Explanations are static quality patterns

• Static quality is a concept introduced in Lila (Robert Pirsig).
  • Instead of dividing everything into subjects and objects, Pirsig divides reality into Dynamic Quality and static quality. ‘Dynamic Quality’ is the term he gives to the continually changing flux of immediately-experienced reality, while ‘static quality’ refers to any concept abstracted from this flux. Source
• Pirsig sorts static quality patterns into inorganic, biological, societal, intellectual. The insight behind this is that explanations on different levels allow a deeper understanding of reality than reductionism or holism (High-level simplicity can emerge from low-level complexity) and thus more freedom (Better explanations increase wealth).
• Pirsig derives a morality based on these levels. The Metaphysics of Quality combines the four levels of patterns to produce one overall moral framework which has a cosmological evolutionary hierarchy, in which the entity or process that has more freedom on the evolutionary scale – the one that is more Dynamic – takes moral precedence.
• Finding explanations is a creative act, a dance with dynamic quality. Conjuring and criticising allow us to arrive at better explanations. We create better explanations through conjecture, criticism and testing.
• However, the outcome of explanations are always static, fixed models. Explanations are always maps, never territory. They are fixed in the sense that improving upon the explanation means creating a new one. The explanation can not move anywhere. Once spelled out it’s like a dead butterfly. Improving explanations means going back to confronting dynamic quality, staying at and expanding the edge. All models are wrong, some are useful