From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Mar 06 2005 - 23:39:34 GMT
Scott, Max, Sam, Ant and all MOQians
dmb opens:
Welcome Max. That's my son's name. If I start talking to you like you're 4
years old its only because of that. Just slap me and I'll remember who I'm
talking to.
Scott asked:
Was there consciousness before the biological level came into being?
dmb answered with quotes from Pirsig:
"In the MOQ empirical experience begins with Quality which generates
intellectual patterns. One of these intellectual patterns is named 'senses,'
but this pattern is derived from the study of anatomy and is not primary in
the actual empirical process."
"The MOQ agrees that the senses are primary in an anatomical explanation of
[the] empirical process. So the statement in Lila seems correct to me. But
at the cutting edge of the actual Dynamic empirical moment these anatomical
explanations are nowhere to be found."
To which Scott replied:
I fail to see how these quotes answer my question. Awareness does not
require sense organs (we are aware of our thoughts, and there is mystical
awareness).
dmb says presently:
I'm stunned by this glib dismissal and the failure even to see how the
quotes address your question. At the risk of insulting your intelligence,
let me spell out what it means. You'll notice in the quotes that the
anatomical explanation of the empirical process is an intellectual pattern
generated by a prior experience, and so are the biological sense organs
themselves. As a form of idealism, there is a sense in which the entire
world, the entire encyclopedia, is a construction of the intellect. Pirsig
makes this same point in another place that is less specifically about sense
organs. Maybe you recall. It asserts the same idea in broader terms,
qualifying the idea of the inorganic coming before life, which came before
society, which came before intellect. Within a static view, such basic
common sense notions of time and space can't be abandon. And we can accept
these ideas as very good and useful, true and correct in all practical
matters. But ultimately, he says, all of those ideas of bodies and senses
and the evolutionary history that produced them are just that. Ideas. You'll
also notice it in these quotes too. "Experience begins with Quality which
generates intellectual patterns." One of those intellectual static patterns
says that bodies and sense organs are a pre-requisite for consciousness. But
at the moment of Quality experience "these anatomical explanations are
nowhere to be found". This is how the quotes answer your question. Yes,
there is consciousness before the biological level. The biological level is
a construct of the intellect, which is generated by a prior experience.
Clearly this is a form of consciousness quite differnet from the SOM notion.
It this confusion, I thought, that prompted the question and which leads me
to conclude that you're sneaking the SOM self back in - inadvertantly.
Ant McWatt said to Scott:
A conflation of intellect (as understood by Pirsig) with Dynamic Quality
will be confusing if applied to the MOQ. A real spanner in the works which
I'm opposed to. (dmb added more of the same criticism.)
Scott denied the charge:
...What I have said is that Quality and Intellect are two names for the same
(non-)thing. This does NOT imply that the normal, S/O-based intellect can
grasp Ultimate Reality. It does not even imply that a Buddha can
intellectually grasp Ultimate Reality. It does imply that we can -- and I
think we should -- think of everything as the play of Intellect. It was SOM
that removed intellect from nature. The MOQ, by its definition of intellect,
preserves that removal, by treating intellect in the same way that
materialism does, assuming that it came into existence from a reality that
didn't have it. I am arguing -- against materialism and against the MOQ --
that it be restored.
dmb says:
Let me start with your assertion that the MOQ's version of the intellect is
like the SOM materialist version. If you consider the Pirsig quotes and the
explanation I provided, then you should be able to see that Pirsig version
of the intellect is not removed from nature nor does it assume that
intellect arises from material reality. Instead, nature is a construction of
the intellect, a product of the intellect, synonymous with it in a very real
sense. In the MOQ, the intellect creates the subject and the object, it
creates the idea of a sensory creature in a material world. This very much
turns SOM and materialism on its head, specifically with respect to the
intellect. Unlike SOM, the MOQ puts both subjects and objects on one side of
the metaphysical split. Unlike materialism, the MOQ doesn't put matter
before mind or sense organs before consciousness. In other words, your
assertion that the MOQ is like SOM materialism is WAY wrong.
Thanks.
dmb
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