Greetings, Willblake --
I haven't had the pleasure. (Do I call you Will or Mark?)
Ham, You provide an interesting evolutionary view of the free will of choices. How does Quality fit in?
I don't know that my view of free will is "evolutionary", but it is fundamental to my concept of human existence. First of all, I prefer the term Value to Quality, despite the fact that the MoQ's author has equated the two. Value is a measure of what we individually desire or want in life -- the desiderata of our experience. I consider it the driving force of human activity which, if properly nurtured and allowed free expression, can achieve a "giant leap for mankind" in all endeavors. We are all innately value-sensible creatures, but all too often our values are suppressed by external influences that preempt them, such as coercion or suppression by the state, control by the society, or moral codes accepted on the authority of others.
Essentially, value is the affinity of sensibility for its estranged source. In the individual it is manfested relationally as "wanting" -- the psycho-emotional response to esthetic, moral, and conceptual attributes of experience which itself is a construct of value. The phenomena (objects and events) of experience are objectivized representations of the individual's value-sensibility. Pirsig defines experience as "the cutting edge of reality", which, to me, is the chisel that carves finite being out of the undifferentiated "otherness" that surrounds us. The otherness that we "carve up" is Essence less the sensibility of our experiential awareness, and the "chisel" is the nothingness of the subjective self which delineates all things as objects in accordance with its (our) proprietary value-sensibility.
As you can see, I think it is a mistake to dispense with subjects and objects for the sake of a grandiose "worldview". We can't escape the fact that existence is a differentiated system which we "co-create" and participate in as individual subjects. Existence is our "reality" as value-sensible beings-aware, but it isn't metaphysical Reality, nor is value its ultimate source. Value doesn't exist unless it is realized, and it is the role of the sensible agent to bring value into the world as beingness. I interpret Plato's question to Phaedrus, "And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good -- need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" as meaning that the realization of value is subjective, not that "morality is universal" as advanced by the Pirsigians.
I hope this gives you some idea of how Value "fits into" my Essentialist ontology, and it's quite a different concept than MoQ's "primary empirical reality". While I can accept value as the essence of experiential reality and man's link to his ultimate source, without a sensible value agent, reality is meaningless.
Welcome aboard, Willblake2, and thanks for the question. Essentially yours, 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/
