[Marsha again] In a monist metaphysics, how is the comparison being executed?
[Arlo] I just answered this. The comparison is "executed" in the near-immediate valuative experience of Quality. For the amoeba, it experiences low-quality (a valuative experience (which is redundant to me, but I use it for emphasis)) and moves until it experiences something better. It will keep moving until that "betterness" outweighs the low-quality. Humans compare using a wide array of symbolic understandings to move the experience into post-experiential representation. I'll give you Pirsig one more time. "The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that 'Quality is the response of an organism to its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, 'This environment has poor quality.' If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus 'understand' it." (ZMM) This same thing is addressed in LILA. "Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, wooly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow." (LILA) The valuative experience is first. Subjective (and Objective) experience comes later for the person, but not the amoeba. (By the way, I say "valuative experience" is redundant for this reason. "The value itself is an experience".) 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/
