[MD] What does Pirsig mean by metaphysics?

[Krimel]

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]
Are heart beat and respiration patterned or unpatterned? I sincerely hope
that they are patterned but my experience of them is almost always
transparent. Nothing fades into the background like that without first
becoming a habit.

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

dmb answered:
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.

[Krimel]
So the winner must be Gazzanaga. Bolte Taylor framed her experience the way
she did because of Gazzanaga. For more than forty years he has done research
on people who were cured of severe epilepsy by having their left and right
brains separated. He talks about a non-conscious; which is mainly anything
verbal or conceptual... basically your list of static patterns. In the
lecture I recommended, Keltner talks about one side of the brain being more
emotionally responsive in approach situations while the other side lights
when it's time to get away.

I think if you look back, using the model Bolte Taylor articulates, you can
read Freud without feeling wood, or revulsion or both. 
 
[dmb]
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.

[Krimel]
I think I agree with this, but, for me it is easier and clearer to say that
the beach is continuous, while handful is discrete. Nevertheless, flimsy as
they are, we use those handfuls of sand to build castles and high rises. We
literally turn those bits of sand into iPhones. 

An act of God or a twist of fate can shake the foundations of our thoughts
and deeds. "When the levy breaks you got no place to run." Every cup of salt
water that is dipped from the ocean, one way or another finds its way home
again someday.

After that it gets complicated.