From: Monkeys' tail or (elkeaapheefteen@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 09:28:57 GMT
Hi Wim and all,
>Subject: Re: MD (Wim is it.) Focus forum - round four
>Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2002 08:22:01 +0100
>From 'Lila' chapter 9:
'Phaedrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a
baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the
child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective
science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly.
When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot
can be explained about that baby's growth that is not well explained
otherwise. 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. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a
rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder
and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the
previous examples. 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.
Hello Wim and all,
I do not have much to say about this specific part, the only thing is that I
find it very dangerous trying to describe the MOQ by using how a baby
interacts with the world or how the baby makes SOM out of DQ by making
patterns of values into an object. He states<if the baby is attentive to
DQ>, while imo it is impossible for a baby to be<attentive> to DQ, rather DQ
is <attentive> to the baby. It seems a futile point but the biggest danger
of describing the MOQ is starting out with prepositions like <a baby is
attentive to DQ> or <a baby is aware>, or <a baby makes a complex patterns
of values> etc. I sure hope I am wrong or Pirsig intended this section as
purely, for the sake of the argument, but it imo creates a fuzzy area where
it is more likely that people get confused over where the distinction
between SOM and MOQ lies rather than they get a good idea on how a baby
enrolls into an perspective based on subjects and objects from the world of
<pure experience>and how DQ, spov, and som relate in a bundle of experience
called a baby. I do not have any problems in how P. describes how the som
perspective is a product of the force of habit and <usability>, but the rest
confuses me more than it makes things clear.
Greetz Davor
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