Gerhard and All
Seems like Marco and I are tearing at each end of you. Hope you
don't break.:-)
You said:
> As you understand, I'm in the process of getting to know the possible
> ingredients in the levels. This partly because I have some potential
> problems with the levels, as the intellectual me seems to directly be
> over-ruling my biological me, as I understand is a not very good idea
> according to MoQ. Let's say as an example that a person (on the
> intellectual level) decides to commit suicide. The biological level
> try to stop this stupid idea, and sometimes this works, but sometimes
> the intellectual level is winning this battle. "Popular" ways of
> suicide in Norway is to jump of a cliff or drive a car right into
> something big (like a truck). These ways might be recognised by the
> fact that they happen fast, and the conscious me am maybe not totally
> involved. This seems to be examples of intellect over biology
> (directly). Another example that comes to mind, is when I try to
> convince myself to take a bath here in Norway (12 -18 deg C in the
> ocean outside Stavanger), biologically, I do not at all want the bath,
> but intellectual I know that I will feel better after the bath. My
> intellect always wins this battle. But, but mostly I'm interested in
> the levels because I like to see the essence of the levels to better
> understand.
Good examples Richard.
It's a knee-jerk reaction to think that each time an impulse crosses
our mind we operate at the intellectual level, but that's not so IMO;
Brooding on suicide is mostly social-induced, I have yet to meet a
successful, well-adapted person who wants to kill him/herself,
while love- and financial affairs ...in general loss of social status
range high on the list. Consequently it is the social me versus
biological me. Intellect - looking objectively on it - wawers and
usually takes biology's side, but isn't able to prevent emotional ad-
hoc impulses.
The bath example will be along the same line (I had a swim at the
"Sola strand" once:). Perhaps it's not Intellect that deem
swimming in cold water good, but rather your social side who
wants to "feel better", but even if Intellect is involved it can influence
the social level and thus decide what to do.
Your point is terribly important and allow me to harp a little more on
it. One person (Struan Hellier) once meant to have disproved the
QM. He used the brain-prodding experiment (Nörretranders) as a
demonstration of there being no Q-levels, the physical touch had
an immediate psychic reaction; no escalation through four levels
(he actually said it disproved the MOM too, but got bogged down).
Now, it's not QM's assertion that experience jumps from level to
level through time-space. The value "mesh" is there ready-made.
I insert something I have written before:
A perfect example of this frustrating non-understanding is
Struan Hellier who brought up the famous experiment of how
prodding the surface of an exposed brains evokes vivid
memories. The very same example I had used in my QE essay
for the exact opposite purpose and I will probably lose the
attention of any reader by re-iterating my line of reasoning, but
S.H’s point is that the subject/object (mind/matter) two-tiered
reality is invalid because the touch and the memory is one, so
to postulate a four-tiered reality is preposterous. SH obviously
thought that the MoQ says that the objective touch have
several costume changes to perform before ending up in the
intellect-mind as a subjective experience. It must be
remembered that Pirsig says that the MoQ don’t reject the S/O
but merely places the “objective” under its Inorganic and
Biological levels and the “subjective” under its Social and
Intellectual levels
About the lack of any mind-matter divide S.H. is absolutely
right - and in complete agreement both with the MoQ and every
experiment that can be conceived, and his criticism of a four-
tiered reality would have been valid had it been what the MoQ
says, but it is not. The subject-object divide is replaced by a
dynamic-static one and the actual probing of a live brain which
transports the experimentee back to previous experiences,
means that all static levels performed their dynamic/static
transformation act simultaneously: The INORGANIC (voltage of
the) probe is read by the BIOLOGICAL level as the memory
“file” which content is read by the SOCIAL level in its original
emotion-filled context and finally the INTELLECT which knew
that this was a memory from the past and not objectively
happening. This no process in either time or space, but one
instantanious event. S.H himself become entangled in a logic
knot of his own when he discovered that his much hailed unity
couldn’t be maintained for long. As said, the very moment one
starts to speak some fundamental system imposes itself, and
as SH didn’t accept the MoQ he was forced into the SOM, and
the more he struggled the deeper he sunk.
Thanks for posing such to-the-point examples Gerhard,
will soon deliver the rest
Bo
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