Welcome back, Bo --
Sorry to hear about the demise of your PC. I went through this grieving
process twice within the past year, and am still trying to recover my
documents and web pages. And no, you don't have to manually shift to each
new line; what you sent displays just fine.
[Ham, previously]:
Nothing without its opposite (being) is an absolute void--
the 'monism' of empty space. Being subtended by nothing,
however, describes existence: things and events in space.
A monad is undifferentiated 'oneness' in which opposition
is equilivency. Clearly the experiential world that we
call existence is not a monism, since it is both differentiated
and relational.
[Bo]:
Well, does not this support my decade long struggle for
MOQ's first postulate being "Reality=DQ/SQ" rather than
"Reality=Quality"? And it further shows that the culprit is
the box diagram that mislead Pirsig to visualize a Quality
remaining after the DQ/SQ split. The error is also shown
in same kind of diagram of SOM. There is no one who
considers the S/O-split to be secondary to a Reality
something and I'm aghast that Pirsig didn't see this.
He didn't WANT to see it because it smacked of religion or supernaturalism.
And such beliefs are held to be "enenlightened" in postmodern philosophy.
Haven't you heard? Anti-thesim is the 'in' thing these days.
Being/Nothingness is a SOM offspring too. Am I forced
to give a cultural history course in each post?. The idea is
that SOM emerged out a mythological past that did not
have any idea about an existence in contrast to no-existence.
In MOQ this becomes the intellectual level emergence from
the social, thus philosophy in general is a 4th-level pattern
(S/O) in the sense of search for truth.
[Ham, previously]:
I totally agree that Quality is not fundamental from an ontological
point of view, and that simply integrating patterns or levels of
Quality does not reduce existence to a monad. Whether we
define Quality or Value as "'betterness", "excellence", "rightness",
or 'Arete', the definition always presupposes a subjective referent --
that is, cognitive apprehension of an other. Unperceived Quality is an
oxymoron.
[Bo]:
I would like to see the - sorry - silliness of this sentence:
"...definition always presupposes a subjective referent - that is,
cognitive apprehension of an other".
This stems from a reasoning that goes like this: "Humankind
possesses mind where thinking takes place, thus everything is
man-made. This is 100% valid but also 100% stale unless the
basis for a Man or Individual metaphysics.
By "stale", I guess you mean old-fashioned, like 10-day-old poundcake.
Some of the most profound ideas in philosophy date back to medieval times.
Are they too stale to consider today? I seems to me that the test of a
metaphysical theory in not how "new" it is but how well it supports a
logical thesis. If, as you say, the proposition that man's experience
creates objective reality is "100% valid", why should we want to tinker with
it?
[Bo]:
The perennial problem is the "intellectual" term which by common usage has
come to mean thinking or intelligence. In the MOQ the organism known as
Homo Sapiens was the
biological pattern that DQ "rode" to the social level, which
in turn spawned the intellectual level and thus "man" is found
to be an intellectual S/O pattern.
This makes no sense to me. Human beings, as biological organisms, are
intellectually construed to be evolutionary products of nature, like cats,
lions, and fleas. Human self-awareness, the individual psyche, cannot be
explained as a developing species, nor can the thought process we call
intellection. It would appear that MoQists want to dismiss proprietary
awareness from reality. I maintain that there is no Reality without
Sensibility, and you can't have existence in the absence of awareness. My
definition of the cognizant individual is "being-aware". It's precisely
this dichotomy
that makes existential reality possible.
You and I may sound like two old-home inmates talking without
listening to the other, anyway your fallacy is to start from SOM's
"man" (as owner of the mind where all is) IMO "man" like "language"
and/or "mind" must be omitted, because it can be proved without a
hitch that "all is" these three entities and a such is completely stale
... unless a metaphysics of MAN, of MIND, or of LANGUAGE
is constructed
Get it?
I understand what you're saying, Bo. But it ignores the fact that all
knowledge is derived from experience and is proprietary to the 'knower'. It
suggests that intellection, like language and concepts, resides in some
extracorporeal realm independent of man. And that simply is not true. Why
on earth do you want to eliminate the conscious mind of man? Where would we
be--culturally, socially, scientifically, morally--without individual
awareness? Indeed, where would our very existence be? Even if you can't
accept the universe as anthropcentric, such an epistemology allows no agent
for value appreciation and the moral precepts that are so dear to Pirsig.
It also makes human freedom a meaningless slogan.
I respectfully suggest that you carefully think this ontology through before
foisting it on the group as a cure for the MoQ's alleged paralysis.
Essentially yours,
Ham
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