[MD] Responding to DQ

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Margaret, All,

The question this addresses is Platt's claim that "only human beings can respond
to Dynamic Quality".

In ZMM, on the amoeba, Pirsig writes, "The easiest intellectual analogue of pure
Quality that people in our environment can understand is that 'Quality is the
response of an organism to its environment' (he used this example because his
chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior
theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric
acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak
the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, 'This
environment has poor quality.'"

Here it is clear that the amoeba is "responding to Quality". Platt has since
proposed that the "Quality" the amoeba responds to is "static quality", but
given Pirsig's description of static quality, I hardly think that's adequate.
Elsewhere, Platt had written, "even my cat knows 'it's better here'".

This is clarified in Lila, where Pirsig writes, "When the person who sits on the
stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his
experience is Dynamic. He does not think, "This stove is hot," and then make a
rational decision to get off. A "dim perception of he knows not what" gets him
off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the
situation."

Here it is clear that for both the amoeba and the person, the first response,
the "sense of betterness" is "Dynamic". It is "static quality" which comes
later, in the building of analogues and symbolic representations of the
experience.

Arlo