[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Platt Holden]

> [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?

DQ is at the front edge of Quality. So is static quality. Only human 
beings can respond to DQ. Animals and below respond automatically, 
statically to the front edge by instinct.

> 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.

The amoeba responds automatically, statically by instinct.

> >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.

It's "dynamic" in the sense that it happens quickly. But it's static in 
that it's an instinctive, automatic response If you want a good 
description of DQ, here's the word direct from Pirsig:

"He said, imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a car where 
someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you've never heard before 
but which is so fantastically GOOD it just stops you in your tracks. 
You listen until it's done. Days later you remember exactly what that 
street looked like when you heard that music. You remember what was in 
the store window you stood in front of. You remember what the colors of 
the cars in the street were, where the clouds were in the sky above the 
buildings across the street, and it all comes back so vividly you 
wonder what song they were playing, and so you wait until you hear it 
again." 

Let that sink in. A human being responding to something "Fantastically 
good." Or from the brujo story, "A vague sense of betterness."  That's 
DQ.

> "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.

The front edge of experience is Quality. At the front edge is both 
Dynamic and static Quality. After hearing the song many times, the  
hearing of the song at the front edge of experience becomes static. 
"Static quality is what you normally expect" at the front edge of 
experience. 

> 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."

"have gotten" past tense.

> "Talk about ingratitude. These bodies would still be a bunch of dumb
> bacteria if it hadn't been for sexual quality.

"hadn't been" past tense.

 >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].

"It was" past tense.  
 
> 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."

I find the analogy of human sex with a bee's sex absurd. After having 
sex with the queen bee, the male bee dies. And the selection or choice that
takes place is preprogrammed and instinctive, thus basically an automatic,
static response brought about by hormones. Same with humans as anyone
knows who has been, or observed, a teenager. 

> Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work." [GUESS
> YOU'LL PROPOSE THAT NATURAL SELECTION HAS CEASED IN THE
> NON-HUMAN WORLD]

Yes, evolution has ceased in the non-human world. Unless you can 
provide evidence to the contrary. And I don't mean a new species of 
mosquito or a different beak on a bird..

> "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."

 "have done so" past tense.  But yes --  betterness, goodness. I think 
you are on the right track at last.

> [Arlo previously]
> Why is that so threatening? 
> 
> [Platt]
> Not threatening. Just wrong.
> 
> [Arlo]
> Apparently not.

Apparently so. 

> [Arlo previously]
> [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.

You mean everything 'was" don't you, but that now "only a living being" 
can. 

> 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.

Atoms are capable of experience? You'll have a hard time convincing 
anyone of that. If the MOQ rests on that premise, it hasn't got a 
chance. Further, it's directly contradicted by Pirsig's "only a living 
being" can respond to DQ. .

Platt