Michael, on Friday, February 27, 2009 12:49:35 PM you asked:
I must ask just, what pain is. biologically speaking in terms of reflexive systems. > DS says: > > He may not know what gets him off the stove but I suggest it's the > feeling of pain. Science has names for all the receptors in the skin > and has traced a nerve path from pain receptor to muscles that doesn't > go by way of the brain. Now you're asking the question I've wanted to get at for thirty years. Everyone seems to feel pain when they sit on a hot stove, so I'm thinking biological reflex. But there's more: this reflex seem species specific and responds to stimulus in a predictable way. It's a feeling and a separate feeling from the heat feeling that will eventually be registered at the brain. So the experience of sitting on a hot stove yields two pieces of information: one, is the pervasive conscious (conscious that's important) negative, location specific, feeling of pain; the other, is the local, sometimes conscious, feeling of heat. I'm on record as believing that these are two different kinds of reflex: the pain I've called (after Pirsig) the valued reflex; the heat I've called the corresponding reflex because it generates a nerve impulse to the brain that corresponds to the sensation stimulus. I've postulated two other kinds of reflexes: the simple reflex (what biology thinks of as the only kind of reflex) and the learned reflex (what we call ideas or knowledge) that are stored in the cerebral cortex. If you have any thoughts on these reflexes (esp. valued reflexes and their relation to RMP's concept of Quality) I would be grateful to hear them.-david swift 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/
