[MD] experience

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

Thanks for the Dictionary lesson, Kevin. Its good to be reminded of the SOM
understandings of "experience" now and again. For me, the MOQ broadens our
understanding of the world away from the Subject/Object divide into an
integrated way of understanding, one that begins with value/experience
(Quality) and demonstrates how this fundamental event (the "Quality event" as
he calls it in ZMM) is as responsible for tiny inorganic patterns responding to
gravity, as it is for an amoeba to move away from acid, as it is for society to
pass a law against murder, as it is for Quantum Physics to have displaced
Newtonian Physics.

You ask if we should add a "new definition", is that not what the MOQ is all
about? New understandings? New definitions? Indeed, isn't that itself the
fundamental principle OF the MOQ? Discard the old when something better comes
along? 

The levels of the MOQ give us broad understanding of how "experience", Quality,
value, differs, and how new levels are not only a small improvement in
"experience" over the previous, but a huge leap to something entirely new. The
collectivization of atoms into cells and cells into bodies and bodies into
societies and thoughts into intellectual patterns represent dependent but
emergent levels of experience. An inorganic pattern can never experience
biological quality, but put enough together in more and more complex ways and
eventually you will have a higher-level pattern that sits atop the inorganic
patterns, but is not just the sum of the inorganic patterns, that does
experience quality in a whole new way.

In this way, the biological level overcomes the inorganic-limitations of
experience of the patterns from which it emerges. In the same way the social
level overcomes the biological-inorganic limitations of experience of the
patterns from which it emerges. 

Humans, you and I, experience intellectual, social, biological and inorganic
quality. We have complex symbol systems (derived from social-intellectual
experience) allowing us to move out of the fray of direct experience and
reflect and plan (post- and pre- experience). A rock can do none of this.

But if we are serious about "Quality" being the fundamental source, then it
makes no sense to try to deny the Quality experience to inorganic patterns, for
Quality is every bit as responsible for that rock experiencing gravity and
falling as it is for you experiencing the pleasure of your favorite song.

"This low quality is not just a vague, wooly-headed, crypto-religious,
metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an
experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an
experience." (LILA)