[MD] [Bulk] Re: cloud of probability

[david buchanan]

Andre said to Marsha:
...And, just for the record, dmb has said many things about DQ and Mysticism. You need to take a better look at the archives. Some of his posts on DQ stem from 1998 and carry on in 2002, 3, and 4.

dmb says:
I was curious and so did a google search on "moq dmb mysticism" and it returned 47,800 results. Even if one tenth of 1% of those hits are my posts on mysticism, that's still 478 posts on that particular way of addressing DQ. I'm not going to actually count them and don't really see the point in determining that number anyway. But the idea that I haven't said enough about DQ can easily be checked by anyone who cares to look and anyone who looks will see that the idea has no merit whatsoever. 

Here's one of the post that showed up on the first page of that google search, for example:


dmb says:
Yea, the undefinable nature of Dynamic Quality has been discussed here atlength and it can be found throughout Pirsig's books. Chapter 9 of Lilaspeaks to this, for example. "When A. N. Whitehead wrote that 'mankind isdriven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existinglanguage.' he was writing about Dynamic Quality.
 
DS says: Pirsig says that Whitehead was talking about DQ, Whitehead onlysays that he doesn't have words to describe his experience. Others (Hobbes,Hume, Locke and Kant) have had non or pre-verbal experiences and they didn'tdescribe them as DQ. It feels like Pirsig's experience may have been cut tofit his MoQ.
 
dmb: DQ is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of allthings, completely simple and always new". This is also the chapter where heillustrates this with the hot stove example. The idea is to show how DQ isnot some speculative metaphysical entity but rather refers to actualexperience. In that sense, we all already know it from experience. And yetit isn't something we can define. Definitions and concepts are static andfollow from DQ. "When the person who sits on the stove first discovers hislow-Quality situation, the font edge of his experience is Dynamic. He doesnot think, 'This stove is hot,' and then make a rational decision to getoff. A 'dim perception of he knows not what' gets him off Dynamically.
 
DS says:
He may not know what gets him off the stove but I suggest it's the feelingof pain. Science has names for all the receptors in the skin and has traceda nerve path from pain receptor to muscles that doesn't go by way of thebrain. 
 
 
dmb: Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain thesituation." The thing to notice here is that these descriptions tell us WHYwe can't define it. It is PRE-intellectual, too obscure for existingLANGUAGE. But because this is a category of actual experience, DQ is alsocalled the primary empirical reality. It's the first thing you know and soit's ahead of definition, prior to the conceptualizations and distinctionswe later assign to the situation. DQ is also too thick and rich for wordsand concepts so that, in some sense, definitions are what we use to reduceexperience to manageable proportions. And this is right where the mysticismfits in. In chapter 5 he explains that philosophical mystics throughouthistory "share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality isoutside language; that language splits things up into parts while the truenature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues thatthe illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The NativeAmerican church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understandingupon those who were normally resistant to it..." The pre-intellectual natureof DQ can also be seen in the radical empiricism of William James, whichPirsig had arrived at independently, was recognized by a reviewer of ZAMMand which Pirsig adopts in Lila, explicitly in chapter 29. There he quotesJames saying that this primary empirical reality is 'the immediate flux oflife which furnishes the material to our later reflection with itsconceptual categories'. Notice again how concepts follow from a morefundamental and immediate experience. "In this basic flux of experience,"Pirsig writes, "the distinctions of reflective thought, such as thosebetween consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, [orhot stove and burning ass] have not yet emerged in the forms which we makethem. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical; itlogically precedes this distinction".
 
DS says: I hear you but I'm not necessarily buying. The way I see it thereare two language levels: the feeling level of direct experience (Pirsigcalls DQ) and the words as symbols for feelings that verbalizers use whenreflecting on past experience (SQ). The feeling level used by animals andpre or non verbal humans (read babies and primitives) is preverbal but notnecessarily preintellectual. We have no way of knowing and it would bearrogant to suggest that nonverbal people are also bereft of intellect.
 
 
dmb: In this sense, DQ is nothingness but not in the sense that reality isentirely absent. Instead, it is experience as directly known, prior to thedivisions and distinctions imposed by our definitions andconceptualizations. Pure experience is undifferentiated, undividedexperience while words and ideas chop reality into the ten thousand things,the static reality of culture, language and world view.
 
DS: While I agree that "words and ideas chop ." it does not necessarilyfollow that pure experience is undifferentiated. I experience non verbalsights and sounds and can still tell the difference between them.
 
 
 
dmb: In that sense, DQ is no-thing-ness. Even so-called physical things arediscrete entities, with distinct borders, which can be distinguished formevery thing that it is not and so in a very basic verbal sense, even rocksand trees are conceptual and depend upon agreed cultural definitions. DQ ispre-verbal and pre-intellectual in the sense that not even these basicperceptions are among the static quality that follows from the primaryempirical reality.  
 
So when you absolutely need a definition, define it as undefinable. And ifsomebody demands to know why it's undefinable, tell them it's because theterm refers to the kind of experience that comes in the moment beforedefinitions.
 
DS: In my experience all experience comes before verbalization.
 
 
dmb: It's the reality you know before you have time to think about it. It'sthe reason you jump off the hot stove even before you can even think 'hotstove' or 'jump off'. 
"Phaedrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study onlysubject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, itwould be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purposeof mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bringone's self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static intellectualattachments of the past."
 
Thanks,
dmb