On 16 Mar 2010 at 12:37, david buchanan wrote: Pirsig's Quality is called the primary empirical reality and the cutting edge of experience. I don't see how this kind of immediate experience can reasonably be characterized as transcendent or independent of us in any way. Pirsig is talking about the experience of actual people. Royce is talking about something "not ourselves". The incompatibility of these two ideas is obvious, don't you think?
Platt Not if you consider the view of David Darling in his book, "Soul Search," Chapter 9: "If we accept that everything in the universe has a subjective aspect to it, then the brain appears in an extraordinary new light. The brain begins to look more like a regulator or an editor of consciousness - a "reducing valve," as Huxley called it. At first sight, this may seem utterly bizarre, so familiar is the idea of the brain as a maker of thought. And yet most, if not all, the major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don´t manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we think? "Among those who speculated along these lines is William James. He picked up the notion from Oxford philosopher Ferdinand Schiller, who in his book Riddles of the Sphinx wrote: " Matter is an admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting and restraining consciousness, which it encases. Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that which limits it. It is an explanation which no evidence in favor of materialism can possibly affect. For if a man loses consciousness as soon as his brain is injured, it is clearly as good an explanation to say the injury to the brain destroyed the mechanism by which the manifestation of the consciousness was rendered possible, as to say that it destroyed the seat of consciousness. "The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson was also drawn to the idea that consciousness is all around us. For him, it was a force that applies intelligence to evolution. In a similar vein, controversial biologist-writer Rupert Sheldrake has argued that consciousness exists in the form of a field spread throughout space. Individual minds, he suggests, can tune in to this field and so "resonate" with one another. "Sheldrake likens the human brain to a TV set. An extraterrestrial who had never seen television before could drive itself slowly mad trying to figure out where the picture on the screen came from solely in terms of the set´s hardware. We, who know how the trick is done, recognize that the TV simply picks up and selects from the complete range of broadcast signals. And we know, too, that even if the set is turned off or destroyed, the signals carry on." Interesting? I think so. Platt 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/md/archives.html
