, David, All.
Wait for me! I had written a reply to David's opening of this thread (the
16th), but before it was ready you two were into your fifth(?) round.
David's puzzlement centers on Pirsig saying that the "highest quality
intellectual pattern" (aka "common sense") which says that inorganic
matter comes before ideas, is wrong because common sense (as a
set of ideas) comes before matter. David is all correct, but the REAL
wrongness - what forces even Pirsig into this impossible dead end -
stems from the premise that SOM is one intellectual pattern and that
the MOQ is another.
In my own input on this (before David's) I pointed to the claim that
"common sense" is a set of ideas and thus before matter ends in
absurdity because everything dissolves into sets of ideas. Pirsig
succeeds in proving that ideas are primary, no doubt, but they
become all there is. A weird universe where the idea of matter before
ideas are replaced by the idea of ideas before matter ...etc.
Paul tries to save things by a new quote where Pirsig says the
opposite, and sure, he speaks true moqish most of the time, the
nonsense stems from the impossible definition of intellect as a realm
of ideas, where SOM is a "high" - yet no good - idea. (see Paul, all
patterns of a level must belong to the same value!) This will haunt the
MOQ as long as the current definition is maintained, and I am a little
puzzled by David who sees these things so clearly, yet refuse to
address the root problem.
Once the intellect is seen for what it is really is, namely the eternal
S/O see-saw - in this case what comes first: matter or ideas - things
are straightened out. To return to the puzzle above. Don't
misunderstand me, Pirsig WAS correct; his insight that everything
ends up in the said absurd solipsism is valid from the SOM's
premises, and P. of ZMM started from SOM. Its log-jam is what the
QUALITY insight saved him from: Quality gives rise to the S/O divide
itself. Its "impossibility", however, is due to it being a mere static level
not reality itself (SOM).
But returning with this "idealism" afterwards it only makes a mess of
the MOQ. There is this little thing, however, that redeems it all. In
annotation # 102 he says.
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 assumption,
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.
He starts in the usual vein about the observer and the observed
(subject and object) both being intellectual assumptions (intellectual
patterns), but suddenly in an aside he says that Dynamic Quality is
excepted from the this closed circle. How can that be if the MOQ is
another pattern in the mind-defined intellect? Clearly, here he
FINALLY returns to the true MOQ where Quality is the mother of the
observer/observed pair, which then - separately - aren't intellectual
"assumptions", rather - as a pair - is one of intellects countless
offshoots.
To return to the question "what comes first". Once the postulate of
Quality being outside the mind/matter (observer/observed) is made,
the static inorganic level comes first, but it has nothing to do with
SOM's substance.
IMO.
Bo
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