Do you like the Metaphysics hat?

[Honey]

Posted elsewhere here:

What?  Morality is "programming."  (though we shouldn't stretch that metaphor of the brain as a computer too thin)

Also note the difference between immorality and amorality.

This made me go back to the book, Lila, An Inquiry into Morals by Robert Pirsig (also the author of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).  In the beginning of the book he quotes John Von Neumann, "who said, "the single thing that makes a computer so powerful is that the program IS data & can be treated like any other data."  That seemed a little obscure when Phaedrus had read it but now it was making sense."

He then goes on throughout the book, & interspersed with various story lines and back & forth to come up with his Metaphysics of Quality:

"Phaedrus had once called metaphysics "the high country of the mind" – an analogy to the "high country" of mountain climbing.  It takes a lot of effort to get there & more effort when you arrive, but unless you can make the journey you are confined to one valley of thought all your life.  This high country passage through the Metaphysics of Quality allowed entry to another valley of thought in which the facts of life get a much richer interpretation.  The valley spreads out into a huge fertile plain of understanding. 

In this plain of understanding static patterns of value are divided into 4 systems:  inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns & intellectual patterns.  They are exhaustive.  That's all there are.  If you construct an encyclopedia of 4 topics – Inorganic, Biological, Social & Intellectual – nothing is left out.  No "thing," that is.  Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent.

But although the 4 systems are exhaustive they are not exclusive.  They all operate at the same time & in ways that are almost independent of each other.

This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual.  It says they are not continuous.  They are discrete.  They have little to do with one another.  Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level.  Quite the contrary.  The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes. 

This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics where everything has to be an extension of matter.  But now atoms & molecules are just 1 of 4 levels of static patterns of quality & there is no intellectual requirement that any level dominate the other 3.

An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels, Phaedrus thought, is the relation of hardware to software in a computer.  ...

He makes an excellent analogy here about hardware vs. software but I'm getting tired of typing.  & some get a wee bit annoyed by metaphysics.  (also makes other analogies throughout the book that work for me too like the platypus & other stuff about carbon based life)  Ah well.

"Hello!"
"Hello"
"do you like my hat?"
"no I do not like your hat.  Goodbye."
"Goodbye."
-Dr. Seuss

[Honey]

Continued here:  (I am a little drunk right now & on the phone with a friend from TN so ...)

"An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels, Phaedrus thought, is the relation of hardware to software in a computer.  ...

It isn't necessary for a programmer to learn circuit design.  Neither is it necessary for a hardware technician to learn programming.  The 2 sets of patterns are independent.  ...

What makes all this significant to the Metaphysics of Quality is its striking parallelism to the interrelationship of different static patterns of quality.  ...

Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it.  But that does not mean that the novel is an expression or property of those voltages.  It doesn't have to exist in any electronic circuits at all.  It can also reside in magnetic domains ... or a notebook ... or in the brain of the programmer, but even here it is neither composed of this brain nor possessed by it.  The same program can be made to run on an infinite variety of computers.  A program can change itself into a different program while it is running.  It can turn on another computer, transfer itself into this second computer & shut off the first computer that it came from, destroying every lat trace of its origins – a process with similarities to biological reproduction.

Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of in-organic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of the computer's circuits.  You can't do it.  You can see how the circuits make the novel possible, but they do not provide a plot for the novel.  The novel is its own set of patterns.  Similarly the biological patterns of life & the molecular patterns of organic chemistry have a "machine language" interface called DNA but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms possess or guide life.  A primary occupation of every level of evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution.  But as the higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on purposes of its own.  ...

Now this vagueness is removed by sorting out values according to levels of evolution.  The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value.  The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value.  They are completely different form each other because they are at different evolutionary levels.  & they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause the most skeptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove.  These patterns have nothing in common except for the historic evolutionary process that created all of them.  But that is a process of value evolution.  Therefore the name "static pattern of values" applies to all.  ...

Historically every effort to unite science & ethics has been a disaster.  ...

But the Metaphysics of Quality says, first of all, that "amoral objective matter" is a low-grade form of morality.  No slough-off is possible.  It states, second of all, that even if matter weren't a low grade form of morality there still would be no metaphysical need to show how morals are derived from it.  With static patterns of value divided into 4 systems, conventional moral patterns have almost nothing to do with inorganic or biological nature.  These moral patterns are superimposed upon inorganic nature the way novels are superimposed upon computers.  The are more commonly opposed to biological patterns than they are supportive of them.

& that is the key to the whole thing.

What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just 1 moral system.  There are many.  In the Metaphysics of Quality there's the morality called the "laws of nature," by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the "law of the jungle" where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation & death; there's a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, "the law": & there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempt to control society.  Each of these moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to flip-flops (circuit that stores a "1" or a "0.")  ...

The Metaphysics of Quality also clears up the mind-matter puzzle.  ...  & the "free will vs. determinism controversy." 

He quotes the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, who said, "We are suspended in language."  Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.  ...

So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity.  It is nothing else.  When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so because it's "better" & that definition of "betterness" – this beginning response to Dynamic Quality – is an elementary unit of ethics upon which right & wrong can be based.

In general, given a choice of 2 courses to follow & all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is at a higher level of evolution, is more moral.  An example of this is the statement that, "It's more moral for a doctor to kill a germ that to allow the germ to kill the patient."  The germ wants to live.  The patient wants to live.  But the patient has moral precedence because he's at a higher level of evolution.

Taken by itself that seems obvious enough.  But what's not so obvious is that, given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient.  This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures.  It's true for all people at all times, now & forever, a moral pattern of reality as real as H20.  We're at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason.  We can deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before."

[LMNO]

I just have to say that Pirsig is a twit.




Apologies that I have nothing to add to your post.

[Cramulus]

I'm really not a fan of metaphysics -- and this above bit seems ludicrously Aristotelian for Pirsig (who spends so much of ZATAOMM picking at the foundations of the classics). but I guess you've gotta master the form before you can escape the form, right?

ZATAOMM was one of my favorite books and still has a large bearing on how I operate.

[Kai]

I'm really not a fan of metaphysics -- and this above bit seems ludicrously Aristotelian for Pirsig (who spends so much of ZATAOMM picking at the foundations of the classics). but I guess you've gotta master the form before you can escape the form, right?

ZATAOMM was one of my favorite books and still has a large bearing on how I operate.

Its one of those books I've wanted to read for a while but the first word in the title throws me off.

[LMNO]

I read it.  I didn't like it.

[Cramulus]

I'm really not a fan of metaphysics -- and this above bit seems ludicrously Aristotelian for Pirsig (who spends so much of ZATAOMM picking at the foundations of the classics). but I guess you've gotta master the form before you can escape the form, right?

ZATAOMM was one of my favorite books and still has a large bearing on how I operate.

Its one of those books I've wanted to read for a while but the first word in the title throws me off.

the book actually has very little to do with zen

it's more or less about "quality" being the thing which can heal the artificial rift between the rational and aesthetic worlds.


edit: changed "scientific" to "rational" because it makes more sense

[LMNO]

There's a rift?


I am unconvinced.

[Cramulus]

okay

[the last yatto]

wasnt there something about a hat makes the man?

[Honey]

Thanks for reading & thoughts expressed.  (very nice hat!)  I'm re-reading the book now (Lila) & I'm finding some of the things I read a few years back, either I've incorporated certain ideas from back then till they're barely recognizable or I've missed other ideas completely & now they're hitting me in a different place.

What I like about the MOQ is that it provides a framework for testing out thoughts, both on an individual level & as a bigger picture reality check.  What I dislike about any type of framework is that it can become a prison (the framework like the bars in the BIP maybe?).  Another thing I like about the MOQ (& probably haven't elaborated on enough in the above quotes) is that Pirsig makes room for the Dynamic feature of this system by providing a "wild card" element.  This allows an individual (or a society or any other group I guess) to step outside the framework & re-evaluate or re-assess or re-whatever & make changes to the framework.  Maybe knowingly, maybe not.  He cites examples in the book about these things.  Fr'instance, someone comes along, a trickster of some kind maybe?  This person bucks the system somehow, maybe ends up in jail because he or she has broken some kind of societal rule or legal law.  But what if (as in the student from Utah at that auction who broke the law? but ended up achieving some of his ends & perhaps making his society more aware because of his actions?) & this just might be an example of the Dynamic feature.  There are other examples you can find when you frame the "thing" within this arrangement.  Allowing for the Dynamic (vs the static) provides the tools needed to break out of it, if desired.

Conversely, this system doesn't require you to define the Dynamic value.  It exists is all.  To demand that the ineffable become 'effable' (is that even a word?) just doesn't make sense to me.  It seems to restrict rather than liberate.  Or like attempting to define randomness mathematically, the more you try, the less random it becomes.  Maybe that's why there's a certain kind of power that comes with the naming of things?  I just dunno.   

& Pirsig speaks about the platypus.  When the platypus was first discovered, a system for the classification of animals was already in place.  People were so used to this system (& maybe imprisoned by it just a bit?) they thought the platypus was some kinda miracle or a hoax of some sort?  They did this rather than looking at the system in place (& maybe re-evaluating the system?) which didn't account for that type of animal.

& I'm not suggesting the system (or whatever) always needs to be changed.  If something works, why change it?  But when the system isn't working, why not change it?

Anyway, just re-reading the book, gonna go back also & re-read Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance too 'cuz I haven't read that one in years.

Oh & Happy New Year!      (I'm freezing my ass off here in NY)