From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Aug 12 2003 - 12:51:55 BST
Scott:
> Yes, subject to the mythic qualification. That is to say, Quality
> thinking is not human thinking, and Quality's intentionality is not ours
> either. Only to say that human mental verbs are better at pointing to
> Quality than human physical verbs.
Would you explain the difference between a mental verb and a physical
verb?
> Yes, more than doubt, I'm convinced that the brain cannot produce
> intellect, or sentience for that matter, by itself. But notice that
> Pirsig says "in the brain", not "by the brain". I do not deny that the
> brain is involved in our thinking or sensing, but do deny that the
> brain's spatiotemporal activity alone can produce our thinking or
> sensing. Pirsig (from LC #67): "The MOQ says that Quality comes first,
> which produces ideas, which produce what we know as matter." The brain
> is matter, so there must have been an idea of the brain before the
> brain. And an unthought idea does not seem to me to make much sense, so
> there must have been (non-human) thinking before there was a brain. So,
> in the human, I would say that ideas and purpose and so forth exist
> independently of the brain, but the brain is used as a tool to make them
> happen in a way that lets them be expressed while we are physical -- to
> align with our sense perceptions, for example. And, of course, so that
> they can be spoken or written.
An independent realm of ideas? Sounds Plato like. Would I be wrong to
conclude you're a Platonist?
I'm in complete sympathy with the notion that consciousness is a field
that our brain "taps" into just as other body organs, lung, stomach,
eyes, etc., depend for their function on "fields" (oxygen, food, light)
surrounding the body. No reason for the organ of the brain to function
any differently.
I like the connection to the MOQ where you pointed out "The brain is
matter, so there must have been an idea of the brain before the brain
(came into being). Hadn't thought of that before. Of course, we run
into the chicken/egg problem, but that's just another limit of logos.
Platt
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