[MD] Intention changes physical world

[Case]

[Ham]
The subjective is AWARENESS of being.  You can't reduce existence to
subjectivity, to awareness with no object.  Pure awareness is nothingness;
awareness always presupposes a referent.  We cannot escape the dichotomy.

[Case]
I seriously doubt if we are going to get much past this point. Aware beings
are a subset of beings. Rocks are. But rocks are not aware. Awareness does
not exist in the absence of beingness. I do not see any meaning at all in
the term "pure awareness". One might say awareness is a property of being
like solidity.

[Ham]
To use your terminology, any "aspect" of Quality must be derived from
Quality itself.  Inasmuch as quality is a cognizant or subjective value it
is relative (i.e., conditional with reference to something else), hence it
cannot logically be its own source, which is why I don't equate Essence to
Quality or Value.

[Case]
First this is not my terminology it is Pirsig's and I have complained about
myself many times. Quality to me is the Tao. It is formless and nameless. I
have a particular relationship to it I suppose but whatever subjective value
it may have is mine or yours. We can construct whatever metaphorical fingers
we would like to point at it but the best we can hope for in this respect is
that sometimes it looks like this or that. But I don't really puzzle much
over its true nature. It is an idea of such marvelous ambiguity that it
means everything and nothing at the same time.

[Ham]
Right.  Awareness does not exist in the absence of being.  Even in a dream,
we are aware of objects external to us; we're simply recollecting,
"reliving" what we've experienced in the conscious state.  I don't see this
as a valid objection; it doesn't dispel or refute the S/O dichotomy.

[Case]
If awareness can not exist without being as you seem to agree here but
something can be but not be aware, how do being and awareness constitute a
dichotomy? Beyond this "SOMist" is one of the labels that has been slung at
me before and by people who actually think it's a bad thing. Pirsig does not
get rid of SOM he just gives a different way of looking at it. He does not
say it is naughty, don't use it anymore in fact he uses it himself.

[Ham]
Conscious awareness is a psychic entity without beingness of its own.  The
body that you identify with your awareness is not self-created; it's
"borrowed" from otherness. Awareness has no existential attributes.  It
cannot be compared to states of matter.

[Case]
You are getting real close to the line with the psychic business. There is
no awareness without being. My body IS self organizing. It does create and
recreate itself constantly. In fact to accomplish this it borrows a slurp of
iced tea here, a gulp of chicken soup there, the occasional bag of Doritos
and sucks in massive quantities of oxygen. From this process emerges very
little physical activity but lots of random musings generally manifest as
hot air. 

But the point is that awareness does not exist in the absence of matter and
it seems to prefer really complex configurations of matter to survive. I
would like to say it is a state of matter but I would be willing to back off
a bit and say it is a state of complexity.

[Ham]
You have to distinguish negation as an arithmetical or logical "proposition"
from negation that actualizes physical reality.  It's like the distinction
between cosmogony (dialectial, theoretical) and cosmology (literal, actual).

Hegel's epistemology of actualized reality is a better model than Gardner's.
He bases his primary source on Being rather than Essence, but postulates
that it is negated -- that is, reflected in an image or "recognized" --
which implies subjective cognizance of an objective "other".  He goes on to
explain that this reflection of Being is an "appearance" that "is also the
proximate truth of [Essence]" in the sense that it contains Essence in an
objective form.

According to Hegel, Appearance is the negation of the negation of Being,
whereas Actuality is the negation of the negation of Essence.  By "negation
of the negation of Being," he is alluding to a secondary negation -- one
performed by the negated self, as opposed to primary negation which is the
negation or denial of nothingness that actualizes existence.  Objective
experience is the result of the appearance of beingness negated from
undifferentiated otherness by the negate.

[Case]
I think the problem with Hegel and Kant and all those dudes laboring before
the last half of the 20th century is that they just did not have access to
the information they needed to simplify their speculations.

All that negating just gives me a headache. Human beings are able to record
experience into memory and access memory randomly. The source of memory is
sensation and perception. The source of these is whatever is out there in
the real world. But we access only our experience and memory of them never
them directly.

I apologize for being obstinate but I really don't have the stomach for
Hegel.

[Ham]
And you won't, until you understand that awareness is not a derivative of
being.
In the philosophy of Essence, the primary source is beyond being and
awareness.
Essence creates the dichotomy that actualizes being-aware.  Cognizant
awareness, in turn, objectivizes (differentiates) all existential phenomena.

[Case]
I can live with that. Awareness is a property of being. I have no reason
whatever to think that it exists in a disembodied state. Nor do I see the
relevance of a primary source but if there is one I see no reason why I
should be unaware of it.

[Ham]
You've got the epistemology right.  However, Value does not evolve from
biology or physical beingness; instead it fuels the intellect to construct
them.  What has been "actualized" by Essence is negated by the subject's
becoming aware.  I see this as a reciprocal principle: the primary negation
establishes awareness-of-otherness.  By acquiring the Value of otherness for
itself, subjective awareness incrementally annuls the effect of primary
negation, gradually restoring "actuality" to "essentiality", and in the
process experiencing otherness as "things".  In this way, Essence remains
undivided, unconditional, and (perhaps) refreshed by this independent
affirmation of its Value.

[Case]
Maybe if you treated all these negations as mathematical, some of them could
cancel out and you would be able to just make straight forward statements
about things. I have tried to read the paragraph above three or four times
and it just goes round and round. It is as though you are trying to
construct a mechanical process out of abstractions. This abstraction must do
this or negate that...

Value does most certainly evolve from physical and biological processes. We
place positive Value on the things that promote and enhance our being and
negative Value on things that don't.

But I don't even know what you are trying to show here. Are you trying to
account for existence? 

[Ham]
That's because you are bound to the belief that reality is fundamentally
rooted in beingness which must therefore incorporate awareness.  (And I
thought Pirsig had "overcome" positivist objectivism!)  Again, awareness is
NOT beingness.  It's a psychic propensity that's only contingent on being.
We can't create it, localize it, measure it, universalize it, predict it, or
even prove it.  By all scientific and empirical criteria awareness doesn't
exist.  Yet it's the subjective core of all that you value.

[Case]
I do think that reality requires being but I do not think it requires or has
even long contained awareness. If awareness is what this is all about then
there is plenty of material from psycho-biology and the social sciences that
explores its qualities and limitations. These are fields replete with
controversy and theory but they are focused on the facts discovered. They
only make up terms and traffic in abstraction when they can find a good
reason for doing so. I don't see such a reason in what you have said so far.

[Ham]
Think upon it, Case.  Even an intractable existentialist like yourself is
capable of having second thoughts ;-).

[Case]
I have second, third and fourth thoughts all the time. But really our tracks
are on like separate continents here. I can't imagine what possessed you to
think along these lines in the first place. It is not so much that you are
off track or on a different track. It's more like a different kind of track
made for vehicles with square wheels.

Ok, that last bit was kind of mean but I have been relatively nice and could
restrain the inner beast no longer.