Ham (and all others) Thanks very much for spelling out some of your ideas in this simple way: > > First of all, for something to be, it must be made aware. That puts > awareness at the focal center of everything that exists. It also suggests > that experience actively "creates" our reality, rather than passively > "receiving" it. > > Second, nothing comes from nothing. The fact that the universe exists > means > that it is the effect or result of some greater power. Since > cause-and-effect explanations lead to an infinity of prior causes, I > maintain that the ultimate source (Essence) is uncreated, undivided, and > unconditional. > > Thirdly, contrary to Pirsig's metaphysics, Quality is a value perceived by > a > cognizant observer. If a work of art, a piece of music, or the universe > were to exist without being realized, how could its value or quality be > discerned? Parmenides said "Man is the measure of all things". And he > was > right. >
The 'effect or result of some greater power' sentence does remind me of some ideas that I read in the Buckminster Fuller book, 'Intuition'....cause-and-effect explanations leading to an infinity of prior causes. I'm not too certain of the 'greater power'...and I'm wondering if you mean this in a traditional 'God' sense...What power does the Essence have? How do you define Essence? I actually never thought of Pirsig's definition of Quality as being both a Value AND an Essence actually (as in the word being both a noun and a verb). Perhaps I do not quite understand it correctly. I read Lila over 3 years ago now and don't re-visit it that often. So everything I think about the MOQ comes from this foggy recollection of ideas I gathered when reading it (and everything I read here) - and maybe I understood it incorrectly to start with. But still, I always thought that where he went with Quality, was that it was like what (I think) you are describing as Essence. Like a prime directive of sorts...that exists even at infinitesimally small and exponentially large levels. Atoms/cells colliding, merging, separating based on the forces of nature (gravitation, electromagnetism, strong & weak interactions - or the grand unified theory)...BUT there is another 'quality'/Quality in these interactions (as in my limited understanding of what Quantum Physics is supposed to be about) that might influence the behavior of an element where it (appears to) choose a 'direction' toward a state that is somehow 'better' than another choice...but this 'better' is just in relation to the other state in that system at that moment at time. There are these moments of choices occurring all of the time - and in those moments the direction is made up of SOME decision...in that moment the life force that compels us to do anything at all (also understood as Essence maybe???) is the force that compels the entity to choose a state that is 'better' than some other state. Even when I am sleeping and basically un-aware, my body is breathing which is a state 'better' than not breathing unless my organism no longer has enough functioning parts to continue to breathe - in which case, no breath will be a better state. I could say, for example, that I am writing this e-mail this morning in this moment, because right now this activity has greater Quality for me than going to take a shower, but in the next 15 minutes, taking a shower is going to become more important because I have someplace I want to be at 11 am. And this is all happening at 'margaret's intellectual level'. In my mind, it was this notion of 'betterness' that Pirsig called Quality, which works at multiple levels AND can also be the same thing as an Essence - unless you are saying that Essence is like a traditional view of 'GOD' sitting up there in space somewhere - who gave the world a "cosmic Jewish Zombie who can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree." (that sentence by the way, was sent to me in a cartoon last week. I can send it to anyone here off list if you want (or I'm sure you can find it via google). I DO have a problem with the MOQ trying to fit everything into these certain numbered levels - certainly everything can be described at 'Biological', 'Social' and 'Intellectual' levels, but I think we ARE all 3 levels at the same time and we are EXPERIENCING all 3 levels simultaneously so trying to label and categorize everything this way just doesn't make sense to me. Labeling, Categorizing, Structuring, Judging - just muddies up the water/life force/essence/quality (? hmmm....does the word work there). So on what other (simple) points does Essentialism completely collide with the MOQ? In what ways is my thinking about MOQ completely wrong? AND please don't be disappointed if I take a few days to respond. I have a huge number of on-going projects and it takes me a while to get my brain into this space - think about what I'm reading and how to respond to it. mm 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/
