Hi Platt,
Before I can respond to you and to Scott's posts I need some clarifications.
So, could you indulge me with replying to 3 questions:
1) Do you believe that their exists a material physical reality independent
of your, and any other human being, observing it. What I am getting at is
if you, me and all humans died, would there still be a physical material
universe filled with stars, galaxies, etc?
2) Do you believe that Pirsig believes that there exists a material physical
reality independent of human observers?
3) In your e-mail you quote from Lila chapter 9, I have pasted that citation
below this question. My question is: where is the 'thinking' mentioned
through out that citation taking place? Where is the "distinctions" that
the infant is making taking place? Where is the "noticing of differences
and correlations of Dynamic quality" taking place? Where are those
"deductions" the baby is making taking place? In the air? In someone's big
toe? Nowhere in the physical material universe? Can you tell me where?
Once I have these 3 answers, or even just the answers to the first two
questions, I will be able to formulate a coherent response to your email.
Hoping you will indulge me,
Gary
Here is your citation from your email;
The answer to your question is found in Chap. 9 of LILA where Pirsig
> describes how a baby learns. Here is the relevant passage, with certain
> portions deleted in the interests of time and space:
>
> "One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of
> simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth
> acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know
> these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and
> hunger and so on but the baby doesn't. We could call them stimuli but
> the baby doesn't identify them as that. From the baby's point of view,
> something, he knows not what, compels attention. This generalized
> "something," White-head's "dim apprehension," is Dynamic Quality.
> If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated
> that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to
> Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then
> correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the
> correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he
will
> begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex
> correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to
> be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It
> will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary
> experience. Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values
> called an object and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops
> a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that
> produced it, as though it were a single jump. This is similar to the way
> one drives a car. The first time there is a very slow trial-and-error
> process of seeing what causes what. But in a very short time it
> becomes so swift one doesn't even think about it. That is why we think
> of subjects and objects as primary. We can't remember that period of
> our lives when they were anything else. In this way static patterns of
> value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static
> distinctions, between such entities as "before" and "after" and between
> "like" and "unlike" grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge
> that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the
> culture in which we live."
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