Greetings Ham, Thank you for the explanation. It doesn't matter what you call me, I use Willblake2 to keep myself in tune with this MoQ forum as opposed to other forums (weird I know). I am fine with the word Value, as it stirs the same feeling as Quality. When I speak of evolutionary, I mean in the simple biological sense of things evolving from the inside out, into a nothingness, in the same way a tree (of life, e.g.) is said to grow out into the open "environment". This conveniently leaves out a forming principle such as Nature, or God, or Quality, that may be doing the manipulative "natural" selection. I suppose "chance" could also be considered a directional force since it does have rules. There is no doubt to me that evolution as we describe it shows direction, and that this is simply a manifestation of the forces under(over)lying it. Or perhaps a dance of nature with a complete interplay at every level.
The fact that a concept such as Value, once statically imposed, may seem contradictory through the subjective evidence of good and bad, does not worry me since it is just a static representation. What I was asking with my question was: Does Value grow from the inside out, or shape from the outside in. Does our reason grow in response to Quality, or create Quality. If it is thought that our reason is a manifestation of Value, then it sounds like Taoism, which I can understand. If Value is indeed directional, that is, shows a preference which can be felt by our sensibilities, then I will need to continue looking for its manifestations. These can perhaps be found in its apparent subjective contradictions (ying yang) that appear on the surface. Thanks, Willblake2 On Mar 15, 2009, at 9:42:41 PM, "Ham Priday" <[email protected]> wrote: From: "Ham Priday" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [MD] Subjectivity in the MOQ Date: March 15, 2009 9:42:41 PM PDT To: [email protected] 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/ 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/
