[MD] The Top Down Fallacy

[Ham Priday]

Hi David --



> What about pre-intellectual but differentiated experience,
> like when my pre-linguistic nephew carries the same toy
> around for weeks, only to suddenly move on to a new favourite?

Intellectual development progresses by degree in the toddler, and you've 
provided a good example of how this works.  Although I'm not a psychologist, 
I would suggest that your nephew senses the value of his favored toy as a 
challenge to his intellect.  Once he has mastered that challenge, the toy 
and his "intellectual experience" of it loses his interest.  He moves on to 
explore a new value, and that becomes his next favorite toy--another object 
added to his experience, and so on.  In this successive exploration of 
objective otherness, he builds a knowledge base about the identities and 
physical properties of "things" and how they relate to each other, 
eventually accumulating enough knowledge to assemble or structure objects in 
ways that demonstrate intellectual competence.

Epistemology (how we learn) starts with experience; but Value is primary to 
experiential knowledge.  My argument is that the "pure" or 
"pre-intellectual" experience that James, Rorty, and Pirsig refer to is not 
knowledge but Sensibility.  We perceive otherness as Value, because we are 
value-sensible creatures.  But because the Value we are sensible of is 
filtered through our organic sense receptors and becomes conscious in the 
space/time mode of human awareness, all experience (intellection) is 
differentiated and relational.  Pre-intellectual awareness is our 
psycho-emotional response to Value.  The intellect cannot deal with pure 
sensual data as anything but abstract "feeling".  Instead, the 
cerebro-nervous system converts (reduces) primary Value to specific objects 
which are experienced and remembered as the things and events that make up 
our physical world.  And because that world is intellectualized as a 
cause-and-effect reality, we are deluded into thinking that the objects 
experienced are primary to the values sensed.

I believe we are pre-wired for the precept that Value is intrinsic to the 
objects of our experience.  Otherwise, we would not have such difficulty 
convincing ourselves that Value is primary.  Also, if we did not perceive 
being as the source of Value, rather than the reverse, we would be 
confounded by living in a "virtual reality" which, I submit, is a more 
accurate metaphysical ontology.

Essentially yours,
Ham