[MD] (Fwd) Re: John Carl Critiques Pure Experience:INST01

[X Acto]

>DMB: 
Quality is direct, everyday experience, not a mechanism and certainly
> not a reductionist mechanism. Quality doesn't need to be proved because
> the term refers to what all persons already know directly from
> experience.
Bo:
You dear fool, this argument can be given for just anything. God is 
surely seen as "everyday experience" "not need to be proved" by 
Jews, Muslims and Christians. It is not the Reality=Quality that 
constitutes the MOQ but the DQ/SQ dualism replacing the 
Subject/Object one. 

DMB:
> Do you need a mechanism by which it can be proved that you don't like
> lima beans? Nope. You just put them in your mouth and you immediately
> know they're awful. 
Bo:
Sure, but senses are STATIC biological quality and very much "a 
mechanism". However, the MOQ does not postulate senses as the 
sole perceivers of Quality, the universe itself is its first "perceive". 

Ron:
Here is where you are most mistaken about Pirsigs MoQ. static biological
quality is an idea about Dynamic sensual experience just as objects are
as God, as the universe as anything concieved of or defined.

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he 
said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. 
By this he meant that subjects and objects are not the starting 
points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. 
They are concepts derived from something more fundamental 
which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which 
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its 
conceptual categories.' In this basic flux of experience, 
the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those 
between consciousness and content, subject and object, 
mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which 
we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either 
physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, 
James had condensed this description to a single sentence: 
'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and 
reality, because the former are static and discontinuous 
while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had 
chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the 
basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.
What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James' pragmatism 
and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal 
reality from which subjects and objects spring is value. 
By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical 
empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic 
test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. 
The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. 
Experience which is not valued is not experienced. 
The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value 
is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial 
scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a 
mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the 
brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical 
procession."
Lila chptr 29