Bo,
Thank you for running my thoughts through your mental gear. I have been
away from the 'face' for the last two weeks and I have just returned to
computer connectivity. Yes, there is a place in the world that the Internet
has not penetrated, out in Hell's Canyon. As we adjust the thought rate, I
would like to thank you for your response, it is really difficult for a
mirror to reflect on itself and your thoughtful response is allowing me an
oppurtunity to 'see' the reflection.
bens
Comments threaded below...
----- Original Message -----
From: <skutvik@online.no>
To: <moq_focus@moq.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 1999 1:56 AM
Subject: Re: MF level progession?
> Benjamin F Schafer and MOQ focussers
>
> Welcome to the "quality discussion" and thanks for a new slant to
> our ongoing struggle to understanding Pirsig's ideas. You wrote:
>
> > I do have some disturbing thoughts to share on the underlying models
> > expressed throughout the threads. The thoughts, at least, are
> > disturbing to me! In my reading of Robert M. Pirsig's works on the
> > Metaphysics of Quality, I have not encountered any teleological
> > approach by Robert M. Pirsig to answering big questions. The
> > discussions' postings all seem to have a set of suppositions that the
> > MOQ was developed/discovered with a purpose to define the 'next big
> > thing'. I would like to suggest that this idea or MEME
> > virus of the mind) is an artifact created by each of our own
> > experiences.
> > We want a happy ending or to be able to predict what happens next.
> > Please bear with me for a few short moments and then, hopefully the
> > underlying concepts that are bothering me will be exposed through the
> > use of the MOQ.
>
> Hmm. Teleological approach? (Teleology according to my
> dictionary:
>
> "Theory, teaching, belief that events and developments are
> due to the purpose or design that they are serving (as
> opposed to the mechanistic theory of the universe)."
>
> No mocking, but I believe that the MOQ escapes either
> classification by relegating it to the SOM which puts mechanistic
> in the 'O' class and the teleological in the 'S'. As you well know,
> the MOQ claims to have rejected the SO division. If you insist that
> nothing can escape such an analysis you have constructed a new
> metaphysics :-).
The point you make about MOQ and Teleogical bias is precisely on target.
What was most troublesome to me in the discussions is the insistence that
MOQ be "coming from someplace" and "making predictions about going
someplace". This places any practioner of MOQ that attempts to follow a
teleogical methodology in a hampster wheel, going round and round with great
energy while desireing to be moving across the landscape.
>
> The "language" part of the message was an impressive one if only I
> were sure that I understand what you mean.
>
> > Language is the current medium of communicating and as such
> > understanding it(language) presents a formidable barrier to accurate
> > and clear expression of the mental processes we each undertake in the
> > dialogue of the MOQ. I defer to Steven Pinker in his "The Language
> > Instinct, How the mind creates language" for a much longer and very
> > precise description of language and its place in the human condition.
> > The short version is "Language is a site specific suborgan or system
> > in the physical brain." Language does not consist of "English, or
> > Spanish or Bilt!thong" but of a universal grammar that preexists the
> > audible word in each brain.
>
> This is obviously enough, except for the "universal grammar" part. I
> know next to nothing about this but have heard it said that the indo-
> european languages and their subject-predicate-object grammar
> differ fundamentally from other language structures and create a
> particular reality for the users different from other. For example the
> monstrosity of "being dead".
"universal grammar" is a hook used at the present time to hang out ideas
about pre-linguistic abilities that observation of humans and simians show
to be in existence. Work with people, such as Helen Keller, that exist in a
non auditory, non sighted state, has produced a realm of work related to
symbol commonality. We as creatures learn the "language" of our genes as
expressed in, sight, touch, taste, smell, sound, movement and in the
organization and rigidification of the neural knot we express as the seat of
self. This approach can be used to enhance the examination of
mind/intellect/body, consciousness/unconsciouseness/self, and the
predisposition to break thingification into distinct pairs; ie
romantic/rational. Significant work with people that have had the corpus
colapsum severed (ie split brain) show two distinct "minds/personalities"
inhabiting the same skull. "Of two Minds" is an excellent book that explores
this space of the human bio-mental condition. The book goes on to show that
each of the two minds can be communicated with independently in a person
that has not undergone any procedure to physically seperate the two halfs of
the brain. Now why would I be so focused on the
brain/mind/intellect/conscious/unconscious/self(s)? In engineering the first
thing that has to be verified is the instrument or method of measurement,
without a basis there is no measurement, an example of this type of falicy
introduction would be the Hubble myopia produced by lack of verification of
two standard blocks used to validate the wavelenght resolution acheived in
silvering the mirror. MOQ embraces and the me uses MOQ to understand and
then to express that understanding, the questions I have relate to
understanding the pervasiveness of MOQ while being an observer participant.
It is just an hypothesis at this time for me that all creatures exhibiting
thought express the MOQ presence. If this is indeed true than MOQ and
"universal grammar" are somehow related or entiwined or the same thing.
>
> > The language connection to
> > MOQ was traversed by Robert M. Pirsig in his pursuit and use of
> > rhetoric. Rhetoric is a tool with which to approach understanding of
> > the MOQ but it is not without is flaws as a tool. If we confuse
> > language with MOQ than examination of language with MOQ raises the
> > fallacy of using a tool to build the very tool in use, not unlike
> > Escher's Hand drawing a Hand sketch.
>
> Correct, many confuse language with the MOQ in the sense that
> they want the intellectual level to be language, and as they also
> claim that the MOQ is an intellectual construct ..voila MOQ is
> language! I agree when you assert that
>
> > I assert that language can usefully be examined by using MOQ because MOQ
> > preexists in the creation of the "mind or intellect" 'before'
> > language.
>
> ....even with the "mind or intellect" bit, because I feel to have come
> to grips with how the mental or mind quality came to be stuck with
> the Q intellect (see my Mon.25 Oct message to Keith Gillette). I
> don't know if you have followed our meanderings long enough for it
> to mean anything?
I have experienced many things in life, humans have the inate ability to
develope new and strange symbols and shorthand on the fly, while I don't
fully "grok' Q intellect the readings in the focus group will soon require a
captian marvel decoder ring and devolve into pages of acronyms that need to
be hypertexed for a reader to follow the unscramble of the communications.
(end of bitch) If it was an easy life it would have been given to someone
else to live. :)
>
> I guess that it is our speculations over a fifth level that have
> triggered your reaction, but a possible development beyond
> intellect is no "goal" - at least not in an eschatological sense. It's
> no deliverance or happy end, but merely another turn of the static
> wheel. Pirsig even says that the development may be seen as
> evolving "away from" rather than towards something.
Actually, my reaction/response was stimulated by the trap that Robert Persig
left laying in Lila for the unwary intellectual shoppers only. "That's all
folks, just the four levels, ain't no more!" I fell into a distracting
reverie when I first read Lila, that reverie caused a distance from Robert's
main concept of the developement in Lila of MOQ. I actually had to reread
the book to get back to the "hidden in plain sight" main concept of MOQ as a
framework to hang other ideas on. I guess I was not prepared to accept the
framework at the time and so I went harking off into thought land for the
"fifth" level. It took me a lot of learning time to come to the oblivious
conclusion(yes oblivious) that Robert said what he meant and meant what he
said.
>
> > Thank you. Of course the ideas and opinions expressed here-in are the
> > sole responsibility of the author.
>
> Understood :-)
>
> Bodvar "Bo"
>
>
> MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
>
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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