[MD] Fwd: Re: Static Patterns Rock!

[David Morey]

Hi DMB

I see so animals can tell what the difference is between say a mate and say something to eat and respond to the undifferentiated dynamic quality of these undifferentiated non-patterned experiences and respond in different ways to these undifferentiated experiences. Yes that really hangs together well,  how could I possibly imagine that your definitions of DQ and SQ have become a mess?

David M

david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
>Jan-Anders Andersson said to David Morey:
>Very funny example DM! Because what you should really consider is, just like in the color blind test, you're just acting "experince blindly". It is you that act as you call Dmb, you apparently doesn't understand what dmb is writing. You maybe read dmb's words but doesn't understand RMP's concept of "pure experience". 
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>dmb says:
>Exactly. DM does not understand the meaning of DQ or "pure experience" or any of the other terms that refer to this "immediate flux of life" and when I present the evidence or otherwise try to explain it, he just dismisses as "crap" and ignores it.
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>But it's not crap. I've repeatedly provided well-supported answers to his questions but he just cannot see them. Like I said,...
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>It's not quite explicit but it's still pretty clear that DM is 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 he expects "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, DM is converting their Zen mysticism into common sense realism.
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>He doesn't want pre-conceptual experience to be an indeterminate flux because he mistakenly believes that it is devoid of content. He mistakenly believe that it means we can't taste bananas or see the moon?
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>The only reasonable way out of this confusion is 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. As it now stands, DM is misusing Pirsig's terms to refer to things that Pirsig has rejected and has no place in the MOQ's structure. This misuse of terms and the misconceptions that follow has created tons of confusion and frustration. 
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>DM can't possibly have a problem with their "primary experience" until he gets a handle on what they're actually saying, unless he grapples honestly with the term's actual meaning. So far, he has only been objecting to his own misconceptions of this flux as some kind of white noise that's devoid of content. But as I keep telling him, "undifferentiated" simply means that the content has not yet been conceptualized. Nobody, except Marsha maybe, thinks pure experience is devoid of content. Apparently, some people take the term "nothingness" in some literalistic way but it really just means "no-thingness", which (again) simply means unconceptualized or unpatterned. 
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>And - holy cannoli - the Pirsigian notion of patterned and unpatterned has nothing to do with polka dots, stripes, plaids or colorblindness. Frankly, I think DM's question on colorblindness is sheer nonsense and I cringe with embarrassment every time he uses a contradictory phrase like "pre-conceptual patterns". 
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>David Morey replied to JanAnders:
>Maybe you can help explain it then,  do animals with instinctive behaviors identify their food and mates using SQ? Yes or no. Is this SQ conceptual? Yes or no. Either SQ can be pre-conceptual,  which I prefer,  but everything pre-conceptual is DQ for DMB,  or animals use concepts,  which is a very odd use of the word concept. If you can clear up this obvious muddle I will be most grateful.
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>
>dmb says:
>This is another case where DM keeps asking for an answer that has already been given several times. This question should not stump anyone and the answer is pretty simple too. "So you believe babies and animals presumably use concepts," DM said to me the other day. "No," I answered, "babies and animals can respond to experience without concepts".  Animals can respond to DQ biologically and our closest cousins even have some basic capacity for morality, language and even rudimentary theory of mind, i.e. some capacity to read and predict the behavior of their peers or their prey. Babies, of course, are going to develop human capacities and will eventually learn to live in the mythos. But even when that baby grows up and has the full range of concepts, he can still jump off the hot stove before concepts are deployed, he can still respond to DQ dynamically or biologically or instinctively. And in the big picture of the MOQ's static hierarchy, everything has the capacity to respond to DQ. Even the law of causality is re-concieved as an extremely persistent pattern of preferences, as an extremely regular response to DQ.
>But all of this talk about animals and physics is part of our mythos and how animals or particles actually experience reality we cannot say. As Thomas Nagel so famously pointed out, we just can't know what it's like to be a bat. Animals do not inhabit our mythos. Even if they had concepts (abstractions and generalizations) in the same sense that we do, we still wouldn't be able to comprehend their concepts or their mythos. We can't even get inside the experience of other human beings - except by way of the mythos. 
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>“Experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent.  The active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us, is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes….When the reflective intellect gets at work, however, it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process.  Distinguishing its elements and parts, it gives them separate names, and what it thus disjoins it can not easily put together.” -- William James
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>“If now we ask why we must thus translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form, filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions…..The naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us, and the tendency of raw experience [a.k.a. “pure experience”] to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together…Had pure experience, the naturalist says, always been perfectly healthy, there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms.  We should just have experienced inarticulately and un-intellectually enjoyed.” -- William James
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