[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Arlo]
Responding to DQ means sensing "it's better here".

[Platt]
Automatic, instinctive responses set in static behaviors as preferences  to
survive are not responses to DQ which is always at the front edge of 
experience and comes as an unpredictable "surprise.". 

[Arlo]
Yep, DQ is at the front edge of experience. Are you saying that nothing else
experiences the "front edge of experience" but humans?

Let's go back to the amoeba.

"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.' [FRONT EDGE OF EXPERIENCE] If it had a nervous
system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of
the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its
previous experience [STATIC PATTERNS], to define the unpleasant nature of its
new environment and thus 'understand' it.

In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues [STATIC PATTERNS]. We
invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts,
language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these
analogues reality. And they are reality."

>From Lila.

"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 [FIRST RESPONSE TO SITTING ON A HOT
STOVE 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 [AFTERWARDS COMES STATIC]."

"And they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause
the most skeptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove [IT IS BIOLOGICAL
PATTERN RESPONSE TO HOT STOVE THAT IS DYNAMIC]."

Let that sink in. The response is (1) on the biological level, and (2) Dynamic.

"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify
without any intellectual argument [STATIC PATTERNS] whatsoever that he is in an
undeniably low-quality situation [FRONT EDGE EXPERIENCE]: that the value of his
predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, wooly-headed,
crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience [FRONT EDGE
EXPERIENCE]. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description
of experience [STATIC PATTERNS]. The value itself is an experience. As such it
is completely predictable."

Wha..? "The value itself", the response to Dynamic Quality, "is completely
predictable"? And it is still "front edge experience"? You bet.

Back to the cells.

"The cells have gotten to their advanced state of evolution through all this
fucking and farting and pissing and shitting. That's quality! Particularly the
sexual functions. From the cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality
[NOT PAST TENSE, PRESENT], the highest Good of all."

"Talk about ingratitude. These bodies would still be a bunch of dumb bacteria if
it hadn't been for sexual quality. When mutation was the only means of genetic
change, life sat around for three billion years, doing almost no changing at
all. It was sexual selection that shot it forward into the animals and plants
we have today. A bacterium gets no choice in what its progeny are going to be,
but a queen bee gets to select from thousands of drones. That selection is
Dynamic [A QUEEN BEE SELECTING A SEX PARTNER IS RESPONDING TO DYNAMIC QUALITY].

In all sexual selection, Lila chooses, Dynamically, the individual she wants to
project into the future [JUST LIKE THE BEE]. If he excites her sense of Quality
she joins him to perpetuate him into another generation, and he lives on. But
if he's unable to convince her of his Quality-if he's sick or deformed or
unable to satisfy her in some way-she refuses to join him and his deformity is
not carried on."

"Good! The "undefined fittest" they are defending is identical to Dynamic
Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work." [GUESS YOU'LL PROPOSE
THAT NATURAL SELECTION HAS CEASED IN THE NON-HUMAN WORLD]

"So what Phaedrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an
ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create
life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they've done so because it's
"better" and that this definition of "betterness" -this beginning response to
Dynamic Quality [AGAIN, NOT PAST TENSE, PRESENT]-is an elementary unit of
ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based."

[Arlo previously]
Why is that so threatening? 

[Platt]
Not threatening. Just wrong.

[Arlo]
Apparently not.

[Arlo previously]
We have more complex responses to DQ (in the invention of more complicated
analogues, static patterns) than bees. Our "fondness for ourselves" can be
gained from examing not how we alone can experience DQ, but the level of
complexity to which we can statically latch that experience.

[Platt]
Even if you take "only a living being" can respond to DQ out of context  and
apply it to amoebas and queen bees, it still leaves out your  quantum
particles, unless of course you think quantum particles qualify  as living
beings. That would be ridiculous, but unless particles are  alive, your edifice
of DQ responding at all levels crumbles.

[Arlo]
I'd say "only a living being can respond to DQ on the biological level (e.g.,
sex)". As to what can or can't respond to Quality, I'd say Pirsig is quite
clear that "everything" is a "response to Quality", from the formation of
inorganic patterns to the dialogic construction of Calculus.

Dynamic Quality, the front edge of experience, is at its simplest the response
of "it's better here". Carbon atoms, UTOE and you are all capable of that
experience. As a more complex organism, you invent more complex analogues that
UTOE, and the "fondness of ourselves" is gleaned by these analogues, not in the
belief that only We, Wonderous We, are capable of experiencing "betterness".

Arlo