[MD] Responding to DQ

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt to Gene]
You could also sit on a hot stove a hundred times and every time you  would know
you were in a low quality situation. Pirsig points out that  the action is
completely predictable and reproducible -- a static  pattern of behavior if
there ever was one.

[Arlo]
Not according to Pirsig.

"The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now
given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. 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."

Notice... "the front edge of his experience (the low-quality appraisal of the
experience) is Dynamic". This same "negative esthetic quality" is what the
amoeba responds to, as Pirsig makes clear when he says, "Quality is the
response of the organism to its environment".

Notice too, the similarity in description from the above to the amoeba reference
in ZMM.

"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.'"

The amoeba (organism) pulls away because it is responding to the "low-Quality
situation", a Dynamic experience.

Plain and simple.

And as for the "completely predictable" stuff, well, that's NOT Pirsig (as
anyone who read him would know). He addresses "causality" in the following
segment.

"Particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely
committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is
just a very consistent pattern of preferences."

Individual particles, and I would venture then biological organisms, are never
"absolutely committed to one predictable behavior".

Arlo