[MD] -elitist ideas

[MarshaV]

At 05:34 PM 3/19/2007, you wrote:
>[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".)

Arlo,

In a monistic metaphysics there is only one substance.  Once broken 
down into the many (SQ), your explanations makes sense.  But there is 
no such division within Quality or DQ.


m