[MF] reality: interactions or quality?

[Kevin Perez]

Mike,
  
You asked, "You don't think Quality has anything to do with love?"
  
That's what I'm trying to figure out.
  
Where's the love in the following description of Dynamic Quality and the
development of a fetus and a baby (Lila, page 118)?
  
     One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of
     simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth
     acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We
     know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth 
     and hunger and so on but the baby doesn't. We could call them
     stimuli but the baby doesn't identify them as that. From the baby's
     point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This
     generalized "something," Whitehead's "dim apprehension," is
     Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his
     hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same
     sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music
     and heart attack in the previous examples.
  
     If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated
     that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive
     to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then
     correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of
     the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that
     he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously
     complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called
     an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary
     experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from
     primary experience.
  
     Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an
     object and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill
     and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced
     it, as though it were a single jump. This is similar to the way one
     drives a car. The first time there is a very slow trial-and-error process
     of seeing what causes what. But in a very short time it becomes so
     swift one doesn't even think about it. The same is true of objects.
  
The baby in this description looks like a machine.  And so I ask myself if
Pirsig may be missing something.
  
It seems more correct to me to credit love with human development.  But
then value and quality would have to derive from love not the other way
around.
   
  
Kevin
   
   

		
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