[MD] Platt's Individual Level

[Case]

[Dan]
Let's examine this carefully. When something happens, it is memory you count

on. The intellectualization of the happening creates the happening, so to 
speak. The present is impermanent, always shifting, ever Dynamic. Memory 
solidifies the happening into fact. No probability involved there. Still, I 
do get your drift. To take the past and impose it on the unknown future does

seem to involve probability. But isn't that just more intellectualization 
after the fact? I should think it is.

[Case]
When something happens I count on my memory or on the testimony of others
but memory shifts and is altered by incoming data. Our projections of the
past are as probabilistic as our models of the future. It is ironic that the
only certainty that can ever exist is NOW and it is forever off limits to
us. That is illusion enough for me and it is based on physics. I guess I am
wondering how much more illusory metaphysics can make things.

[Dan]
For instance, if my actions are this, then the results of my actions are 
that. Let me ask you: how do you see karmic relationships affecting
probability?

[Case]
I am not sure I understand the question. Is Karma causal or just the way
things seem to work out? Like the bell shaped curve it just shows up all
over the place? A classic distribution of probability rather than a factor
in what gets distributed. 


>[Case]
>If you are saying that Quality is uncertainty then I agree.

[Dan]
I don't believe that's what I am saying though it might be interpreted in 
that way, I suppose. I believe you mean Dynamic Quality is uncertainty but I

think the MOQ would say that is incorrect. Dynamic Quality is 'betterness' 
and there is nothing uncertain about that, imo.

[Dan]
I thing Pirsig's got the idea right but messed up with his terminology. His
use of DQ seems more like Harmony to me. It is when things are balance and
"right" This is more of his original use of Quality in ZMM. DQ seems to me
to be that aspect of Quality that it unpredictable and wild. It can be a
lotto winner or a safe falling from the 10th floor. Not better or worse just
constantly different.

[Dan]
I feel materialism is a high quality idea and the brain in the vat theory is

a low quality idea. Even if we were to consider everything an idea it 
doesn't necessarily follow that all ideas are equal. Otherwise there would 
be no path towards getting better.

[Case]
I agree but separating the wheat from the chaff is uncertain business don't
you think?

[Dan]
Maya has many different connotations. However, I think it a mistake to 
believe maya is all appearance and no substance.

The illusion is that there is something of permanence, anything of
permanence.

[Case]
So it is not so much that there are not "thing in themselves" which exist
independent of perceiving organisms, it is that whatever they are they are
changing too?

[Dan]
I think the MOQ would say that chaos isn't the source of anything.

[Case]
How do you think of chaos?

>[Case]
>What I perceive is an illusion.

[Dan]
And the perceiving? What of that?

[Case]
Isn't perception in some sense how illusions are created?

[Dan]
That is of course assuming you believe you are apart and separate from
"whatever is actually out there."

[Case]
I may be absorbing what is out there and incorporating it into my illusion
but I get a strong sense that there is much more out there and it is apart
from me.

[Dan]
External reality is what you make it. I read in another thread about how a 
person can have faith that the sun rises every morning. All one has to do to

stop the sun from rising is to realize the sun doesn't rise at all. It is an

illusion that we take for granted. I haven't seen a sunrise or sunset in
years.

[Case]
I am not following you on this one.

>[Case]
>Thankfully the correspondence between illusion and reality tolerates a lot
of slack.

[Dan]
Please tell me how you know that.

[Case]
People can believe that dolls are babies or become so detached as to let
cigarette burn their fingers and yet others will pick up the slack for them.

[Dan]
I think Phaedrus of ZMM discovered just the opposite. The more insight a 
person gains into something the more questions arise. So the less certain it

is.

[Case]
This is Bohr's point, that the complementary of clarity is precision. The
more you look at detail the more details you will find. Isn't that what a
Gestalt shift involves: taking all those details and integrating them into
some new whole? Clarity eventually shifting into phase as a result of
precision.

[Dan]
I think one could say we are perceivers of reality. Our senses bring us the 
world. We may extend our senses to perceive more than we might otherwise but
there is no reality beyond the illusion we hold, imo.

[Case]
This suggests to me at least there is some object of perception: this
changing reality that we mold into a changing illusion.

Case

"No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all his efforts
to search it out, man cannot discover its meaning. Even if a wise man claims
he knows, he cannot really comprehend it."
Ecclesiastes