[MD] Intuitive Reasoning?

[Ham Priday]

Hi Case --


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

I was referring to social collectivism and the attribution of experience,
intellect and value to an extracorporeal level.  Awareness of what happens
within my body and nervous system, no matter how complex the sensory
intregration or processing, is proprioceptive to ME.  I am a single entity.
Next you'll be telling me that having ten fingers and toes, 200 odd bones,
and a dozen or so organs makes me a "collective being"!

Ham:
> [T]he 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.
> 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.

Thank you, Dr. Spock, for this comprehensive pediatric chronology.  Yes,
this is the evolving consciousness and the attendant motor skills.  (I read
somewhere that the baby recognizes the mother first, and much sooner than
two months, but perhaps the pediatric researchers have updated their facts
in recent years.)  But, what's your point?

Case:
> 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."

Well, that's all very interesting, and I suppose if you're a sociologist,
pediatrician, or a new parent, social development is significant.  Again,
though, you've taken my statement out of its philosophical context.  My
criticism of Pirsig's thesis is simply that he describes man almost
exclusively as a creation of biological evolution and societal conditioning.

Virtually every function that is commonly understood to be innate in human
beings -- consciousness, the psyche, creativity, intellect, experience,
morality, and value sensibility -- has been stripped of its individuality
and "collectivized" in some extracorporeal stratum called Quality.  One gets
the feeling that the author would like to dispense with the individual
entirely and regard man as an incidental byproduct of organic evolution.
Sartre expressed much the same attitude when he said that man is
"unnecessary since the world would exist just as well without him."  Yet
individual human experience is central to both existentialism and the MoQ.

I find this "dehumanizing" of existence as bizarre philosophically as it is
demeaning to man, particularly in an era when Humanism is all the rage.
Whatever happened to individuality, and why is it now fashionable to
disparage it?   Or am I the only one who still believes that man is a
special creature and that the world is anthropocentric?

Regards,
Ham