ROGER CONTINUES THE DIALOGUE ON THE
THOT EXPERIMENT WITH GLOVE (AND OFFERS A
MONEY BACK OFFER TO HORSE)
Below is a cut and paste of Glove's comments and my (Roger) new replies.
Thank you for your time and input Glove!
Roger:
The question I want to answer deals with......"How exactly can you pursue
experience?" Or inversely, how would you avoid it? Running from experience
is like running from your shadow in the sunshine. If we are experience, then
we can hardly avoid ourselves now can we? No, of course not.
Glove:
I disagree. We avoid experience all the time by simply ignoring it. We are
conditioned into this by the very way we experience. Personally I know
people who have been avoiding themselves for years by any means they can
find. Alcohol, drugs, tv, what-have-you, are all ways of ignoring what self
is and avoiding the experience of self.
Roger:
But these avoidances are themselves experience....right? I think we are
really saying the same thing.
Roger:
So the key term
isn't to pursue experience, it is to pursue a type of experience, or a
quality of experience. The type of experience is clearly toward UNPATTERNED
EXPERIENCE. Though Pirsig also warns of going too far into chaos.
Glove:
This I can agree with in a way, although "to pursue experience" gives me a
feeling of discomfort. We cannot pursue experience for we are experience and
how can we pursue that which is already what we are?
Roger:
That was my point!!
Glove:
At the same time,
experienced is static quality reality while non-experienced is Dynamic
Quality. How can we pursue that which we do not experience? If indeed you
mean to pursue Dynamic experience.
Roger:
No, I think it more appropriate to say that prepatterned experience is DQ,
and patterned, conceptualized experience is sq.
Glove:
Can you see that to think of pursuing experience is to have a particular
goal in mind to the exclusion of all else? And rather than finding Dynamic
Quality, only static quality will appear? This is what the master is warning
about. And that is what is my discomfort too, I think.
Roger:
I strongly agree with this. I think striving and pursuing themselves are the
path away from DQ. Using our above analogy, the path to DQ is not to pursue
it, it is to stop and embrace it.
[the below relates to my decryption device thot experiment]
Glove:
I remember Jonathan mentioned something awhile back about random number
generation and the fact that it is not possible to generate truly random
numbers, but is possible to generate arbitrary numbers. No matter how big or
how complex the computer, it still must start with a finite set of numbers.
Roger:
Yea, I thot about this too. This actually improves the experiment because it
establishes some noise in the randomness.
Glove:
Evolution doesn't seem to use a clock. I don't know if you've read this
paper or not...
http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/users/adrianth/er97/paper.html
It concerns artifical evolution in the physical world...self-evolving
silicon computer chips. You should perhaps throw out the clock in your
thought experiment and see what happens. Also, see my note above on random
number generation, at first there isn't total chaos, there is a finite set.
Is it possible to design a program using qubits (quantum computing) instead
of numbers? That would seem an area of interesting possibilities.
Roger:
I will read it now. Again, the randomness does not have to be perfect. I
agree that the thot experiment can be made much more sophisticated as you are
indicating.
Glove:
Yes I read about this "experiment" by Wheeler...where was it now? Fabric of
Reality? It points to the way we perceive reality, most certainly.
Roger:
Actually, I don't remember seeing it there. I took it out of an even better
book.....THE COLLAPSE OF CHAOS by Stewart and Cohen. This book is in
absolutely awesome. In fact, if either you or Horse buy it and don't like
it, I would promise you that I will send you a check for the full cost of the
book. It is a mind expanding book when tied to the MOQ. (Sorry, I don't know
the rest of you[or do know] well enough to make the same guarantee).
Glove: I am not sure what throwing out number generation will do to your
thinking here. The pre-conditioned fear of the unknown is what causes us to
hold on so tightly to static quality patterns of value, or in the MOQ,
static quality values preconditioned fear to create stable patterns of
value. Using qubits instead of numbers would seem to mean that instead of
seeking to embrace the dynamic chance of number generation, we would instead
be dealing with super-impositional qubits in both time and space. Forget
fear!
Roger:
Exactly. Your suggestions work to improve the model and clarify the concepts.
Glove:
With the changes I suggested in your thought experiment, Roger, I started
going thru some of your conclusions and quickly saw that my revisions should
perhaps be addressed before I go thru each and every one of your comments.
Some I agree with and some I do not. I do thank you for your time in putting
this together though! Let me know what you think!
Roger:
Let's play!
Rog
PS I still want to buy you a beer when you come to town, Dan
PSS Struan....I don't get any more rational than this. I am working on some
rational pieces on DQ in the other forum and on Free will for this one.
Rational Rog is back!
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