Hi Steve and Marsha
Steve Peterson wrote:
> Hi Ham, DM, (Bo?, Chris?, Magnus? all)
>
> I'm interested in your comments on an extensive Lila quote to follow...
>
>
>>> 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.
>>> My point is that creating the concept of a perceiver is already done
>>> for
>>> us.
>>> We each perceive our self as the perceiver. Why do you deny the
>>> obvious?
>>>
>> DM: I just do not think it is true. The child experiences prior to
>> this.
>> First the
>> child recognises others and then it comes to conceptualise itself as
>> also
>> like
>> these others. We act and exist just like animals until we start to
>> become
>> self-conscious and for full individual & human self consciousness you
>> need
>> language.
>
> Steve:
> I think this is right on, DM. I am so glad you brought up "the child"
> in attempting to understand the MOQ. The baby does not perceive himself
> as the perceiver as Ham suggests. I think it may be far more useful to
> try to find the birth of subjects and objects in the development of a
> child rather than in history.
>
> Here Pirsig describes the evolution of the child to explain dynamic and
> static quality:
>
> "When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic
> areas a lot can be explained about that baby's growth that is not well
> explained otherwise.
> One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple
> distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more
> complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions
> are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the
> baby doesn't. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn't identify
> them as that. From the baby's point of view, something, he knows not
> what,
> compels attention. This generalized "something," Whitehead's "dim
> apprehension," is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby
> studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with
> the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music
> and heart attack in the previous examples.
>
> If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated
> that
> he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to
> Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then
> correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the
> correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he
> will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex
> correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object
> to be
> able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It
> will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary
> experience."
>
> Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and
> found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at
> jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it
> were
> a single jump. This is similar to the the way one drives a car. The
> first
> time there is a very slow trial-and-error process of seeing what causes
> what. But in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn't even
> think
> about it. The same is true of objects. One uses these complex patterns
> the same way one shifts a car, without thinking about them. Only when
> the
> shift doesn't work or an "object" turns out to be an illusion is one
> forced
> to become aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of
> subjects
> and objects as primary. We can't remember that period of our lives when
> they were anything else.
> In this way static patterns of value become the universe of
> distinguishable
> things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as "before"
> and "after" and between "like" and "unlike" grow into enormously complex
> patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to
> generation as
> the mythos, the culture in which we live."
A bit of a coincidence. I just wrote in another post that I'm not sure why
we have to keep calling the parties in a quality event for subject and object.
As the quote suggests, the child doesn't know it is the subject until it
develops the sense of "self", and doesn't that happen much later?
Marsha commented:
> I think about it all the time. Would it be possible to frame
> discussions centered on the experiential events of patterns of
> value? Isn't that how you are seeing it?
Not sure, I hardly understand the question, but it sounds intriguing. Could
you elaborate? I have a hunch this thread could be what you want, but I'm not
sure.
Magnus
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