[Krimel]: > Bo, as is often the case Ham addresses his comments to people > without actually know who he is talking to. Since he comments > to each of us in equal measure please pass this along to him.
As it happens, I was talking to Bo who had quoted comments from others, one of whom I assumed was you. But it's all right, Krimel. I don't need an intermediary. You can talk duirectly to me. > He speaks of nothingness as an absolute void, empty space. > This is a major flaw at the core of Ham's "philosophy". Throughout, > he makes 'nothing' into something and treats it as if it were something > while maintaining a self delusion that it is not. Nothingness cannot create anything, and I never said it did. As to how I can "make nothing into something...while maintaining a delusion that it is not" is a paradox only you can explain. > Space even empty space is something. Nothing on the > other hand is nothing. It is inconceivable. It is who and > where you were before you were born. That it is inconceivable does not mean that it isn't true. > Even if one were to grant the validity of being and nothingness > as a duality, all one could ever speak of is the being part. > About 'nothing' nothing can be said. At all, period. To then > jump from being to awareness of being, Ham must take a huge > quantum leap. Who says that being requires awareness? > Descartes would say that awareness presumes being but that > is a different matter. I don't disagree with this analysis. But even evolutionists regard awareness as having jumped from being to awareness of being. And if Descartes was right that awareness presumes being, and Pirsig is right that experience defines being, then I'm not taking this quantum leap alone. Inasmuch as empirical evidence is experiential, there is no evidence that things exist in the absence of their being experienced. > While I do not think that being requires awareness I agree > that Value and perception are wholly subjective. So while Ham > and I agree that perception requires a perceiver we disagree > that the perceived requires a perceiver. > > I too see a chronic confusion among many between 'reality' > as TiTs and reality as were construct it. I don't especially see > this as a fallacy in Pirsig's philosophy since I regard the MoQ > as being 100% about how we construct our internal realities. > As a result I think Ham is wrong when he says that within the > MoQ, "the intellect is not indigenous to the cognizant > individual." I think Pirsig is saying that the cognizant individual > is not separate from the reality she constructs. Again, I have no disagreement with the MoQ as you have qualified it. We do make ourselves part of the reality we construct by becoming aware. But I don't think this is what Pirsig means when he writes about accessing the Intellect. [Ham, previously]: > The theory of "random access" to knowledge (presumably by > mankind) is unsupported by any epistemology I'm aware of, > and would seem to be yet another MoQ fallacy. I question the > assertion that a flawed metaphysics can "provide a pretty good > guide" to a new reality perspective... [Krimel]: > Here Ham confesses [confuses?] randomness and random access. > Random access is something we used to learn about in elementary > school when they taught us to use the library. You rightly pointed > out that we have random access to our memories, so it is really not > 'new'. Ham fails to notice that there are whole courses on random > access these days; particularly in the IT departments. Database > management is a field unto itself and is all about random access. > Kids can Google as a result and gain random access to the > collected wisdom of all mankind. If this is a Fallacy in the MoQ, > it is that Pirsig didn't run farther with it. It is a fallacy to regard intellect as indigenous to a culture rather than to the individual. Researching information from a library or on the Internet may be a random search, but it is not accessing Intellect. Intellection is what one does to draw conclusions from the researched data. > Randomness is another story. Pirsig concludes that a MoQ > would be an MoR but he turns away from it. Someone could > compile an impressive list of philosophers who have pointed at > randomness or chaos and turned away. They bring an > argument to the brink of it and then head in another direction > because obviously we can't go there. Why can't we go there? Evidently you already have, or at least think we should go there. Personally, I don't see the point of metaphysical randomness. It doesn't qualify as a primary source any more than does an orderly universe. I view order as the intellect's "contribution" to raw experience. It seeks a rationale for diversity, is attracted to symmetry, harmony and logical coherence, and constructs a perspective based on these principles. Of course, I also believe that the properties and arrangement of phenomena are derived from the Value that connects man to his essential source. > But we have a built in aversion and horror of chaos and > uncertainty and I would claim this deep fear is what drives > Ham's entire philosophy. Essentialism may allay the "horror of chaos and uncertainty" but fear is not what drives it. The concept of Essence as the ultimate reality was inspired by gnostic philosophers and logicians who understood that relational existence does not spring from nothingness but is only the differentiated image (negation, reduction) of an absolute source. The precept that we are all linked to this source by Value offers a teleology for existence and gives meaning to the life experience. > Bo, be sure and pass all this along to Ham, will you? > Oh yeah and tell him I laughed out loud to see that he put > that hate filled essay on his "Values" pages. > Values, what a laugh. Then again, some people don't recognize value when it stares them in the face. Regards, Ham Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
