Hi Ham > David -- > > I wonder if you realize what you are saying. >
DM: I think so. DM said>> 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. > Ham> 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. DM: My point is that to create the conception of a perceiver you have to divide out of experience something that is not a quality of experience and this is a vain hope. What you don't seem to see is that the notion of a perceiver cannot be isolated or made sense of because all experience is experience, what is there in experience that is not experience? Only in a thought experiment about things beyond experience can we imagine un-experienced things coming into the experience of a 'perceiver'. Try reading a good book about Heidegger who was in fact a master logician. > > 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. DM: I think my logic in more thorough than yours but it is hard to settle this. Your > assertion that the perceiver kills experience is an absurdity. DM: I think it is simple logic given the premise that all experience is experienced, so that isolating a perceiver from the world means that experience has been dissected to get 'world' on the one hand and 'perceiver' on the other, experience comes first and gives us a unity of perceiver-world called experience that is prior to either world or perceiver which are abstracted from this. There may be a story to tell about how the world and human beings evolve but this is speculative science not philosophy and an ontology of experience which for me is the unavoidable starting place. Not a million miles from idealism but with the greater sophistication of Heideggerian phenomenology. The isolated > perceiver is PRECISELY what experiences. DM: How do you get from experience to postulate this 'what'? You have to start with experience which is prior to this postulation. 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. DM: Experience is indivisable from value and is prior to all this talk of world or perceivers. > > I'm well aware that this SOM epistemology makes me a "sinner" in your > view. DM: Confess and I'll forgive you! > 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". DM: DQ is all about freedom for me. How can a > philosophy that decries human individuality and freedom enlighten our > society? DM: Individuality is a great 4th level achievement in the MOQ made possible by intellectual values overcoming social ones. 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/
