[MD] The Tao of Quality - Verse 1

[Krimel]

[DM]
Yes concepts and thinking are based on analogies, but analogies of what?
Where do analogies start, how do they get going? Do we not discover
regularities in experience before concepts? Regularities like hot? Is not
hotness a form of quality, a static quality we understand long before -as a
species- we get to language and concepts. And long before we get to
analogies about really 'hot' looking girls? You know whatever happened to
those hot stove static qualities of value?

[Krimel]
Well yeah, that is an issue and one I have been trying to make so sense of. 
We are creatures geared toward finding difference. We are possessed of an
array of sensory neurons for doing just that. But we also have memory which
lifts us out of the differences of each passing moment and allows
comparisons of the past with the present. This yields generalization and
analogy where some properties of the present are regarded as similar along
some dimension to some previous experience. In language what you get is a
semantic network of interconnected pairing of signifiers and experience. 
I think you are on target with the problem of SQ. I don't think it can be
address without appreciating the distinction between rational and irrational
or what Pirsig call pre-intellectual thought. I would say it is in the
process of naming which is rational and digital and artificial. Almost
everything we do as beings is done without any of that. We respond to
patterns in the lifeworld and develop habits of action completely without
rational analysis or even conscious awareness. I would argue that there are
cognitive activities going on in these processes but they are irrational in
that they do not require any stepwise, reasoned, algorithmic accounts. They
are analog.