[MD] Platt's Individual Level

[Steve Peterson]

Hi Dan, all,

Dan said to David:
I think there's some confusion here that I will try and clear up. Gene M 
believes a person exists separately from the idea we might hold of that 
person. 

[Steve]
I think pretty much everbody believes that. To believe otherwise is solipsism. Don't you believe that I exist for example?

[Dan]
That belief is contrary to what the MOQ states, imo. Looking to LILA 
we read:

"Man is always the 'measure of all things...'"


[Steve]
I don't think this is MOQ support for solipsism. I think if you read on in that passage you'll see that the point is that intellectual patterns are subjective and culturally filtered wheras biological patterns are the same for everyone. He's using it as a lead in to talk about insanity and how diagnosing insanity is qualitatively different than diagnosing a biological disease:

"Pneumonia is a biological pattern.  It is scientifically verifiable.  ...
Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. ... No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane.  There's nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe.  The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity.  There's no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations.  Insanity isn't an "object" of observation.  It's an alteration of observation itself.  There's is no such thing as a "disease" of patterns of intellect.  There's only heresy.  And that's what insanity really is.
... It is a social and intellectual deviation, not a biological deviation."
[Dan]
Man measures with intellect, with ideas. Always. 
[Steve}
I think 'measure' in this quote ammounts to 'experience' in the MOQ which says that experience comes in several varieties of which intellect is only one kind.




[Dan]
We presume there's a person behind our idea of the person. And that is a high quality presumption, I should think. At the same time however, since we are unable to experience reality directly, we cannot know with certainty that there really is a person there behind our idea of the person. All we have are our assumptions. Always.

[Steve]
The existence of a person is scientifically verifiable at any time. We don't have to make a distinction between a person and our idea of the person.

I disagree with "we are unable to experience reality directly." In the MOQ reality is an abstraction from experience or is considered equivalent to experience.


Dan quotes RMP:
But one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely 
expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Ph�drus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.

Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been 
correct, but for Ph�drus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.
---------------------------
[Dan comments]
I think what Phaedrus possibly failed to grasp during his time in India is 
that though the nature of the world is illusory, that nature doesn't negate 
cause and condition. I think Phaedrus gave up on account of the fact he 
failed at the time to grasp that there is no separation between subject and object...he believed objects were things in themselves rather than 
intellectual patterns of value, a very difficult point to grasp. So perhaps 
it was just easier to give up and go home than it was to expand his 
consciousness to the point of that of his Indian professor.

[Steve]
The above quote contradicts your view that ideas are the only things that exist.

In the MOQ objects are not intellectual patterns as you say, they are inorganic and biological patterns.

I think Pirsig makes sense of "the world is illusory" when he explains how our intellectual patterns are culturally derived (accept for Platt's of course).

As for Nagasaki, the atom bomb, and us, we are all part of the same 'illusion' from an inorganic or biological perspective, regardless of what social patterns and ideas we have surrounding an explosion.

Regards,
Steve

 		
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