[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
1. "Quality is direct experience"

2. "Quality (is) divided into Dynamic and static components."
 
3. Ergo, there are both Dynamic and static components in direct  experience.

[Arlo]
Except that Pirsig says directly, "Static quality ... emerges in the wake of
Dynamic Quality". It is not front edge experience, it comes afterwards. You
know this, of course, because you then say...

[Platt]
Note the progression from Dynamic on the first hearing to less than 
Dynamic in subsequent hearings. Also note that all hearings occur as direct
experience, but not all the hearings are Dynamic.

[Arlo]
This is simply a deliberate distortion. Pirsig says,

"What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in
such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free,
without static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend
it to a friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static
quality. Static quality is what you normally expect."

Tell me. When you place a drop of acid next to the amoeba, did the amoebe
"expect that"? Seems to me it would come as quite a surprise to the amoeba,
whose first response is "it's low quality here" [DYNAMIC QUALITY]. 

Now, as to auditory sensations as direct experience, they are. And if you played
that song a hundred times at a certain volume, you'd have static expectations
about what's coming [WHAT'S EXPECTED]. But, if I snuck in a turned up your
volume to 100! You can damn well bet that in that split second of front edge
experience of painful loudness [DYNAMIC RESPONSE], your body would respond to
DQ quite quickly.

Despite Gene's frustration, since you once again ignore Pirsig completely, I
reprint... {Gene, you can stop reading here. Platt, maybe you should start.)

"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."

"Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of
all things, completely simple and always new." [FRONT EDGE EXPERIENCE]

"Static quality ... emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and
complex. It always contains a component of memory. Good is conformity to an
established pattern of fixed values and value objects." [NOT FRONT EDGE
EXPERIENCE]

"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 - FRONT EDGE OF 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 [NOT STATICALLY].
Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation
[AFTERWARDS COMES STATIC - IT IS NOT FRONT EDGE BUT GENERATED IN THE
AFTERMATH]."

"And they [THE STATIC PATTERNS] are completely different [AHEM!] from the
biological pattern [DYNAMIC RESPONSE] 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]."

Arlo