[MD] -elitist ideas

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Marsha again]
In a monist metaphysics, how is the comparison being executed?

[Arlo]
I just answered this. The comparison is "executed" in the near-immediate
valuative experience of Quality.

For the amoeba, it experiences low-quality (a valuative experience (which is
redundant to me, but I use it for emphasis)) and moves until it experiences
something better. It will keep moving until that "betterness" outweighs the
low-quality.

Humans compare using a wide array of symbolic understandings to move the
experience into post-experiential representation. I'll give you Pirsig one more
time.

"The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our
environment can understand is that 'Quality is the response of an organism to
its environment' (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to
see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). 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.'
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, to define the unpleasant nature of
its new environment and thus 'understand' it." (ZMM)

This same thing is addressed in LILA.

"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify
without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably
low-quality situation: 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. It is not a judgment about an experience. It
is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such
it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It
is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable
there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value,
but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low
valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow." (LILA)

The valuative experience is first. Subjective (and Objective) experience comes
later for the person, but not the amoeba. 

(By the way, I say "valuative experience" is redundant for this reason. "The
value itself is an experience".)