[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
The unpatterned experience, for example, can be called the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, the pre-conceptual reality, the primary empirical reality, pure experience, pre-reflective experience, immediate experience, noncognitive experience, pre-verbal experience, the immediate flux of life and the cutting edge of experience.
Krimel replied:
What's left over? What you have here seems like more than 90% of human experience. The rest of experience you describe as, "...static, conceptual, verbal, cognitive, reflective, intelligible and differentiated." Isn't that mostly just the idle chatter our verbal brain does to pass the time while the non-verbal part is living and keeping us alive, driving us to the store, talking to our spouses, washing the dishes...

dmb says:

You use your non-verbal brain to talk to your wife? Sounds like quite a trick. But yea, the rituals and routines of life are sort of given over to the autopilot. Once we've learned and mastered a certain task, that "knowledge" fades into the background so that we don't have to be thoughtful or deliberate about tying our shoes or brushing our teeth. That sort of thing might count as unpatterned in SOME sense but then again we are talking about thought habits and patterns of behavior. 


Krimel asked:How does you unpatterned experience differ from Freud's unconscious or Gazzanaga's non-conscious?

dmb says:

Don't know about Gazzanaga but I have read some Freud. His notion of the unconscious was very different from this. It was the home of primal instincts and all the repressed material that was too ugly to see the light of day. You know, a life full of fucking and killing is what we really want, he thought. The unconscious both the source of these motivates and the place where their true nature is hidden from the conscious mind. All of human culture, he thought, is nothing but the sublimation of these instincts toward sex and aggression. We dress them up in fancy clothes to make them seem sublime. Things like romantic love and a warrior's courage are really just window dressing for basic animal drives. His unconscious has a specific structure and function. He's also a kind of reductionist.
This notion of an unpatterned, pre-intellectual experience goes in the opposite direction. While it's true that in both cases we're talking about something that is not conscious, preverbal experience is not about instincts or repression or anything like that. If it HAD to be described in terms of a structure of the mind (at gun point, say), I'd point to the brain's right hemisphere. As opposed to the differentiations of thought and language, it has a all-at-once way of processing "things" resulting in an undifferentiated awareness. Remember the Harvard brain scientist named Jill Bolte Taylor? When she only had that hemisphere working, due to a stroke, she experienced nirvana, she says. If the two hemisphere can be correlated to the dynamic-static split (big IF), then it does have some structural basis that we can point to. But I really don't know if that works because that could get pretty reductionist too.
Think of that analogy in ZAMM where our our understanding of the world (conceptual, static world) is just a handful of sand from all the endless beaches. The thing to notice here is how much bigger the unheld sand is. You can't reduce your handful to that. The contemporary pragmatists express the same same idea, I think, when they talk about this kind of experience as "rich", "thick", "overflowing" and maybe even "inexhaustible". And they talk about the concepts and ideas derived from it in terms of "takings" rather than reflections or representations. In this proportional sense, concepts are derived from the pre-intellectual reality the way a cup of salt water is derived from the ocean. Our concepts "take" a tiny, tiny fraction of what could be taken. Just a handful of sand. 
Maybe I'll check out the podcast. Thanks.

  http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Self-Development/Emotional-Development/Human-Emotion-Podcast/19719 





 		 	   		  
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