For earlier work on this subject, I would suggest going all the way back to the Phenomenologists (Husserl, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and (especially!) Merleau-Ponty). Merleau-Ponty's writing is highly academic and intellectually

challenging, but it's the closest thing I've found to Pirsig's fundamental concepts in the world of academia. (Pirsig's Quality Event corresponds well with Merleau-Ponty's concept of Situation. Again, this post is just a teaser... The comparison can be extended ad infinitum… - Jason Gaedtke

Here's what caught my eye:

"Theoretical biologists sometimes seem to be divided by esthetic considerations as much as scientific ones. Where purists like Dawkins thrill to the cold logic of mathematical rigor, pluralists like Gould get their pleasures from the tangled bank of biological diversity. I suspect this is why the debate often seems so intangible. They aren't arguing about facts, but about which is more fun -- the ingenious equations of population genetics or the curious contrivances of the flamingo's beak and the panda's thumb. Given this, it is not surprising that the two sides can't agree. Who is to say if there is more value in the lucidity of mathematics or in the variety of nature?"

A couple of points about this passage. First, it's great to see one of our principles directly confirmed by someone who probably never heard of the MoQ. Second, it's good to reminded that esthetic considerations have often been used as indicators of "truth" in the scientific community. Third, it's dawned on me that some of the Squad's differing views are more about esthetics than anything else. - Platt Holden

"The basic recurring theme in Hindu Mythology is the creation of the world by the self-sacrifice of God - 'sacrifice' in the original sense of 'making sacred' - whereby God becomes the world which, in the end becomes again God. This creative activity of the Divine is called *lila*, the play of God, and the world is seen as the stage of the divine play. Like most of Hindu mythology, the myth of lila has strong magical flavour. *Brahman* is the great magician who transforms himself into the world and he performs this feat with his 'magic creative power', which is the original meaning of *maya* in the *Rig Veda*. The word maya - one of the most important terms in Indian philosophy - has changed its meaning over the centuries. From the 'might', or 'power', of the divine actor and magician, it came to signify the psychological state of anybody under the spell of the magic play. As long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine "lila" with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman "underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. Maya, therefore, does not mean that the world is an illusion, as is often wrongly stated. The illusion merely lies in our point of view, if we think that the shapes and structures, things and events, around us are realities of nature, instead of realizing that they are concepts of our measuring and categorizing minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory."

There you have Capra's definition of the mystic (Brahman is supreme) and logical positivist (maya is supreme). Pirsig really has introduced something new with DQ (lila is supreme). - Jonathan B. Marder

If a running program is an information processor, does that mean it is just like the brain? After all, the brain is an information processor, too, right? Wrong: the brain is no mere information processor, it is a *meaning creator* --and meaning creation is a trick no computer can accomplish. ... You can build a sophisticated digital rose-recognition system,. wave a rose in front of it and thereby bring about lots of electrical activity; and perhaps after a while some words will appear on a screen -- "rose recognition accomplished" or "damn, what a rose!".-- but no one and nothing has had the sensation of having seen anything. And no computer scientist has any reason to believe that any computer ever *will* have such a sensation, or any other sensation. Granted there is no reason in principle why you couldn’t build a machine that shares with the brain this remarkable capacity; but there is also no reason to suppose you could do it without reproducing the brain itself."

Incidentally, this quote comes from Gelernter’s book Machine Beauty where you’ll find the entire first chapter devoted to a

stunning confirmation of the MOQ. Note his emphasis in the above passage on the brain as a *meaning creator.* As wonderful as computer technology may be, what can it tell us about the MEANING of a computer virus or the MEANING of the information on the Internet? Science and technology are concerned with means; the MOQ (and most of us) are concerned with meanings. There’s a huge, huge difference. - Platt Holden

"A purpose immediately fulfilled is the ideal of adhocism; it cuts though the usual delays caused by specialization, bureaucracy and hierarchical organization."

"By realizing his immediate needs, by combining ad hoc parts, the individual creates, sustains, and transcends himself."

"We live in a pluralist world confronted by competing philosophies, and knowledge is in an ad hoc, fragmented state prior to some possible synthesis...The objection to this pluralism, to such ad hoc amalgams of competing cultures, styles and theories, is that it is indecisive, arbitrary and confused. These are in certain cases the weaknesses of adhocism, although

they obscure its essentially purposeful nature." - Dave Thomas

nothing IN THEMSELVES, there is always a relationship: a context. This is…contextualism… - Bodvar Skutvik

the progress and conflict between science, philosophy, religion, and mythology from pre Socratic until present with an up to date bibliography.

It clearly illustrates that all science is done within the context of the social patterns of its time. And it shows how time after time philosophers and scientists include things in their supposedly "objective" theories that were clearly "subjective" based, conscientiously or not, on their philosophical POV or their societies POV. - Dave Thomas

Unfortunately it was published before Lila, so it's definitely missing a substantial section of Pirsig's philosophy. - Ciona

DaWuLiMa is a great book. If you got Zukav's major points as foundation, you can go to the man himself John von Neumann. - Doug Renselle

revise it. Time constraint was not its difficulty. But for one thing, when he wrote it he assumed (and had to assume) that the reader had already read it. (Boggled yet?)

discusses similarities between Tibetan Buddhism and the theories of physicist David Bohm.

In Buddhism the Dharmakaya is the dimension of unconditioned truth, into which any kind of concept has never entered. It is the "ground of all", from which subjects and objects emerge. To summarize this point, I think that DQ and the Dharmakaya, while not necessarily identical, do convey much the same meaning. Dharmakaya therefore should have nothing to do with occultism… - Maarten

correct, placing meaning before happiness, power, and sex has definite implications for the MoQ. When meaning is seen as the center of man's action, everything man does is for an all-inclusive, qualitative value. In my opinion it is a psychology of quality. - Kevin Sanchez

The three writings were: William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and Aleister Crowley's Yoga for Yahoos. (Synchronistically, some of the only books mentioned in ZMM and Lila.) - Kevin Sanchez

greater importance than the rights of society. …I have not seen any evidence so far… to make me believe otherwise. - Horse

"Powerful computers birthed the fantasy of a pure disembodied intelligence. We know the formula: a mind inhabiting a brain submerged in a vat. If science would assist me, the contemporary human says, I could live as a brain without a body. And since we are big brains, I could live in a computer's mind...etc"

This classical - um - SOM approach, the feefloating mind that looks upon objective reality, is what the MOQ so fervently opposes. But first an aside. Through the entire life of TLS the definition of Intellect has troubled us. The obvious: Intellect as mind (of SOM) or consciousness or awareness or 'ability to think' has surfaced again and again and just as often have I rejected it. The Intellect of Quality is none of this: it has grown out of the Social level! MIND "as such" has no place in the MOQ! This is a horribly important point to understand the Quality idea, but back to Out of Control.

The book contains an approach to the mind - or Intelligence problem - which at first resembles the Quality one, but after Life it jumps to Intellect missing the Social dimension altogether, and is soon just as lost as the Matter/Mind approach. For example it refers to the Black Room experiments … where people being deprived of sense impulses soon loose their ability to concentrate and goes into thought loops or start to hallucinate. If body was the creator of intellect it should be as snug in a black room as elsewhere. The body/brain connections are not severed, only the ones to the environment! And not to the MATERIAL environment, but to SOCIAL reality. And yet it touches upon the 'flock mind' (social), but never gets the grip on that thread and goes on to all sorts of visions how intelligent machines can serve us. I see that I have stopped underlining after the first third. The only feasible thing is to regard mind as MIND/MATTER-thinking. Making both Intellectual Value Patterns. What this means for the AI/AL I haven't yet probed, but I feel there is an opening here. - Bodvar Skutvik

think it is excellent, but at the same level as Zukav's DaWuLiMa. It's metaphysics, essentially. - Doug Renselle

I think Pirsig's metaphysics follows the same line of thought. Subjects and objects are one way of classifying our dynamic experience. Another interesting passage I found in the same essay was, what I take as, an indication in the direction of the MOQ. "If one were to make an evolutionary construction of how a lot of originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into an orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon one's success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, could become less so, and, from being an energetic attribute in some cases,

elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely internal nature. This would be the evolution of the psychical from the bosom of the physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences would represent a halfway stage."

In my reading of James, I have found and interesting account of his struggle with the criticism of the Victorian values of his time to establish his philosophy. - Herb Penry

then it doesn't make any sense. If you read it as a thinking person-member of society (social/moral person) then it's dynomite! - Donald T Palmgren

detachment of sense and soul; science and religion), how it was born (via rationality and science denying the validity of the spiritual because the spiritual cannot be defined by scientific terms; hence the world loses depth/meaning - this is the central problem of ZMM), and how we can transcend it (healing the divide between science and religion by framing them both as different interpretations, different lenses with which we view the world, and therefore Spirit). This is the core of his

latest book The Marriage of Sense and Soul. - Andrew Russell

Andrew has been urging us all to read Ken Wilber for insights into Dynamic and static value and he recommends the following websites for further reading:

The World of Ken Wilber

http://www.xs4all.nl/~annor/wilber/nlwilber.htm

http://www.concentric.net/~Lemckay/wilber/

http://www.shambhala.com/wilber

"I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea, it makes contact with Plato's world of mathematical concepts. When one 'sees' a mathematical truth, one's consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it (accessible via the intellect). I have described this 'seeing' in relation to Godel's theorem, but it is the

essence of mathematical understanding."

Diana has rightly described the essence of Quality as Dhrama, the principle of rightness. I would argue that Pirsig '"sees" the truth of Dharma just as Penrose "sees" a mathematical truth. So put me down on the side of those who believe that Platonic ideals do indeed *really* exist as patterns of value, not imaginary (logocentric) ideas.

[See] Mark Lencho's essay "Who are you and what should you do", for a rough guide to the static levels and their moral implications. – Platt Holden
 

… found a remarkable likeness to Pirsig's static Q-levels - in the same way as Wilber - but the first and decisive confrontation with the Subject- Object metaphysics is absent from both thinkers, so even if one finds a lot of valuable and MOQ-like observations, it is this fundamental chess opening that sets Pirsig's system apart from anything previously thought. - Bodvar Skutvik

In some sense, the goal of philosophy in general, in both Asia and Germany has been the overcoming of the S-O distinction. - Donald T Palmgren

Richard Dawkins is a leading spokesman of a purposeless existence and the meaninglessness of life. That he writes books filled with purpose and meaning is an irony that apparently escapes him, and many others… - Platt Holden

they got further than Pirsig.) They never completely throw off SOM, but they do toss out reductionism and you can tell they don't buy into conventional SOM "wisdom."

On page 431 they address the topic as follows: "A dynamic does not necessarily imply a purpose. Darwinian evolution has a dynamic, but organisms do not seek to evolve. The existence of attractors does not imply that dynamical systems are goal-seekers: on the contrary, they are goal-finders, which only recognize what the 'goal' is when they have found it." They then go on to state that it is a tempting fallacy to " derive a sense of purpose from a dynamic and see it as a spiritual frame that we must use. "

On 9/8 Ken Clark wrote " As I see it DQ is not a goal, but simply a force that is directed by our individual, previously-established patterns of value."

On 9/9 Horse stated "This doesn't mean purpose ceases to exist though, just the opposite, it goes at a completely different

character..........Purpose/Meaning is value. To exist is to have purpose and meaning."

Jonathan Marder on 9/15 wrote "I think that 'purpose', that SOM platypus, is the bridge between the August and September discussion programmes."

My final clip is again from Horse on 9/8 in response to my question from a few days earlier where I wondered if the journey and the goal were one and the same thing........."Why not? Who says there must be a goal!" - Roger Parker

Students of Dennett, please be merciful in your critique of my summary. Like I said, I found the book to be awkward to wade through. But combining this with Pirsig's metaphysical foundation does begin to explain consciousness. - RISKYBIZ9@aol.com

"The perennial ideas that grip the philosophic imagination and more or less exhaust (in both senses) its endeavor can be summarized as two: the idea of meaning or value in the universe, and the idea that reality has an ultimate nature. The two are linked, in that they supply or at least suggest interpretations of each other. The first is connected with all our questions about whether there is a transcendent source of value, one that specifies goals and makes demands on how we live and behave. Questions of deity, morality and esthetics lie under this heading, and even an answer that says there is no transcendent grounds of value, and that we must find them within, is vitally important to us. The second idea might seem now to be the possession of the natural sciences; but they in turn generate new forms of the ancient question, and so far have made slow progress with such puzzles as, for example, the nature of mind. The idea of reality prompts questions about knowledge, truth and meaning -- in short: the relation of mind to the world -- and like the first idea, it invites us seek not merely knowledge but understanding of everything comprehended under it."

A couple of things struck me in reading this passage:

First, I wonder if members of the LS agree with the general proposition suggested by Grayling that philosophy boils down to these two basic ideas. Second, it seems obvious that the MOQ falls directly under the scope of the first idea in that it espouses a "transcendent source of value." Third, when Grayling said, "The idea of reality prompts questions about

knowledge, truth and meaning -- in short the relation of mind to the world ..." I gagged at his "relation of mind to the world" assertion. We Pirsigians can spot a subject/object assumption a mile away, making me wonder just how many so-called academic philosophers in the colleges today recognize that "relation of mind to the world" is just an assumption, nothing more, and a most questionable assumption at that. Not many I wager.

It's always a source of great pleasure to me to be able to see current affairs and commentary through the lens of the MOQ. It's like getting a new pair of eyeglasses with which to see truth more clearly. Or, to avoid the S/O paradigm, to see that what one is the truth. - Platt Holden

He said that the last stage would be a return to the first one in a spiral sense.

As I see it is this a description of a MOQ based culture (by one who of course haven't heard of Pirsig) Experience as primary

reality is pure MOQ while dreams and fantasies are more unfamiliar and is not used much in LILA, (but lots of dreaming in ZMM), but I guess they are just another Dynamic Quality channel.

"I have seen popular books on this subject: The Tao of Physics, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, that seem rather eager to jump from an observation of similarity to a statement of identity. But be careful to follow the scientific rule of saying no more than you really know. My personal belief, from talking to physicists and trying to gauge their level of understanding of Buddha's world is that they don't know anything." (letter from Robert Pirsig to Anthony McWatt, March 29th,

1997). – Bodvar Skutvik

the end of this email if you care to. it really ties into Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality quite well. - glove

What is there even before the world came into existence? what the zen master wants to know about is the cosmic landscape prior to the creation of all things. When is timeless time? Is it no more than an empty concept?

the master's answer was:

The old pond, ah!

A frog jumps in:

The water's sound!

Let me try to give a little more intelligible account of the master's koan. An ancient pond is likely to be located in some old temple grounds, filled with many stately trees. Such surroundings add to the tranquillity of the unrippled surface of the pond. When this is disturbed by a jumping frog, the disturbance itself enhances the reigning tranquillity; the sound of the splash reverberates, and the reverberation makes us all the more conscious of the serenity of the whole. However, this consciousness is awakened only in him whose spirit is really in consonance with the world spirit itself.

These images are not figurative representations made us of by the poetic mind, but they directly point to original intuitions, indeed they are intuitions themselves. When the latter are attained, the images become transparent and are immediate expressions of the experience. An intuition in itself, being too intimate, too personal, too immediate, cannot be

communicated to others; to do this it calls up images by means of which it becomes transferable. But to those who have never had such an experience it is difficult, even impossible, to reach the fact itself merely through images, because in this case images are transformed into ideas or concepts, and the mind then attempts to give them an intellectual interpretation.

As long as we are moving on the surface of consciousness, we can never get away from ratiocination. but the master is not living there as we are, he has passed through the outer crust of consciousness away down into its deepest recesses, into a realm of the unthinkable, into the Unconscious, which is even beyond the unconscious generally conceived by the

psychologists.

It is by intuition alone that this timelessness of the Unconscious is truly taken hold of. And this intuitive grasp of reality never takes place when a world of Emptiness is assumed outside our everyday world of the senses; for these two worlds are not separate but one. therefore, the master sees into his Unconscious not through the stillness of the old pond but through the sound stirred up by the jumping frog. Without the sound there is no seeing into the Unconscious, in which lies the source of creative activities (DQ?) and upon all artists draw from their inspiration.

For me, this is zen and its parallel to MOQ very evident as well.

I thank you for making me aware of Bryson's book A Walk in the Woods. I will read it for I have had similar experiences when walking, as well as with sounds when in meditation. – Lithien

(1972). I want to present Yanagi's ideas here in abstract and paraphrased, and relate those to the "What the hell is DQ?" question.

Yanagi begins by commenting on the pursuit of deformation, the quest for freedom, and the avoidance of regularity in Modern art. Of course a big inspiration to Modern art was Picasso and Matisse's "discoveries" of primitive art from Africa, the Americas, and the South Seas. It is a principal of Modern art that "Free" beauty boils down to irregular beauty.

(Sounds like DQ, doesn't it?)

Among the earliest people to consciously take irregularity, freedom and crudeness as aesthetic principals underlying their work were the Tea Masters of Japan (16th cen CE). To Yanagi, they prefigure Modern artists. (Like Picasso studying African masks, the cultured, sophisticated Japanese studied and consciously imitated the 'primitive' Koreans.)

If you don't know much about Zen art: it is the "art of imperfection." Hisamatsu in his Zen and the Fine Arts (1971, also a great book) says: "Zen is a religion of non-holiness. Ordinarily in religion God or Buddha is something sacrosanct; in Zen, however, Buddha is non-holy as the negation of transcendent holiness... [Zen] is of the nature, as Lin-chi said, of "killing the Buddha, killing the patriarch."

("If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him." Robert M. Pirsig? ..forget him. Zen is not a procilatizing movement. It doesn't try to win converts. If that's what you think... Well, I'll shut-up before I get myself in trouble. Everybody already knows where I stand on the 'philosophy as intellectual warfare'-issue. But, remember, in ZMM, the Narrator says, 'I'm always suspicious of far-reaching social movements. They rarely make anything better. All the world really needs is quality individuals leading quality lives.' [paraphrased from memory])

But to give you a better idea of what Zen art is like, Yanagi writes: "A glance at the imperfections of Tea [bowls] will make this clear. The shapes are irregular, the surfaces dry or sandy, the glazes of uneven thickness; the pieces piled in the kiln remain unglazed where pots rest upon one another; fire cracks are accepted. All these characteristics are not merely put up w/, but are taken as an integral part of pot making and are therefore of potential beauty. The Tea Masters found depth in this

naturalness... The precise and perfect carries no overtones, admits of no freedom; the perfect is static and regulated, cold and hard." (No wonder Modernist in the 50s-60's didn't like motorcycle technology.) Freedom, Yasagi declares, indeed *is* beauty! The Japanese craftsmen deliberately deformed their bowls by not using a wheel, and left the surface rough.

BUT, Beauty in the Tea ceremony does not ultimately reside in the dynamic imperfection. It should reside in what the Buddhist term *muso*, the unchanging formlessness behind all phenomena. (Unchanging? "Behind all phenomena?" This sounds more like Kant that Pirsig's DQ. [Bo, I had to throw that tin there for your benefit. ;-) In *muso* there is

neither acceptance nor rejection, freedom nor restraint. "True beauty in Tea cannot lie in either the perfect nor the imperfect, but must lie in a realm where such distinctions have ceased to exist, where the imperfect is identified w/ [i.e. identical to] the perfect." (Yanagi)

So maybe we should say, first there is just Quality. Then Quality can be divided-up into two aspects: it's dynamic aspect and it's preduring, static aspect. By saying that DQ is unknowable (which if it's pure DQ w/o any sq, yes it must be) perhaps Pirsig has misled us into thinking that DQ = *muso* (or any other transcendental, monist, skyhook like Ding-an-sich or God or whatever). - lonewolf

never close to creating what the scientist (I'll say he since they were all at that time) was charged to create. But given a 150 years later it would have been easy. Intellect Quality truly grows from the Society in which the individual thinker creates. - Xcto@aol.com

biological level (which is the way Pirsig says it does) the book is Heart of Darkness by Conrad. here we have an exemplary individual who is above the rest, Mr. Kurtz who abandons society and goes native. Marlowe who goes in search of him represents society. what he discovers is madness. Without the restraint of society, intellect goes berserk. however, there is a transcendence of sorts experienced both by Kurtz and Marlowe. Kurtz' last words: "the horror, the horror" point towards the realization of the biological in us, i.e. our capacity for violence. the same beast which appeared in Lord of the Flies as an outside symbol becomes internalized within. The Heart of Darkness (the biological level) exists in all of us and it needs societal order and restraint to operate, perhaps not freely, but productively. this is needed for the species to survive. to revert into total freedom would be chaotic and would be a regression not a step forward. we arose from chaos like the Greeks myths ascertain, but need not submit to it for a little while...lol. society and intellect dance a tenuous line wavering between order and freedom. too much of either is disastrous. the dance itself when it is done just right is Dynamic Quality which is Morality. that is where the Value lies. Morality is then defined by the proper relationship between levels. the proper relationship meaning the dance which perpetuates both with just enough freedom to create change and just enough order to prevent chaos. the word "dance" connotes creativity and passion given rein in an artistic but controlled fashion. - Lithien

     Platt Holden