[MD] in defence of the "relative"

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Craig,

Matt said:
How does one know that you're responding, first, to "low 
quality" and only later to "a hot stove," and not the other 
way around?

Craig said:
We are aware of the order & content of our experiences.

Matt:
Really?  Are we?

I'm afraid I have not the present skill to try and respond 
to the confidence, but I will say that Pirsig says (I think it 
might be in ZMM) that the distinction between first and 
second he's talking about is an imperceptible moment, a 
real time moment, but too fast to be noticed.  So I'm not 
sure Pirsig would even quite agree to that sense of 
"awareness" you seem to be leaning on.

Craig said:
We could change the example:  You're sitting on a stove 
that someone is turning on, you think "I better get off 
before I'm burnt", but don't jump until you realize it's 
getting hot enough to burn you.  In this case both 
experiences are conceptualized but you recognize the 
cause before the response.

Matt:
I don't understand the relevancy of the above, or what 
it's supposed to say.

Overall, you seem to want to make the "nonverbal 
response vs. verbal response" distinction be the 
unconceptualized/conceptualized distinction.  So, later 
verbalizations (or whatever language-use) about prior 
non-linguistic reactions are the later conceptualizations of 
unconceptualized experience.  Something like that?  If 
that's the case: I don't think concepts can be distinguished 
from experience like that, I don't think that just because 
an action is non-linguistic it is also unconceptualized.

Matt said:
how can something be "more empirical" than something 
else when everything is an experience?

Craig said:
You've already identified 2 ways: 
1) Unconceptualized experience is more 
empirical/fundamental than conceptualized, since 
concepts are derived from their underlying experiences.

2) inorganic patterns are more empirical/fundamental 
than the biological patterns that evolve from them (& so 
on up the other levels).

Matt:
1) I should have been less confusing when I use 
"empirical," though I wish Pirsig had to.  Empiricism, as 
I think Pirsig understands the living state of that 
philosophical tradition, denotes the idea that all knowledge 
is derived from experience.  This is a platitude when 
_everything_ is experience, because what else would it be 
derived from?  In fact, knowledge is itself experiential.  
So, if "empirical" is derived from that understanding of 
empiricism, then how can we grade what's more 
experiential than other things if everything is experiential?  
That's my question.

2) The two ways you enumerate from me are incompatible 
senses of empirical, which isn't a problem for me since I 
was trying to tease the distinction between the two out.  It 
is, however, a problem for those who want to take seriously 
a notion of "more empirical" derived from Pirsig.  It seems 
to me that one needs to put those two ways together, not 
just notice them, and I'm not sure they can be so put.

3) I don't think Pirsig means "fundamental" as a synonym 
with "empirical" (though that does draw you out of certain 
interpretational quandries if pursued).

4) Saying that inorganic patterns are more 
empirical/fundamental definitely to me seems like a 
backslide into the S/O Dilemma.  Didn't Pirsig want to get 
away from saying that there was something better about 
things that could be tested by scientific instruments?

Matt said:
How can "low quality" be _different_ than the stove, 
when all the stove _is_ (in Pirsig's special sense of being, 
in which DQ "is not") is patterns of quality (and the "hot" 
pattern giving it a "low quality," as it were)?

Craig said:
It is not the "hot pattern" that is of low quality.  It is the 
human experience of touching a too hot pattern that is of 
low quallity.  The "hot pattern" is a high quality 
environment for human cooking.

Matt:
That's a good point.  It is the interaction between nodes 
of static patterns of quality that produce Dynamic Quality.  
Evaluations of low and high are not inherent in any 
collection of static patterns of quality, but produced by 
its interaction with other static patterns.  That's something 
I've been thinking about for quite awhile, though it seems 
to be heretical to certain interpretations of what Pirsig 
means.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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