Dear Mark, Gav and Marsha -- Mark says:
I can correlate "responses to Quality" to say that what Ham terms: "reality of experience [being] relational", is in fact "responses to Quality". From ZAMM, I do not believe that a premise of absoluteness contradicts what Pirsig has written, so I am unclear what Ham is referring to.
Ham is referring to Pirsig's postulate that Quality equals Reality. This is inconsistent with his pronouncement that "experience is the cutting edge of reality." If Quality is fixed as a constant of the universe, it canot be modified or actualized by experience, for experience is relative to the subject 'I'. In short, experience serves no purpose in Pirsig's cosmology.
I believe that Ham's premise is that there is no reality outside our own, which does indeed have relativistic tones. To say this would imply that when we die, the world dies. In my opinion, experience is but a part of existence. There is a reality outside of experience, there has to be else wise we are just negating nothingness in a vacuum.
I am NOT saying that there is no reality outside of our own. I am saying that "existence" is our own reality, and that it's experiential and relational. Ultimate Reality transcends existence, and is absolute and unconditional. What happens when we die is another question beyond the scope of the present discussion.
This may be assumed to be so, but then what is regulating how we create our reality? Who is making that decision? What we experience is our brain in a constant dance with that outside. So are we the brain, or are we the dance? If we are the dance, where does the music come from?
There is no "regulation". WE (as free subjects) are the creators of our experiential reality. We make the decisions and "dance the dance". We dance to Essential Value, the music played by an orchestra we cannot see, hear or experience. We set the rythym for this dance according to our measure of its Value to us.
Now, I would also add that Quality denies empirical Truths such as Ham proposes. Indeed if "truth is relative", then even that statement is relative in itself. This notion would deny any kind of scaffolding to anything and would result in some kind of existential meaninglessness. Worse yet, it would also relegate all opinions to meaningless statements. I believe we are beyond that point. There is a context to our realities.
Quality (Value) neither denies nor affirms. WE are the active agents of our reality. It is we ourselves who affirm its value by objectivizing our being-in-existence to represent it. The meaning of existence is implied by Mark's assertion: "There is a reality outside of experience, there HAS TO BE." No one can deny this, nor can anyone prove it as Truth. That is what sets us free to measure this reality in our own valuistic terms. What we are measuring and definining is relational Value, the ground of our existential reality. Relative values, such as Quality and Morality, are defined experientially by man. What philosophers strive to achieve is a hypothesis (metaphysics) that explains the Ultimate Reality beyond experience and man's relation to it.
Essentially speaking, 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/
