Hi Glenn:
PLATT: (previously)
First I disagree with your assumption that DQ must be a psychical
experience. The vague sense of betterness which describes the DQ
experience can emerge from any and all levels. Alleviation of pain, for
example, is biologically based but psychically felt. All this separation
you insist on is a holdover from mind/matter split that science keeps
insisting on (except as noted).
GLENN:
Listen, if you have any hope of the MOQ being coherent then you cannot
claim that DQ can emerge from any level because then DQ would be
epiphenomenal of that level, and according to the MOQ, DQ is primary.
For this reason, you cannot say the pain from the stove is a direct
experience of DQ if you also admit the pain is caused by the electrical
activity in the nervous system. For DQ to be properly primary, the low
feeling of quality must *precede* the actions of the nervous system and
thus the pain.
So while I agree with you that Pirsig says that the pain describes the
DQ experience, I believe he must be wrong about that if he wishes to
preserve the idea that DQ is primary.
What you seem to miss in all our discussions is the interpenetration of
DQ at all levels from protons to people. Electrons and atoms of the
nervous system are experiential. They are imbued with and respond to
DQ as do viruses and amoebas. You ignored that part of Roger�s
response that said: �As Pirsig's theory is pan-experiential, the
experience referred to by "immediate experience" applies to any entity
(be it a sub-atomic particle, plant, worm, human being etc.) that is
derived from immediate experience.�
As mentioned before, experiments show electrical activity in the brain
can occur prior to it being consciously experienced and subsequently
conceptualized as �pain.� In the hot stove scenario, the low value
experienced by the electrons which are disturbed by the radiant heat of
the hot stove is transferred to nerve tissue cells which experience low
value and pass their experience up through the nervous system to the
synapses of the brain which experience the low value and send a
signal to the heated area to remove itself from the low value situation.
All this internal goings on you subconsciously experience as low value
and you react to it by getting your ass off the hot stove before you can
exclaim �Ouch!�
The overall DQ experience of �that�s good� or �that�s not so good�
ranges from the highest level to the lowest, from the jazz musician
hitting a glorious sequence of notes to a subatomic particle suddenly
bounding out of nowhere and dancing across a laboratory
oscilloscope. As evidence that I�m not just making all this up, recall
Pirsig�s wonderful description of the inner thoughts of bodily cells:
�These cells make sweat and snot and phlegm. They belch and bleed
and fuck and fart and piss and shit and vomit and squeeze out more
bodies just like themselves all covered with blood and placental slime
that grow and squeeze out more bodies, on and on.
"We," the software reality, find these hardware facts so distressing that
it covers them with euphemisms and clothes and toilets and medical
secrecy. But what "We" is covering up is pure quality for the cells. The
cells have gotten to their advanced state of evolution through all this
flicking and farting and pissing and shitting. That's quality! Particularly
the sexual functions. From the cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic
Quality, the highest Good of all.� (LILA, Chap. 15)
Pay particular attention to the phrases, �pure quality for the cells,� and
�From the cell�s point of view sex is pure DQ.� How many biologists do
you suppose would say in a speech to their colleagues, �The cell is
acting this way because it knows what it likes and from its point of view
its doing what it thinks is the most moral thing to do.� Not many, I
wager. And that�s because biologists can�t measure a cell�s point of
view or what it feels like to be a cell any more than they can measure
yours or mine or what we�re feeling at this moment. They like other
scientists are content to look at the surfaces of the world and proclaim
them the world. The MOQ takes into account the inner world of
awareness, consciousness, experience, aesthetics, morality that the
Metaphysics of Materialism and Reductionism doesn�t even come
close to explaining.
PLATT: (previously)
�Matter is contained in static intellectual patterns� refers to the names
and scheme of relationships we assign to our experience of atoms,
electrons, particles and such.
GLENN:
Well, if "matter within mind" only means that we label and name matter
with intellectual patterns of value (language), then I fail to see how this
is different from the conventional materialist interpretation, which
doesn't have a mind/matter problem. I always thought "matter within
mind" meant that minds create matter.
Materialists don�t have a mind/matter problem? That�s a laugh. There�s
a whole group of scientists down in Santa Fe headed by physicist
Murray Gellman who are trying to solve the mind/matter problem. David
Chalmers who has been studying this question for years and is
recognized by the scientific community as preeminent in the field has
concluded that subjective consciousness continues to defy all
objectivist explanations. �Toward this end, I propose that conscious
experience be considered a fundamental feature, irreducible to
anything more basic. The idea may seem strange at first, but
consistency seems to demand it.�
PLATT:
Well, doesn�t that quote from ZMM about man being a *participant* in
the creation of all things sound like quantum theory? Would you, as a
defender of science, throw out the Copenhagen Interpretation? Also
you stick by your assumption that mind is strictly an emergent from
physical processes in the human brain. But what if mind has been
around in various forms ever since . . . whenever?
GLENN:
The CI (Copenhagen Interpretation) is philosophy, not science. The
science of quantum mechanics ends with the calculations of the
Schrodinger equation and the extent to which these calculations agree
with observation. The CI picks up from here and interprets what
*might* be happening during quantum events. The CI is not
substantiated by science. It lies outside science. Many non-scientists
and even some scientists have given the CI itself a very broad
interpretation to mean that human consciousness participates in the
creation of reality, usually with the pretext of having some other ax to
grind.
None of the theories of science are science. The philosophical
premise of science that only propositions that can be empirically
verified are true cannot be empirically verified. Mathematics and logic
on which science is built cannot be verified by pointing a finger at them.
The Schrodinger equation you refer to is �concept.� Observations are
also �concepts� when intellectualized. You seem to work hard to keep
anything �mental� or �conceptual� out of science, an impossibility of
course.
GLENN:
But it's no matter to the discussion at hand. While you've claimed that
you must have been drunk to believe that humans can create rocks,
you seem happy to admit that human minds participate in their
creation, and that's good enough for me.
I admit no such thing. Your sneaking in �human� to modify mind leaves
the wrong impression of my view because you�ve ignored all along the
theory of panexperientialism that I have put forward as answer to many
of your mind-dependent questions. Mind is not contained in the human
brain: it is DQ, direct experience, pure awareness. As such it
interpenetrates all, as explained above.
GLENN:
So if we run with this belief, then when you look out over your backyard,
you conclude that whatever lies below the grass and the thinnest layer
of dirt does not yet exist, because you have not ever directly
experienced it. When you take a shovel to it, you participate in the
creation of the dirt which you appear to unearth, and when your shovel
clunks against something, you smile thinking about the wondrous
Quality experience that has just created the static pattern of inorganic
quality we mundanely call a rock. Before that moment the rock
belonged to the flux, the Void, a cloud of quantum mechanical
probability distributions, or Quality, and couldn't properly be called
anything you know. However, if you take your rock and have it carbon-
dated, you find out it is 11 million years old. So something has to be
wrong here.
So I ask once again. Is MOQ contradictory when it simultaneously
claims that man participates in the creation of rocks and that rocks
were created in an evolutionary framework that pre-dates man? Your
fudge is that "what if mind has been around in various forms ever since
. . . whenever?". Doesn't Pirsig clearly say that man participates in the
creation of *all* things? You seem to disagree, suggesting that non-
human minds participated in the creation of rocks. What minds would
those be before the biological level evolved? Other rocks?
Mind is not located inside the brain, nor outside the brain either: those
are physical boundaries with simple location, and yet a good part of
mind exists not merely in physical space, but in quantum space,
mental space and aesthetic space, none of which are simple location
but all of which are as real (or more real) than physical. If an electron
can simultaneously be in two places at once in quantum space/time,
then rocks can simultaneously appear in historical space/time and
human mental space/time. Your physical, material, reductionist
scientific outlook inhibits you to a rocky world. But that world leaves so
much unexplained, so many platypi unaccounted for, like a coherent
explanation of values, life and mind itself, that it takes a metaphysics
like the MOQ to provide the explanatory power required to fill the gaping
holes of experience that science, by its own admission, cannot fill.
Platt
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