On page 73, Pirsig says: "Quality cannot be independently derived from either mind or matter." When Pirsig here talks about the relationship between mind and matter, do we know how he perceives matter? Does he perceive matter as something physical that has a standalone existence independently of whether anyone observes it, or does he perceive it as something created by the experience of our senses. Or something else. When he says: "The Quality event is the cause of the subject and objects", and further on page 75: "Substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values", it sounds like he says that reality is created by our conscious experience.
04:00 When the sensory organs of a sentient being come into contact with the molecules (eg in a stove) that vibrate in an unstructured and fast way, an experience occurs that causes the sentient being to react in a way that favors its survival. In this case, a quick retreat. If the sentient being is capable of meta-consciousness, it will call the re-representation of this specific experience "heat", and the perceived cause of the heat "hot stove". But the negative or positive quality of the raw experience in itself is, on the other hand, directly linked to survival and is an integral part of the inherited cognitive structure of the sentient being and of life itself.
Page 76: "I (Pirsig) think Quality is the fuel that drives the struggle for survival." Does he mean by this that our drive to stay alive is driven by a desire to understand the mening behind what drives us to struggle for survival? I would rephrase it as: Life's urge to stay alive and evolve is driven by an inherent desire to become aware and understand itself. As life's carrier of meta-consciousness, we as humans have a role in this that gives our life meaning.
Page 77. Pirsig says: "Since value and evolution cannot be eliminated from a description of the real world and since they are not resolvable to atomic properties, you have a real enigma on your hands. (....) Value and evolution must be the larger reality that contains atoms (= matter, my remark)." Can we understand this formulation as if Pirsig advocates a metaphysical position in line with idealism, that is, that the ontological primitive is mental - a universal consciousness - and that evolution is primarily the evolution of consciousness? If value cannot be resolved to matter, then it logically follows that consciousness cannot be an emergent property of brain substance. It is the other way around - the brain substance is an expression of consciousness.
