From: Dan Glover (daneglover@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Oct 01 2003 - 16:22:17 BST
Hello everyone
>From: "Scott R" <jse885@spinn.net>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
>Subject: Re: MD Dealing with S/O
>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 20:46:01 -0600
>
>Dan,
>
> > From the narrow viewpoint of SOM, yes. But I think the MOQ offers a
>more
> > expansive viewpoint. Of course intellect is subjective but it is not
> > subjectivity itself. For example, in Robert Pirsig's hot stove
>experiment,
> > he says the mystic will tend to jump off the stove faster than the
> > intellectual. Intellectual patterns of value tend to take us farther
>away
> > from reality instead of bringing us closer.
>
>I questioned this interpretation in a recent post to Platt, to which no one
>has replied. Here it is again (I've added another bit at the end):
Hi Scott
Thank you for your reply. I read your post to Platt and though I wanted to I
just didn't have time to reply. There's that little thing about earning a
living that seems to take up most of my time these days.
>
>"When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality
>situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think,
>"This stove is hot", and then make a rational decision to get off. A "dim
>perception of he knows not what" gets him off Dynamically. Later he
>generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation." [Lila, ch.
>9]
>
>Pirsig seems to be ignoring his own warning about confusing the MOQ meaning
>of
>"dynamic" and "static" with the way the words are used in physics. There is
>nothing Dynamic, in the MOQ sense, in jumping off the stove. Instead, it is
>the body following the static biological pattern, called a reflex. In fact,
>the only way the Dynamic could come into play in this situation is if
>someone highly disciplined in mindfulness is so focused on the here and now
>that he could block the reflex and stay on the stove. So (in the next
>paragraph) where Pirsig guesses that the mystic will get off sooner than
>the
>subject-object scientist, I think he has it backwards. In practice, of
>course, they will get off at the same time, since they will both obey the
>reflex, but it is the mystic who has the possibility of choosing to get
>off.
I remember reading that Rene Descartes had a habit of dissecting live
animals. His feeling was that the resultant yelping and cries of pain were
merely reflex actions of a biological machine incapable of feeling real pain
like we humans do. I think you're barking up the same tree by discounting
the Dynamic nature of reflex actions that get us off hot stoves and out of
harm in general. I think what Robert Pirsig is pointing to with his hot
stove example is the why behind the reflex that gets us off. What it that
knows it's better to get off the stove? We don't think, oh this stove is hot
I should get off. We just jump off. Later, we might wonder why doesn't the
reflex cause us to shift over a bit and see if it's cooler there?
>
>[Added now]. One might object that I am ignoring the business of the "front
>edge of his experience", but why should I postulate that there is such a
>"front edge"? All this example shows is that a biological reaction happens
>more quickly than thought.
This seems a real stretch to me. How fast is a thought? If I think, I'm
going to get up and walk across the room, then I get up and walk across the
room, it seems to me that the thought was pretty much instantaneous while
the body's action only came later and happened slower than the thought. Now
if I suddenly feel a burning sensation on my butt I don't think at all. I
just react. I jump up. It may seem like merely a reflex but the front end of
my experience tells me something is wrong and to move quickly to remedy the
situation. Only later do I think, damn, I was sitting on a hot stove and it
burned my butt. So it may seem like the thought itself is slower than the
reaction but only since there was no thought to begin with.
Dan
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