Hi Jon, Rick, Horse, David B. and Group:
On March 30 I asked:
How many of us here in this group believe that our bodies, before sensing
anything else, sense values? That the nature of our experience is primarily
moral?
Jon, Rick and Horse pointed out a contradiction. Jon summed it up thus:
“I agree with Rick and Horse. Since everything is value, we must
automatically sense value first.”
Correct. But, I still felt that Pirsig was saying something more than the
obvious, but I didn’t know how to express it. David B came to the rescue with
the following:
“I think Pirsig is just saying that reality is something that happens before you
have a chance to think about it. And it seems that he’s even saying that
experience of value even precedes the transmission of raw sensory data,
which is more like a result of the primary experience. That’s how Pirsig’s
RADICAL Empiricism is different that the empiricism of Kant or the other
modern epistemologists. They were talking about sensory data and the way
our minds shape it, but Pirsig is talking about experience in a broader sense.
It’s hard to talk about this stuff, but it seems “experience” as a product of the
physical senses is very much a SOM conception and the MOQ’s sense of
“experience” is about an event that occurs before the senses are activated, if
you will.”
Thanks David. I wish I’d said that. IMHO right on target.
One further comment. All who responded to this subject said yes, they
believed in an innate moral sense. If true, I wonder how we explain the
amount of lying, cheating, murder and mayhem throughout history? Is there
instinct for might that overwhelms the instinct for right? Do you think that
Pirsig’s theory of battles between moral levels adequately explains slavery,
Communism, the Inquisition and other evils of history?
Platt
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