[MD] Fwd: Re: Static Patterns Rock!

[david buchanan]

Ron said:
Trying to classify percepts as primary or secondary is idle, Bertram Russel said "the belief in the existence of things outside my own biography must be regarded as a prejudice." but our justifications for such a belief is pragmatic as C.S. Peirce said "let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts".


David M replied to Ron:
I believe it is not idle,  it tells us the basis of our knowledge is in experience,  it is the basis of empirical evidence and ...it is exactly what we use to do all the sciences and interestingly and importantly it is much easier to agree about primary experiences like what is hot and cold,  how fast something is moving for experiencers in the same frame of reference,  then it is to agree about more complex objects like money or artworks,  when we need to think again about ideas and concepts it is always good to strip these away and get back to what we experience without our ideas and concepts to consider alternatives and look for something better,  but the challenge is always to get our ideas to make sense of our pre-conceptual experiences. Obviously ideas and concepts can change what we experience,  they change who we are and how we respond,  but I think we can bracket these as Husserl suggests,  doing this is surely the best way to get under the dominance of SOM,  but it surely leaves us looking to try and understand experience prior to language and culture as far as we can,  saying nothing it is undifferentiated is not very useful when at the same time we claim it as the source of SQ and as full of potential,  well is this potential simply tapped by concepts?  seems unlikely that such a theory is complete or adequate. This is my problem.


dmb says:
There are two major misconceptions at work behind the scenes. These misconception are the cause of your so-called problem.

It's not quite explicit but it's still pretty clear that you're using the idea of "primary experience" in a way that is very different from the meaning intended by Pirsig and James. We see this in the way you expect "primary experience" to play a role in the scientific process. But the kind of "primary experience" Pirsig and James are talking about is better understood in terms of satori or nirvana. Obviously, this is a very different sense of the word "experience" than is used in the sciences or in traditional sensory empiricism. Basically, you're converting their Zen mysticism into common sense realism.

The second misconception is in thinking that things like "rock", "red", "white", "moon", "cold" and "hot" are pre-conceptual or naked percepts, raw sense data or whatever. It's not just Pirsig who says that seeing shapes and forms is to intellectualize. All of our perceptions are "theory-laden", they say. The "myth of the given" has been exposed as such. There's a number of famous slogans announcing various degrees of acknowledgement. Even the simplest ideas - like object permanence, the idea that the biscuit will stay in the tin - are still learned ideas. We are suspended in a language that always already sorts experience into these basic categories.   


Dave M. said:
...I used the white moon in a black background I am trying to indicate the differences is percepts that allow us to latch on to something in experience to base all our responses on, ..that is the very heart of my point about pre-conceptual experience of difference or pattern. Here for me the white of the moon is the experience itself,  same as the experience of actually tasting a banana,  ..even DMB knows this,  he has tasted a banana surely,  but he can't admit that there are patterns and difference in primary experience.



dmb says:
Basically, you want primary experience to be a determinate reality. You don't want pre-conceptual experience to be an indeterminate flux because you mistakenly believe that this means it is devoid of content and therefore cannot be the source or substance of our concepts. You mistakenly believe that it means we can't taste bananas or see the moon?

I think you need to take a careful look at what these guys are actually saying about "pure experience". It's non-dual experience, not a subjective experience of objective realities. This is undivided experience of the whole situation all at once, not the unprocessed sense data of traditional empiricism. I mean, you're using Pirsig's terms to refer to things that Pirsig has rejected and has no place in the MOQ's structure. That creates tons of confusion and frustration. 


You can't really even have a problem with their "primary experience" until you get a handle on what they're saying, unless you grapple what the term's actual meaning. So far, you've only been objecting to your own misconceptions of this as some kind of white noise that's devoid of content.  But as I keep telling you, "undifferentiated" simply means that the content has not yet been conceptualized. 

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions. Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known,..."

"Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms."


DQ = pure experience = sciousness

"What is “sciousness”? Bricklin explains in his introduction to the book that “James labeled consciousness-without-self ‘sciousness,’ and consciousness-with-self ‘con-sciousness.’” For those up to speed on their Eastern philosophy, “consciousness-without-self” (sciousness) is, of course, precisely how the Buddha defined nirvana, the traditional goal of spiritual seeking. Bricklin defines it as a “nondual” state of enlightened immediacy and wholeness in which the usual distinction between self and other, knower and known, is dissolved. Ordinary “con-sciousness,” on the contrary, would be considered dualistic, erroneously split down the middle between a perceiving subject and the world of objects being perceived."