[MD] Emotions' place?

[Ham Priday]

Bodvar [Chris and Platt quoted] --

[Chris]:
> No, not all emotions are of the biological level, though they all
> need the biological level, and of course the levels are
> overlapping and interrelated.
>
> But I do think that greed could be seen as a biological pattern,
> the basic drive for survival is greatly benefited by it.
>
> "Greed" is an ambiguous term. One may eat greedily if hungry but
> this is biology's SENSATION.

[Platt]:
> What emotions do you think are NOT of the biological level?
> Pirsig wrote: "The MOQ sees emotions as a biological response
> to quality and not the same thing as quality.  There are many cases,
> particularly in economic activity where values occur without any
>emotion." (LS, Note 141)

[Bo]:
> IMO emotion is the social "expression" (Sensation the biological
> and Reason the intellectual). Animals wouldn't survive if they had
> emotions. When an antelope has escaped a lion it continues to graze
> as if nothing has happened.  If it had been afraid in the emotional
> sense it would never have dared venture out in the open again and
> quickly succumbed.
>
> But as Chris says, emotions "need the biological level". There is the
> experiment of people being injected with adrenalin. Those told in
> beforehand felt the restlessness, but took no further notice, while
> those who didn't know, reacted emotionally, they felt danger
> threatening (flee or fight). This because humans are social beings
> and interprets the biological sensations emotionally. A silly example:
> A stab of pain: Am I ill, will I die?
>
> We are also "intellectuals" so for those told about the expected
> reaction reason overuled emotions.

This is where I think the levels/patterns concept obfuscates understanding.

To call humans "social beings" and their reasoning patterns "the 
intellectual level" ignores the psyche of man which is responsible for his 
awareness and the emotions (biological level?) he feels.  Conscious 
awareness is no more "biological" than it is "social".   It is the 
subjective contingency of being-aware.  Yes, Chris, we need hormones, 
neurons, and a biological organism to experience emotion.  These are the 
"beingness" components of being-aware.  But "greed" is not "Biology's 
sensation"; it's OURs!  And Bo, ALL creatures need emotions like fear to 
survive.  What do you suppose would happen to animals under attack if their 
flight instinct was not aroused by fear?

The concept you are all missing -- and it's because of Pirsig's levels 
metaphor --  is that value, emotion, esthetic quality, or morality left 
unrealized is an epistemological absurdity.  There is no such thing as 
"unrealized value".  Pirsig himself said that "if a thing has no value it 
doesn't exist."  But this means that value must be realized, which is what 
proprietary awareness does.  Everything else -- thoughts, feelings, objects, 
and events -- follows from the primary sense of value.

I define awareness as value-sensibility.  Pirsig uses the term 
"pre-intellectual experience", which is confusing for those of us who equate 
experience with the intellectualized world (i.e., experiential existence). 
Bo's "stab of pain" like Pirsig's "sitting on a hot stove" describes what 
may be called an "experience" but doesn't tell us much about values.  Value 
is what is sensed or felt in our relation to otherness.  It is defined as 
"pain", "pleasure", "fear", or "disgust" only as we relate it emotionally to 
our being-aware.  Experiencing the phenomenal world of "things and events" 
requires intellection, which is a further differentiation of Value.  How we 
behave socially - whether greedy, arrogant, deceitful, cruel, or 
passionate - expresses our valuistic construct of reality (i.e., our 
being-aware-of-
otherness.)

Isn't this a clearer, simpler explanation of human existence than the 
levels/patterns analogy?

Regards,
Ham