Hi Roger, Marco, Elephant,
ROG:
The inorganic level does not predate humans....in fact it does not predate
Pirsig.
GLENN:
You mean the inorganic level doesn't predate the book "Lila", because
that's where he coined the term "inorganic level", right?
ROG:
Yes. Just as the idea of gravity does not predate Sir Isaak.
This is reasonable.
But in ZMM Pirsig doesn't talk about the "idea of gravity". He talks about
the law of gravity and gravitation itself. He has some very unusual ideas
about these. I suggest that you've applied your own static filter to "fix"
the MOQ wherever it seems nutty, silly, and daffy. Here's the full text of
the gravity passage, with my comments interspersed.
PIRSIG: pg 40 (25th Ann ZMM)
...it seems completely natural to
presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed
before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that
until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.
Pirsig is careful about what he means here. He clearly states that
gravity and the law of gravity are two different things.
The names or phrases "gravity", "law of gravitation", and "idea of
gravity" are intellectual shorthand and is a third type of thing, but
he doesn't mean those here. If that's all he meant, it wouldn't "sound
nutty".
So we have:
1) the inverse square law which describes the behavior of masses in the
presence of a gravitational field.
2) the actual force itself that obeys rule 1)
3) the terms "gravity", "law of gravitation", and the "idea of gravity":
intellectual shorthand for 2), 1) and the combination, respectively.
For each of these you can ask if they existed before Newton.
PIRSIG: continues...
What I'm driving at is the [ridiculous] notion that before the beginning
of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal
generation of everything, the law of gravity existed. Sitting there, having
no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind because
there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not
anywhere-this law of gravity still existed?
If that law of gravity existed, I honestly don't know what a thing has to do
to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test
of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of
nonexistence that the law of gravity didn't have. And yet it is still 'common
sense' to believe that it existed.
Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself
going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one
possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity
itself *did not exist* before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
And *what that means* is that the law of gravity exists *nowhere* except in
people's heads! It's a ghost! We are all of us very ignorant and conceited
about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric
and superstitious about our own. [stress his]
Pirsig clearly says that the law of gravity and gravity itself did not
exist before Isaac Newton. He's not talking about mere word coinage here.
Not only has he demoted the law of gravity to a human concept, but
*gravity itself*. He doesn't bother to explain what must have held the
sun, solar system, and galaxies together before gravity came into being,
circa 1600 AD.
However, I have an idea what he thinks held the cosmos together before
1600, and it was the Ptolemeic world view, a static intellectual pattern
of the universe created by Aristotle having 8 concentric spheres each
holding a moon or planet, with the outermost having many small points of
light affixed to it, and rotated by a God that stood outside them. The
Earth was at its center and it got more divine the farther out you went.
Apples fell to earth because apples are composed of earth and they seek
their rightful place, etc.
And make no mistake this system was not just a "wrong concept", as
we think of it in retrospect, but it was *the* static reality before 1600.
Running with Pirsig's argument we find that if Aristotle had a means to
investigate the heavens close up, he would have found those spheres,
touched those affixed stars. And why not, if reality is what you invent?
I think Pirsig would say that stars, galaxies, and supernova simply did
not exist back then. These "concepts" were invented after that and static
reality shifted toward these as they became accepted. In short, according
to Pirsig, no static reality exists beyond what we invent and subsequently
brainwash ourselves into believing, and indeed, one of these beliefs is
gravity, another is a rock we hold in our hand, and another is objective
reality itself.
PIRSIG: (McWatt paper)
When we speak of an external world guided by evolution it's normal to assume
that it is really there, is independent of us and is the cause of us. The
MOQ goes along with this assumption because experience has shown it to be an
extremely high quality belief for our time. But unlike materialist metaphysics,
the MOQ does not forget that it is still just a belief - quite different from
beliefs in the past, from beliefs of other present cultures, and possibly from
beliefs we will all have in the future. What will decide which belief prevails
is, of course, its quality.
In this quote it appears Pirsig does an about face and flatly admits that
objective reality exists. (No wonder that even the long-timers argue to
this day about what he truly means.) But let's not be too hasty. He will
only go so far as to say that it is an "extremely high quality belief of
our time", but like any other belief, it's future prevalence is unclear.
So while he can understand why other people would believe in objective
reality, and indeed the MOQ levels suggest an objective reality, his
personal position remains unclear.
While Pirsig is quite right in pointing out that world-views change and
that different cultures have different beliefs, he is dismissing the
obvious. Some cultures are more technologically advanced and know more
than others. If your culture does not have telescopes in big observatories,
and is isolated from cultures that do, then your culture is not going to
know what the stars are made of or that other galaxies exist. And the
world-view in Aristotle's time was indeed invented. It was guess-work,
conjecture in an ignorant time. They never bothered to test their ideas.
How can he compare this to what we know and have accomplished now and make
similar conclusions? NASA just landed a space probe on an asteroid only 8
miles long and millions of miles away. What are we to say about this? We
have a pretty good grasp of our beliefs? Sure, all that science claims is
still a belief, but what's it gonna take to turn this into "I believe"?
We are very confident that light from distant galaxies takes thousands of
light years to reach us, and also that gravity, Newton's gravity, along
with velocity, is responsible for the spiral shape of these galaxies. So
we know that gravity is at least thousands of years old (indeed much
older), and not merely 400 years old as Pirsig claims.
Pirsig is saying that evolution of static reality is correct and the
ability humans and cultures have to create reality is also correct and he
bundles these two notions under the MOQ. But I think I've shown that the
two notions are not compatible and cause internal contradictions within
the MOQ. You can have one or the other, but not both.
This problem goes a long way in explaining why, as Rick says, no one can
agree on anything about the MOQ.
Glenn
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