Note
In progress!
Lila appears to be a book about Morality, and how that connects to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’s theory of quality.
Phaedrus really seems to hate the Wests adoration of Socrates and the philosophers that came after him. He goes over this above as well as in his previous book.
He spends some time considering views of the world. In his previous book, he rejects the subject-object view as missing out on a lot of aspects of reality, in favor of a Quality based approach. However, he refuses to define quality, as that would essentially allow him to fall into a trap.
Phaedrus really doesn’t like to lose arguments (makes sense, he was a professor of rhetoric)
In this book, he realizes he has to define quality, and introduce another split to replace the subject / object split. He can’t sacrifice communication of his message just because he might lose an argument - there’s no perfect worldview. He introduces the split of Static and Dynamic Quality - Dynamic Quality being similar the old idea of Quality (precognitive experience and apprehension before it is cut by the analytic knife). Static Quality is the patterns that are fit based on routine (individual and cultural habits).
One thing I really liked here was his comparison of it to how a child sees the world - children have very little habits, they see a lot of Dynamic Quality - everything they experience is for the first time. His relation of this to the subject-object split is the first thing that made quality more natural for me. The first order object that all children have is experience, only after weeks and months do they start to have some idea of subject and object (object permanence). This impression sticks with them and has become a somewhat natural foundation for all human cultures. Quality / Experience is still of the first order, objects and the material world come after that - from our perspective at least.
How do things change if we view this from a different perspective though? Isn’t that the question that objective science is trying to achieve? Shouldn’t we be able to answer this independent of our own minds? Maybe I don’t get this yet..
Phaedrus’s thoughts on the Metaphysics of Quality and certain debates:
- Free will vs determinism: Both are true, essentially. We are determinist at our smallest scales, but we pursue Dynamic Quality at the largest scales. I didn’t find this particularly satisfying though, it does just seem similar to what the current status quo is with determinism.
- Mind vs Matter: Both are true again. I thought Phaedrus’s perspective that the mind cannot exist without society was really interesting though - it’s something I haven’t thought of much before but actually fits perfectly. There is no direct connection between mind and matter - this connection is mediated from (matter) biology → society → intellectual (mind). You can add the preceeding element of inorganic if needed. The idea of everything evolving towards something “better” is interesting though. Atoms make moral choices. Who knew?
The separations of abstractions is interesting but not completely true either. Phaedrus talks about transistors leading to logic gates, and logic gates to instructions and logic units from the Electrical side. On the other side a computer engineer or software engineer doesn’t need to concern themselves with individual transistors to solve problems. However it’s never a solid line, signal characteristics and bit flips at the electrical level can be exploited at the symbolic level.
dynamic = chaotically and freely charging forward, with no memory static = preserving and maintaining order, with memory
latching - latching dynamic patterns onto static ones to keep new ideas.