Hi Roger, Rich, Glove, Walter and Group:
Important thread. Here’s my current take, subject to change of course.
The only world I experience is my world. I certainly don’t experience your
world or anyone else’s. How could I? As for as I know, no one has yet
found a way to walk in another’s shoes, or found the gift “to see
ourselves as others see us.”
That your world exists at all is an assumption of mine—a high quality
static intellectual pattern of great practical utility to me, but just a
derivative, culturally-influenced intellectual construct from my primary
experience nevertheless.
Pirsig says the world is experience. I am that experience--as are you and
you and you--using the software program called “Me.”
When I lose my capacity to experience--my consciousness--I’ll lose the
world. There’s no provision for life after death in the MoQ.
Thus I say in MoQ terms that it would be correct to write on my
tombstone, “Mine was the only world.” For mine is the only experience of
primal, unpatterned reality and pure Quality that I know. The rest is
conjecture.
As said before, this goes to the heart of our understanding of the MoQ
and eventual resolution of the individual/group issue that Struan
introduced. The unique pre-intellectual experiential world of each
individual--the only living being that can respond to Dynamic Quality--is
primary in Pirsig’s metaphysics. Ideas and groups are secondary
intellectual patterns.
Like Lila, we each have our own reality. The problem is trying to describe
it in other than divisive subject-object language. How does one say that
Self-Experience-World are inseparable when what is inseparable is
described in three different words?. Perhaps the following by William
James will help convey what I’m trying to get across:
“Our inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our
experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought
plus an attitude towards the object plus a sense of self to whom the
attitude belongs … is a full fact of the kind to which all realities
whatsoever must belong."
I look forward to being corrected.
Platt
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