From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri May 16 2003 - 22:13:22 BST
Hi Johnny,
> >Art (music) is first of all an experience. Later you can interpret and
> >give the experience meaning if you like. About art, especially music,
> >there's no need to think or say anything.
>
> and later we had on this exchange:
>
> > > Pure experience without any static patterns in which
> > > the experience acts means that there is no difference between the
> > > experience of a blow job and a hand grenade, or whatever the stale old
> > > metaphor we use around here is...
> >
> >This is where you miss one of the major points of the MoQ. Experience is
> >always of Quality. The two occur simultaneously only they are not two.
> >Experience and value are exactly the same phenomenon. There's no
> >difference, no separation. Morality and experience are identical. It's
> >Quality that tells you the difference between one thing and another.
>
> I've been having trouble seeing how pure experience, when seperated from
> static patterns in which it is experienced, can have any shape or any,
> well, qualities to it. It seems to me that without static patterns to
> experience it in, an experience of art would not have any value, it
> wouldn't be bad or good, because there wouldn't be any way to know what it
> means.
Art is an experience. Like reality, it has no meaning beyond its own
presence. ("Meaning" depends on intellect which is secondary to
experience.) What is the meaning of a rose? A sunset? A sonata?
> I'm not talking about reflecting on it afterwards, I'm talking
> about being able to feel the heat of the stove as a bad experience. I say
> without the static patterns of burns and pain and hot stoves stored deep in
> the patterns of morality, it wouldn't hurt, it would have no meaning.
> There'd be no hot stove, and no one sitting on it.
Static patterns left in the wake of DQ are indeed necessary for you and I
to be here to experience anything. But do not restrict experience to
what we're capable of. As pointed out by many here, the MoQ posits
that experience occurs all the way down the line to atoms themselves.
The world is a world of experience.
> But maybe you are saying that the experience, or the quality event,
> contains in it the static patterns of the stove and the sitter, and all the
> goodness or badness, is created by or found within the event, or is
> eminating from the event. I do believe that the whole universe is created
> with each moment (each experience) and that the past is created with each
> moment, so I certainly go along with the idea that everything, including
> the context of seemingly pre-existing static patterns, is contained in
> experience. History is created fresh each moment. But here's where my
> determinism, aka my reason and rationalism, kicks in: I believe that the
> universe that each quality event creates must be connected to previous
> quality events - the next moment will still me see sitting here typing the
> next letter of this sentence, it won't be disconnected irrationally and
> I'll be on a beach in Cancun all healthy and tanned, not realizing that one
> moment ago I was typing a post in Massachusetts, all pastey and pale. That
> I stay me is something I think is essential to philosophy. Otherwise
> there'd be no therefores: Descartes would get to "I think", and then he'd
> have to start over again, if he was even still Descartes. And also,
> determinism and reason dictate that the experience of one person will have
> to line up with the experience of another person. If we both walk down the
> same street, we will both have seen the same buildings, if we both examine
> history, we will find the same history. (One or both of us could be wrong,
> but rationalism and reason says that there is a single version of history
> and that things don't suddenly change for no reason.)
>
> A pattern carries itself forward in time. I think some people see patterns
> as shapes of substance in space, like a toaster is a pattern, or they think
> of an institution, like a government, without thinking of them as a toaster
> or government that continues to be a toaster or government through time.
> (The patterns also take shape in the three dimensions, of course, and are
> what make a toaster different from a government). What Reason means to me
> is that each moment - each experience - is dependent on the last moment,
> and patterns do their patterning in the fabric of time as well as space.
> It is also over time that the patterns change, and some patterns are cycles
> or trends, like the lunar cycle and population growth, but patterns have a
> self-abiding disposition to continue to hold together, and they change only
> because other patterns interact with them and cause changes. And as they
> can't help but interact with other patterns they can't help but change, for
> they are all in the same universe, and every pattern but the base class
> pattern (morality itself, or the word) is made up of subpatterns, and all
> but the highest most nebulous patterns are constituents of superpatterns.
I agree with everything you say except patterns "can't help but change"
by simply interacting with other patterns. This is evolution by "oops" or
lucky accident that the MoQ rejects in favor of evolution by responses to
betterness.
> This has all been a long way of saying again that experience is of static
> patterns of morality (even "mystical" experience, which is why mystical
> experiences are recognized as mystical experiences and aren't completely
> different from each other).
"Dynamic quality," because it's a word phrase, is a static pattern. But
the phenomenon it points to is an inexplicable, intuitive presence, or so
I would argue.
> >This is your determinism bit that I completely reject simply by
> >performing the simple experiment of wiggling my finger to the left or the
> >right as I wish, anytime I wish.
> I knew you'd say that. What you are rejecting is your responsibility for
> how your actions affect other people. Morality determines your actions,
> and your actions, in turn, effect morality and other people. Believe it or
> not, when you choose to wiggle your finger, you have to.
I don't believe it. But, that's OK. To you, the fact that "all is determined"
is a good truth in the art gallery of intellectual patterns. To me, free will
is a much better painting in the same gallery. I guess we have to leave it
at that. Or, perhaps we can agree on Pirsig's solution:
"To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of
quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic
Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior is free."(12)
Platt
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