[MD] Seriously, Dan

[Krimel]

> [Krimel:]
> I think James' distinction between precepts and concepts sums it up 
> nicely. I recommend to your attention his chapters on the matter in Some 
> Problems of Philosophy, especially Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

Dan:
We're talking past each other. I see a lot of James in Pirsig's work.
But percepts and concepts don't correlate to Dynamic and static
quality. I think James is discussing biological level function, how we
form memories and construct a sense of self.

[Krimel]
In the chapters I mentioned, James helped to clarify for me at least a
problem that is at once very simple but almost impossible to grasp. It is
the distinction we are talking past. Percepts are immediate experience
concepts are the sense we make of them. Perception is continuous and
flowing, James stream of consciousness. Concepts are discrete. There are our
ideas about the world.

As Pirsig notes we are all confined to a conceptual world. We can not extend
beyond that and in that sense I am "realty as I understand it" I am this
computer I am typing on because this computer exist "for me" as a set of
experiences integrated with all my other experiences which are also me. This
is _my_ conceptual world right here, right now.

But concepts arise from perception and perception arises from sensation.
Sensation is a physical/biological process wherein my biology responds to
physical forces exterior to me. My retinas transduce light energy into
electro/chemical impulses. The world is for me is formatted as light and
sound and texture and smell and taste. These disparate sensations are
integrated into a perceptual unity that is greater than the some of its
parts. 

>Krimel:
> I repeat my question because I am curious: Do you really believe there is
> nothing separate from yourself?

Dan:
Intellectually, I know that when I look at the world, I'm encountering
a mental representation, not the world itself. When I see the light of
the day star, intellectually I know I'm not really seeing the light of
the day star... I'm seeing a mental representation of the light. The
warmth I feel on my skin isn't really warmth on my skin. I know
intellectually that it's a mental representation of warmth on my skin
that I'm feeling.

When I realized that the intense pain I felt in my left leg during
extending sittings corresponded not to my left leg but to the part of
the brain controlling the internal dialogue, I just sat through it.
The pain was real. And as the internal dialogue faded gradually away
so did it.

So. If everything I see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and think about are
mental representations, what is it that I'm supposed to be separate
from?

[Krimel]
It is not as though I don't get what you are getting at. And really it
probably does not matter much. These are pictures hanging in Pirsig's
gallery and your preference in point of view is driven but your sense of
esthetics as mine is driven by mine.

I prefer to think of the warm on my skin as a product of the interaction of
inorganic patterns of heat interacting with a biological array of nerve
endings. I prefer to think in semiotic terms that the sensations I
experience arise from the relationship between my biology and an external
world. That is that they are signs of something other. I agree with James
that my concepts, or my discrete mental "representations", arise from and
are secondary to what is "presented" to me in immediate experience.

I guess the problem I have with what you say about is that it is all about
representation (Concepts) and provides no account of presentation
(percepts).