Hi David --
> What about pre-intellectual but differentiated experience, > like when my pre-linguistic nephew carries the same toy > around for weeks, only to suddenly move on to a new favourite? Intellectual development progresses by degree in the toddler, and you've provided a good example of how this works. Although I'm not a psychologist, I would suggest that your nephew senses the value of his favored toy as a challenge to his intellect. Once he has mastered that challenge, the toy and his "intellectual experience" of it loses his interest. He moves on to explore a new value, and that becomes his next favorite toy--another object added to his experience, and so on. In this successive exploration of objective otherness, he builds a knowledge base about the identities and physical properties of "things" and how they relate to each other, eventually accumulating enough knowledge to assemble or structure objects in ways that demonstrate intellectual competence. Epistemology (how we learn) starts with experience; but Value is primary to experiential knowledge. My argument is that the "pure" or "pre-intellectual" experience that James, Rorty, and Pirsig refer to is not knowledge but Sensibility. We perceive otherness as Value, because we are value-sensible creatures. But because the Value we are sensible of is filtered through our organic sense receptors and becomes conscious in the space/time mode of human awareness, all experience (intellection) is differentiated and relational. Pre-intellectual awareness is our psycho-emotional response to Value. The intellect cannot deal with pure sensual data as anything but abstract "feeling". Instead, the cerebro-nervous system converts (reduces) primary Value to specific objects which are experienced and remembered as the things and events that make up our physical world. And because that world is intellectualized as a cause-and-effect reality, we are deluded into thinking that the objects experienced are primary to the values sensed. I believe we are pre-wired for the precept that Value is intrinsic to the objects of our experience. Otherwise, we would not have such difficulty convincing ourselves that Value is primary. Also, if we did not perceive being as the source of Value, rather than the reverse, we would be confounded by living in a "virtual reality" which, I submit, is a more accurate metaphysical ontology. Essentially yours, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
