From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 16:41:15 BST
Scott,
> Platt said:
> Seems to me self-evident that everything is a consequence of value-laden
> primary experience, i.e. Quality. For example, your and Mark's denial "that
> Quality is the primary source is empirical" is a notion that first emerged
> as a negative response to that particular intellectual pattern, followed by
> verbalizing your negativity. You made an initial intuitive value judgment,
> then patterned it in language. To put it metaphorically, you came across
> that "Quality is the Primary Source" painting in the gallery of ideas, took
> a disliking to it, and later wrote of your experience.
> Scott:
> First, are you talking about everything (including that molecule) or
> everything in my or your experience?
Everything, including that molecule, which is an idea pattern.
> Second, I agree that everything that
> goes on in my experience *involves* value, but who is to say that value
> *causes* everything that goes on in my experience?
There is no question of one "causing" the other because both are one and
the same. Value and experience are inseparable, or if you prefer, co-
dependent. I prefer to think of them as synonymous.
> How do you know that
> there was any value whatsoever prior to a (supposed) emergence of
> consciousness from the slime?
I don't know with absolute certainty, like I know I value. But, it appears
to me (in my experience) to be a high quality idea (intellectual pattern.)
> Now I do not think that consciousness so
> emerged -- I think that consciousness/value/intellect *is* all-pervasive --
> but I fail to see how one can claim an empirical basis for saying so.
I think your meaning of "empirical" and Pirsig's differs. Here's his
explanation:
"I think the trouble is with the word 'experience.' It can be used in at
least three ways. It can be used as a relationship between and object and
another object (as in Los Angeles experiencing earthquakes). It is more
commonly used as a subject-object relationship. This relationship is
usually considered the basis of philosophic empiricism and experimental
scientific knowledge.In subject-object metaphysics, this experience is
between a pre-existing object and subject, but in the MOQ, there is no pre-
existing subject or object. Experience and Dynamic Quality become
synonymous. . . . So in the MOQ, experience comes first, everything else
comes later. This is pure empiricism as opposed to scientific empiricism,
which, with its pre-existing subjects and objects, is not really so pure."
(LC, p. 515)
Thus, the "empirical basis" for your idea that "consciousness is all
pervasive" is simply (in your case) a high value experience. I happen to
agree that that experience, now formed into a static intellectual pattern,
has high quality.
> Platt said:
> The MOQ starts where we all start, with human experience. Thus everything
> is a consequence of it.
> Scott:
> That is fallacious. Even restricting "everything" to human experience, why
> couldn't it be that there is no value unless experience comes in S/O form,
> in which case one would say that value is the consequence of S/O form, and
> not vice versa? (My preference is to say neither: that value and the form
> of experience are mutually dependent).
No, not fallacious. As Pirsig explains in the quote above, the S/O form of
experience is a philosophic/scientific assumption. The question is: How
can the S/O form precede any experience of it? How can there be any
definable "forms of experience" without prior experience?
In the MOQ, once you start talking about "forms" you're talking about
static patterns, left in the wake of DQ.
Platt
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