[Akshay] As I said, the moment of novelty in experience is pure Dynamic Quality. The moment you describe it, it becomes attached to static patterns. As Pirsig informs (rather pessimistically) that DQ is "out of our reach", and so we have to "settle for something less pure".
About your third question, I suppose there is a whole hierarchy of values for an individual being. Apart from that, if you are referring to qualia, that is a big debate. Dennett totally refused to accept qualia in his book. There's no real way to know, except on a hardware level of the brain. [Krimel] Sorry to disappoint but I do not agree with the prevailing view of DQ. I do not regard it as undefined or indefinable and I certainly do not think it is always "good". I tend to take a pretty straight forward behaviorist view of human activities. People are motivated by fear of loss and hope of gain. All behavior can be reduced to the relationships among our biology, our personal history and the current circumstances. So when David asks where basic needs come from I would put them in the biology part. As I understand it the term qualia comes out of a fairly technical debate in the area of philosophy of mind. I don't have a firm grip in the details of the argument but my gut feeling is it is ruse. I have mental states. I know what they are like. Any explanation of them that I offer to someone else is designed to evoke a similar state in them. Your explanations are design to evoke a similar resonance in me. But I have no need to explain my own internal states to me. I can judge my own statements by how well they correspond to my own internal states but I really don't need the words when I have the states. 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/
