[MD] Intuitive Reasoning?

[Case]

[Ham]
The perspective I have of the world is proprietary to me, as are all of the
values that I sense.  

[Case]
I agree with you that all we have is subjectivity. The objects of our senses
can not be directly apprehended. Rather they are represented in our nervous
systems. In my view this is what it means for Quality to be undefined. 

[Ham]
I may have learned from "social structuring", but I am not a collective
entity.
Neither is experience, intellect, or value.

[Case]
But you are a collective entity. The world you create subjectively is
composed of data from five senses. They are five different ways of being. In
addition you have information about the chemistry of your blood letting you
know that it is time to breathe or eat or poop. 

Those five or six or 10 different doors of perception are analyzed and
integrated into your subjective awareness in several different ways
including but not limited to emotionally, holistically and rationally. Out
of this entire collection of entities only one is verbal. To speak of
pre-intellectual experience as Pirsig does has no mystical implication. Most
of our experience is pre-intellectual.

Value tends to be mostly about what satisfies the non-verbal selfs.

[Ham]
The fetus lives in what might be termed a solipsistic environment.

[Case]
The fetus never grows out of it.

[Ham]
But the post-partum infant is already distinguishing faces, bodies, and
other objects.  I don't know when socialization sets in, but I would suspect
this would occur much later.  I think Pirsig has made too much of the
societal factors in human development.

[Case]
When you look at infant development what you are seeing is the evolution of
consciousness. You can see the gradual integration of the senses and the
coordination of motor skill. Infants don't really recognize faces until
after 1 month before that they rely on sound and smell to identify and bond
with caregivers. But this site provides a quickie overview of infant
development if you are interested:

http://www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/family/350-055/350-055.html

Infants seem to come with built in social skills. Newborns cry for food or
maintenance. Infants also coo, gurgle, kick and laugh. Mothers and babies
communicate and have nonverbal dialogs very early on. As early as one month
babies get upset if held or messed with by someone unfamiliar to them. By
six months they develop separation anxiety.

Everything about an infant's existence is socially mediated. Parents and
grandparents, neighbors and friends all participate or lend support. 

Infants who do not have physical and social contact have serious problems
later on. This was noticed in Romanian orphans in the '80s. It is among the
many problems experienced by "crack babies" because they can not tolerate
being touched frequently. The need for early maternal contact was studied
extensively in infant rhesus monkeys in the '50s and has been observed in
other primates as well.

I really don't see how it is possible to make ".too much of the societal
factors in human development."