David -- I wonder if you realize what you are saying.
> For me the meaning of experience-quality prior to > any notion of the individual or perceiver is this: > > a living experience full of trees and sky and sunshine and animals > and clouds and people and grass, etc is what it is to exist and be alive, > experience-life is not confined to some boundary called a perceiver, > experience only exists when trees and birds and sun's are interacting > with human organisms, the human alone and isolated does not > have experience, experience is what occurs when much more > is going on, experience is a process between organisms and > light and heat and energy and their changes, experience transcends > an isolated perceiver, experience is only possible when suns shine > and birds sing and eyes flash and photons are absorbed, so > experience requires not a perceiver but a cosmos. If there is no notion of a perceiver, who or what do you think has the experience that you so poetically describe? Is it not the individual, David Morey, who recalls these images from his own experience? Those trees and clouds and animals are no more real than the subject who is aware of them. I may have misconstrued Pirsig, and my days on this forum may be limited, but I cannot let your full heading "The isolated perceiver is an abstraction that dissects and kills experience" stand without logical scrutiny. Your assertion that the perceiver kills experience is an absurdity. The isolated perceiver is PRECISELY what experiences. The cosmos doesn't perceive; it has no neurons or brain to serve as a faculty for cognizance. Neither does Quality, for that matter. Value is the province of the proprietary individual, without whose sensibility it could not become aware. Social morality and collective knowledge are only codified by-products of individual experience. I'm well aware that this SOM epistemology makes me a "sinner" in your view. Well, so be it. Personally, I'm growing tired of defending the autonomous individual against a corps of elitists who insist that human beings are only "abstracted patterns" and that freedom is "negative and bad". How can a philosophy that decries human individuality and freedom enlighten our society? The most left-leaning politicians in the free world would see such a belief system as endemic of a stagnant culture like Islam as opposed to that of any any western ideology. If this kind of thinking is what you folks consider intellectually "progressive", heaven help us! Respectfully, 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/
