Greetings, Steve (and Platt) --
On 8/18 you said to Platt:
I sympathize with this view [that sensibility is the ground
of being and creator of the world]. If consciousness is "value
sensibility" we can also think of
consciousness as what it is like to BE value. And if everything is
Quality, then consciousness goes all
the way down, then we don't need to ask when consciousness
emerged. But I hate to say such things because it sounds
a lot like new-agey nonsense. Oh well.
It is not nonsense at all, Steve. We ARE "conscious of what it is like to
BE value." It's called "experience", and it represents our
value-sensibility as beingness -- as finite 'existents' in the experienced
world of time and space. If you substitute "Value" for "Quality" in the
next sentence, you'll see that it expresses the concept that phenomena
(i.e., everything in existence) is an experiential projection of Value. In
a word, human beings are value sensible creatures.
One other minor adjustment is necessary to make that sentence conform to my
epistemology. Conscious awareness is a finite reduction or derivative of
what I call Sensibility. So, it isn't Consciousness that "goes all the way
down" (because only a creature can be conscious), but the Absolute
Sensibility of the primary source. The same is true with Value, which we
do not experience in its "pure" form but only as representative objects and
events. Yet, as value sensible agents, we are all aware of Value by our
emotional and intellectual response to it.
This is why Platt prefers the term "aesthetic sensibility", because he is a
connoisseur of art and music. However, human sensibility encompasses not
just aesthetic appreciation but qualitative, quantitative, and moralistic
judgments about everthing we experience. It is the "experience generator",
and in that sense value-sensibility is, as Platt says, "the ground of being
and creator of the world." So, although Platt claims to exclude "Ham's
metaphysics", his valuistic view of consciousness actually supports it.
I suspect that, with a little introspection and a less rigid interpretation
of Mr. Pirsig's philosophy, other MoQists here might come to the same
conclusion. (But perhaps that's asking too much.)
Thank you, gentlemen. It's gratifying to know that my influence may have
made a small dent in the official dogma.
Best regards,
Ham
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