[MD] Consciousness (explained?)

[skutvik at online.no]

Platt, Andre and interested parties. 

Platt said:

> Interesting reactions and responses to my queries about consciousness
> and how it's presented, treated and interpreted with the MOQ as the
> primary reference. First, from Andre came perhaps the most definitive
> Pirsig quote on the subject:

    "At the time we are aware of millions of things around 
    us...aware of these things but not really conscious of them 
    unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect 
    something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly 
    be conscious of these things and remember all of them because 
    our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable 
    to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we 
    select and call consciousness is never the same as the 
    awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We 
    take a handfull of sand from the endless landscape of 
    awareness around us and call that handfull of sand the world. 
    "Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are 
    conscious, a process of discrimination goes to work on it. This 
    is the knife." ZAMM  (p 75).  

I'd like to dwell on this, but even before that I always wonder what we 
mean by "consciousness", if it is contrasted to unconscious it's not 
only humans, animals sleep and wake up (to consciousness). I suspect 
it is the more enigmatic "self-consciousness" which is at the stake, but 
Pirsig's above seems not to address that, rather to demonstrate how 
Quality is necessary for anything to be perceived at all, the point refined 
in the "cutting edge of time" argument. 

    He'd been speculating about the relationship of Quality to mind 
    and matter and had identified Quality as the parent of mind and 
    matter, that event which gives birth to mind and matter. This 
    Copernican inversion of the relationship of Quality to the 
    objective world could sound mysterious if not carefully 
    explained, but he didn't mean it to be mysterious. He simply 
    meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be 
    distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual 
    awareness, which he called awareness of Quality.

See "mind and matter" or SOM (a subject mind aware of an objective 
world) and moreover, Pirsig sees "nonintellectual awareness"  
(awareness of Quality) as the parent of intellectual awareness and that 
the latter=mind/matter). However these are the deliberations that led to 
the proto-moq where "intellect" or SOM was the only level, but it does 
not matter if 3 levels precedes it in the MOQ proper.        

Andre went on to quote ZAMM:
  
    'Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the 
    basis for sorting and interrelating them'' (the Aristotelian, 
    dialectical method and classification?). Romantic understanding 
    is directed toward the handfull of sand before the sorting begins' 
    (note this is separated from the 'endless landscape') (ibid,p76) 

This is the aforementioned proto-moq, but the Romantic/Classic 
became DQ/SQ so I use it. The static is concerned with "the piles", 
namely the ordering of the featureless dynamic sand and - again - 
"intellect" or SOM the only "pile" at this stage.      


Platt concludes: 

> So for Pirsig, consciousness is a biological selection mechanism
> operating within a background of awareness described metaphorically as
> an "endless landscape." (Note that "experience" is not mentioned.)  

Right, Pirsig does not really address the "self" issue, he just speaks 
about pre-intellectual and intellectual awareness, the latter of which is 
the mind/matter - SOM, which means that awareness is identical to the 
respective level. Self-awareness is intellect's internal view of a mind 
observing a world different from mind.  

IMO

Bodvar