Re: MD Fwd: Pre-intellectual awareness = Dynamic Quality?

From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu May 12 2005 - 22:11:17 BST

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    Hi Mike,

    Welcome to the MD. You raise an excellent point:

    > According to Lila, Dynamic Quality has driven the evolution of inorganic
    > patterns into biological, social and intellectual patterns. To me, this
    > doesn't tally with ZMM's central thesis that pure (Dynamic) Quality is the
    > flux of pre-intellectual awareness supplied by our senses. I accept that
    > social and intellectual patterns "filter" our experience into something
    > more static and less bewildering, but surely our senses are a *biological
    > pattern*, and also filter the Quality reality, before the social and
    > intellectual patterns get involved.

    Pirsig addressed your point in his paper, "Subjects, Objects, Data and
    Values" (SODV) as follows:

    "In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight
    hearing, smell and taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical
    tradition here in saying that the senses are the starting point of
    reality, but -- all importantly -- it includes a sense of value. Values
    are phenomena. To ignore them is to misread the world. It says this sense
    of value, of liking or disliking, is a primary sense that is a kind of
    gatekeeper for everything else an infant learns. At birth this sense of
    value is extremely Dynamic but as the infant grows up this sense of value
    becomes more and more influenced by accumulated static patterns. In the
    past this biological sense of value has been called the "subjective"
    because there values cannot be located in an external physical object. But
    quantum theory has destroyed the idea that only properties located in
    external physical objects have reality."

    Hope this helps. I'm sure others will welcome you and have something to
    add.

    Best,
    Platt

    You can read the complete paper by going to mog.org, clicking Forum at the
    top of the page, then Index of Essays, then the SODV paper under Pirsig.

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