Hi Roger, Rich, Glove, Walter and Group:
Important thread. Here�s my current take, subject to change of course.
The only world I experience is my world. I certainly don�t experience your
world or anyone else�s. How could I? As for as I know, no one has yet
found a way to walk in another�s shoes, or found the gift �to see
ourselves as others see us.�
That your world exists at all is an assumption of mine�a high quality
static intellectual pattern of great practical utility to me, but just a
derivative, culturally-influenced intellectual construct from my primary
experience nevertheless.
Pirsig says the world is experience. I am that experience--as are you and
you and you--using the software program called �Me.�
When I lose my capacity to experience--my consciousness--I�ll lose the
world. There�s no provision for life after death in the MoQ.
Thus I say in MoQ terms that it would be correct to write on my
tombstone, �Mine was the only world.� For mine is the only experience of
primal, unpatterned reality and pure Quality that I know. The rest is
conjecture.
As said before, this goes to the heart of our understanding of the MoQ
and eventual resolution of the individual/group issue that Struan
introduced. The unique pre-intellectual experiential world of each
individual--the only living being that can respond to Dynamic Quality--is
primary in Pirsig�s metaphysics. Ideas and groups are secondary
intellectual patterns.
Like Lila, we each have our own reality. The problem is trying to describe
it in other than divisive subject-object language. How does one say that
Self-Experience-World are inseparable when what is inseparable is
described in three different words?. Perhaps the following by William
James will help convey what I�m trying to get across:
�Our inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our
experience are one. A conscious field plus its object as felt or thought
plus an attitude towards the object plus a sense of self to whom the
attitude belongs � is a full fact of the kind to which all realities
whatsoever must belong."
I look forward to being corrected.
Platt
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