[MF] reality: interactions or quality?

[Michael Hamilton]

Kevin,

> 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.

You have a point. I too am keen to resist mechanistic descriptions of
human beings. It seems that in this passage, Pirsig takes for granted
the enormous difference between mechanistic "stimuli" on the one hand,
and "value" / "wonder" / "Dynamic Quality" on the other. He doesn't
explicitly draw out the significance of the change. To do so would not
have been difficult, for one of the first collections of static
patterns that the baby learns to recognise and identify as an
'object', is the mother's face.

> 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.

Why not consider them identical? Or more precisely, consider love as
the extreme positive face of value, which is a spectrum?

Regards,
Mike