Pirsig claims values are not created in the brain, but his reasoning is merely that science hasn't found them there. If we're going to criticize scientism for claiming God doesn't exist because scientists haven't found God, shouldn't we criticize Pirsig equally for his claim?
DQ is just a guess, a guess that is no better (in some ways worse) than the guess that our sense of quality is created by the brain.
Pirsig writes about the inability of science to pin-point a location in the brain where quality resides and then writes:
Persons who know the history of science will recognize the sweet smell of phlogiston here and the warm glow of the luminiferous ether, two other scientific entities which were arrived at deductively and which never showed up under the microscope or anywhere else. When deduced entities are around for years and nobody finds them it is a sign that the deductions have been made from false premises; that the body of theory from which the deductions are made are wrong at some fundamental level. - Pirsig (ch. 8)Ironically, DQ is also a deduced entity that has the same sweet smell of phlogiston and warm glow of ether. DQ is a thing floating around the universe (like the ether) having no properties (like the ether) that can be detected by no instrument (like the ether). This seems pretty damning to me but I can anticipate two weak protests about this:
1) DQ is empirical - experienced by people, whereas the ether was not.
- Yes, but this is begging the question that the thing we experience as
quality is DQ, and not some epiphenomenal creation of the brain.
2) DQ does not pretend to be a scientific entity, so it does not have to
answer to the standards that would suggest it is fundamentally wrong.
- This is a retreat which does nothing to improve the argument for DQ. It
just mystifies it.
Also, if you were impressed by Pirsig's appeal about the aesthetically unpleasing position of the platypus in the biological taxonomy, then shouldn't you be equally unpleased about the quality taxonomy. Here we have a nice progression of values marching through the inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual levels, which includes everything. Everything, that is, except DQ. It's off on its own over here, an undefined oddball, a lot like the platypus.
Also, there's this business about DQ creating substance during quality experiences. There's no empirical evidence for this, and it contradicts science because a rock that you create and which you claim to be several minutes old can be carbon-dated [Editor's note: actually, I'm wrong about rocks being able to be carbon-dated, but there are other methods that could date the rock, or other things that could be carbon-dated] and shown to be several million years old. Also, this idea of humans creating substances like rocks on-the-fly contradicts another part of MOQ, which states that the inorganic level evolved and pre-dated humans. In this case either evolution is wrong or the creative power of DQ is not true.
As examples of DQ, Pirsig offers many different kinds. There's DQ in a new song, in the excitement of being in a hurricane, in looking at your hand after surviving a heart attack, in the religious experience of peyote, in the driving force of evolution, in the intuition of scientific hypotheses, in all the experiences of a new-born, in the interaction of carbon atoms in the formation of life, and the pain of a hot stove on your butt.
In more general terms, DQ is associated with "events" having to do with freedom, novelty, change, and subjective experiences. In even more sweeping terms, DQ is attributed to just about anything for which explanations involving SQ do not exist or do not do it justice (such as substance-based explanations of consciousness). In short, DQ is ascribed to all that is mysterious, and called an explanation.
None of these, however, prove, or to my way of thinking, even suggest, that DQ exists as an objective phenomena. Quality, despite all the talk around here, seems very much to be in the eye of the beholder. Further, arguments that the self is an illusion and that reality is a dynamic, flowing continuum are unsubstantiated and these beliefs are products of Eastern dogma, liberal interpretations of drug or meditative experiences, and blissful doses of self-deceit. And I don't mean to offend. I'm actually very sympathetic to self-deceit.
I completely empathize with John Beasley, who fails to understand how "value impinges on the inorganic realm at all", and who thinks it's just "an imposition for the sake of theoretical niceness". And "theoretical niceness" is a nice way to put it. The universality of value gives it the ring of a good scientific theory, like the universality of gravitation and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.