From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Feb 19 2005 - 22:46:18 GMT
Hey Focusers:
dmb says:
I'd like to offer a free drink to everyone who reads this post.
Sam Norton concluded:
That is, our primary awareness of value, of good or bad, is not equivalent
to "feeling" understood as biological Quality. So if we are to stick with
the definition of "feeling" as biological Quality, we must be careful to use
some other term when describing our primary discernments of value. ...For DQ
is not only accessed by "feelings"....
Which is a long way of saying that our "experience" of Quality must not be
equated with the biological level. Quite how we are to then understand
"experience", precisely as something *distinguished* from biological
Quality, I don't know. But I'm sure we can have fun talking about it.
dmb says:
Yea, Pirsig warns us not to confuse biological quality with DQ in a number
of ways. He abandons the classic/romantic split because the mystical
experience is NOT theoretic or aesthetic, it is something else. He points
out that this confusion is what doomed the hippie movement and describes it
as a form of degeneracy. When he expands empiricism, it is by adding a
"sense of value" to the standard biological senses. Pirsig points this out
in both LILA and...
...in the SODV paper:
"The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical tradition...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."
dmb continues:
Recalling the hot stove example we can say that we only describe the
negative quality experience in terms of stoves and heat and pain after the
event. That is to say, even our ideas about sensory data are just that;
ideas. This is the tricky part. This is where its easy to get tripped up
because the metaphysical assumptions are ingrained in our language so
thoroughly. To a certain extent, and most certainly when we are talking
about things from a static point of view, we have to go along with common
sense notions. Pirsig evolutionary picture makes sense when we are thinking
in terms of time and natural history, but from a Dynamic point of view the
big bang did not come first, the idea of it did....
Pirsig in LILA, p75:
"This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self" or any
"object" to which it might be later assigned."
dmb continues:
One might be tempted to conclude that this added sense of value is just
another one of our biological senses. (As if medical science has yet to
discover a sixth sense organ?!?) But actually the "sense of value" ends up
turning the whole thing on its head. Its a more primary sense that, in
effect, creates the idea of subjects experiencing the world of objects
through the senses, of time and history and evolution and all that. Its what
holds our common sense world together. Its the sense of rightness behind the
static patterns, if you will.
Pirsig said in Lila's Child, Note 97:
"It is important for an understanding of the MOQ to see that although
'common sense' dictates that inorganic nature came first, actually 'common
sense' which is A SET OF IDEAS, has to come first. This 'common sense' is
arrived at through a web of SOCIALLY APPROVED EVALUATIONS of various
alternatives. The key term here is 'evaluation', i.e. quality decisions. The
fundamental reality is not the common sense or the objects and laws approved
of by common sense but the approval itself and the quality that leads to
it."
dmb concludes:
Thanks for reading this post. Now get yourself a glass of ice and go to the
nearest tap for that free drink. What? You thought I was going to buy you a
beer or something?
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