[MD] Ham on Esthesia

[Ham Priday]

Platt --


> About the only difference I detect between Essence and Quality is in
> the terms "experience" and "awareness." You use the former to express
> the normal subject/object division in human perception whereas Pirsig
> uses "direct experience" to describe what you call "pure awareness."
>
> Perhaps in my eagerness to find compatibility between your philosophy
> and Pirsig's I have seen things that aren't there. I hope you will show
> me where I have gone astray.

That's a diplomatic way of saying, where Ham may have gone astray.  But, as
you know, I'm working independently of Pirsig and feel no obligation -- 
outside of this forum at least -- to "catch up" with this philosopher or try
to conform with him.  I leave that to you folks.

But I'll try to show you where I think "sensible awareness" differs from
proprioceptive (body status) experience of the "sitting on a hot stove"
variety.   (That's a "direct experience", all right; but it's an experience
we can't have without the stove.)

Awareness includes more subtle sensibilities than pain.  It encompasses his
response to and attraction for beauty, his yearning for truth and a cosmic
connection, his need to master and enhance his environment, his compassion
for or resentment of other individuals -- all of which depend on an
objective otherness.  Then there's the intellectual or conceptual faculty -- 
dealing with math, logic and physical laws, which are also abstracted from
his cognizance of otherness.  The very sense of being-in-the-world cannot
exist in a vacuum; it requires the cognizance of a structured, objectified
world.

In a nutshell, my contention is twofold:

1.  Epistemologically, we are all sentient subjects of an objective reality.
2.  Logically, neither Quality nor Value can be the source of that reality.

To account for the appearance of differentiated existence, three
explanations are usually offered:

1.  It was always here.
2.  It was created from a primary source.
3.  It created itself from nothing.

I maintain that #3 is illogical, and that #1 and #2 are logically consistent
with each other.

Furthermore, while the primary source may be conceived as having properties
in common with, or exceptional to, those of the experienced world,
application of Occam's razor and the logic of luminaries throughout history
almost uniformly point to a single, undifferentiated Creator.  The simplest
form of such a primary source is the "prime" form: Absolute Oneness.  But
that Oneness must also have the potentiality to create; that is to say, it
must be an "essence" rather than an "attribute" of something else.  There is
no something else for Essence.  It is the self-contained "not-other".

> One thing we are in total agreement about: "We cannot explain man's
> awareness on biological functions alone." Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and
> their acolytes still have a long way to go to explain how consciousness
> emerges from a lump of meat.

You bet, Platt.  Proprietary awareness is not a byproduct of biological
evolution.  I included this quotation by Philadelphia Inquirer columnist
John Timpane in the introduction to my thesis: "All this new neurobiology
can make people feel as if they are being turned into machines or hunks of
baloney."

Unfortunately, for all his alleged overcoming of duality, Mr. Prisig has not
shown us how it is supposed to benefit the individual.

Essentially yours,
Ham