Hi DMB, You said: " I take Pirsig’s pre-intellectual experience (a.k.a. Quality or Dynamic Quality) to be more or less equivalent to James’s pure experience."
I completely agree. You then said: "The most common objection is to simply to deny that there is any such thing as pure experience. “All awareness is a linguistic affair” or “it’s text all the way down”. Even our basic sensory perceptions are structured by concepts or categories of thought we inherit from language. etc ..." I'm not sure there is such a denial, or any denial worthy of any credence. It seems to me that any denial comes from our difficulty "defining" that pure experience, and it's that problem which becomes suspended in "language all the way down". The "given" is the undefinability. Personally I have no doubt the radical, pure, pre-intellectual experience is real. And I have no doubt it's easily recognizable even in scientific materialist views of the world - Damasio's "Somatic Markers" for example, sensing positive and negative responses to stimuli, without (prior to) any symbolic or linguistic representation of "what" is being sensed. Ian 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
