[MD] Heads or tails?

[Krimel]

[Ham]
If you write a novel about John and Alice who fall in love and get married, 
do you worry about the genetic probabilty that Alice may bear an autistic 
child?  Or that John's future is doomed by a decision he made ten years 
earlier?  No, because since you create the story, you set the rules for what

transpires.

[Krimel]
Certainly with a novel, readers expect to suspend disbelief. But most
readers are only willing to do this in-so-far as the novel makes sense, that
the writer speaks clearly and earns the readers trust.

[Ham]
According to Pirsig's MoQ and Priday's Essentialism, experience creates the 
universe.  

[Krimel]
This is an easily abused notion. Experience is a process of acquiring and
categorizing sense data. Don't you think it is slightly relevant how this
process works? 

[Ham]
If this is true, then the physical laws and principles that we 
observe in the evolution of nature are no more intrinsic to the universe 
than our experience of it.  That goes for quantum mechanics, Newton's 
physics, and the laws of probabilty.  All of these "relational attributes" 
are intellectual constructs that have their basis in the empirical world of 
our creation.

[Krimel]
Intrinsic or not these laws, the stuff we can say about nature, are not
arbitrary either. We don't just make them up. They must withstand scrutiny.
What we can say about them is limited by how well experience conforms to our
descriptions and visa versa.

> [Krimel]
> This ultimate reality you mention; what makes it ultimate?

[Ham]
Something has to be fundamental or "ultimate" to reality, whether it's a 
Supreme Being, Dynamic Quality, absolute Nothingness, or absolute Essence. 
I have posited Essence as the primary source of actualized reality. It is 
my ontology. What's yours?

[Krimel]
Just saying that something "has to be fundamental" does not make it so. Why
is anything like this "required"? You say it is, but not why. 

My ontology? Hmm, shit happens and if you watch it long enough patterns
emerge and reoccur. When we see them let's write it down and compare notes.


> [Krimel, referring to the Lao-Tzu quote]:
> Nice poem, Ham! Where ever did you find it?
> It applies beautifully. Is there more?

[Ham]
I copied it from a small volume titled "The Way of Life according to Lao 
Tzu" translated by Witter Bynner, Perigee Books(1962) [ISBN-10:0399502416], 
available from Amazon.com for $6.45.  Here's the complete poem which has no 
title:

[Krimel]
Check the title page. I think you will find it says: "Way of Life According
to Lao Tzu: An American Version (Tao Te Ching)" Nice book, it has been
translated a lot. I recommend highly it. It is discussed on this forum
frequently. Unless your translator has deviated way off course the verses
are numbered.

You should start at the beginning. I believe you will find that what is
discussed in that book is what Pirsig renames Quality. I think this was a
bad move on Pirsig's part. The Tao is The Way. Notice your translation's
title... "The Way of Life... get it? It is usually called The Way of Virtue.
But your version is for Americans so what can you expect...

...complete poem... sheesh...

[Ham]
Value, as I understand it, is man's sensibility of Essence whose "net value"

is absolute.  Essence itself is indivisible and cannot be perceived 
differentially.  Since man's awareness is relational, he relates value to 
the finite phenomena (beingness) that he "objectivizes" from his 
value-sense.  

[Krimel]
Here is a concrete example of sensibility of net value: family resemblance.
Take any large family of your acquaintance. After you know a lot of family
members, you begin to see this family resemblance. It is not as though the
family members are identical. Various members may have similar features;
uncles with the same nose, sisters with similar ears, hair color and texture
etc. It is not as though any particular trait or cluster of traits is
universal to the family. But certain features appear often enough that you
begin to see the "family resemblance". It is a fuzzy set but it is
detectable by most of us. 

You could say that this set, shared in part by all members but possess in
full by none of them is the "essence" of the family's phenotype. Essences
are sensed as difference and compiled into similarity. Essence is not
something that exists independently and produces sensation it is something
that is derived from sensation.

[Ham]
In my Creation hypothesis, existence is negated from Essence 
as a self/other dichotomy that is "glued together" by the value of the 
source.  

[Krimel]
Just what the world needs another "creation hypothesis". Maybe you could
expand on what you mean by hypothesis. In modern usage it usually means a
formulation that is testable.

The way you use the word sounds more like this, from wiki:

"In early usage, scholars often referred to a clever idea or to a convenient
mathematical approach that simplified cumbersome calculations as a
hypothesis; when used this way, the word did not necessarily have any
specific meaning. Cardinal Bellarmine gave a famous example of the older
sense of the word in the warning issued to Galileo in the early 17th
century: that he must not treat the motion of the Earth as a reality, but
merely as a hypothesis."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis 

Newton firmly rejected this definition, stating in the Principia, "I feign
no hypotheses". He was not claiming that his laws of motion were merely
clever ideas. He was offering a description for how objects behave in real
life.

[Ham]
Thus, value is a differentiated representation of Essence that is 
manifested in the objects and events of a relational universe.  Since we all

observe the absolute source in the same relative way, our "quantitative" 
experience of objective reality is universal, while our "qualitative" 
(valuistic) realization is proprietary to each individual.  The "net result"

of the life-experience is that what is negated as difference is affirmed by 
being-aware as value, which (from the absolute perspective) is the Oneness 
of Essence.

{Krimel]
So how do you know whether Essence is being differentiated from, or complied
out of experience? How can you possibly say which direction the
fragmentation is running? I think it is just as proper to say that
commonality or Essence is derived by negation of the differences we see in
the objects of perception. 

[Ham]
History is only man's incremental view of a valuistic otherness, the reality

of which is his experience.  The biological brain is incapable of absolute 
cognizance, but the value-sense which is innate to each self affords an 
independent perspective of otherness as "being".  It is this sense of value 
that is man's inexorable link to the absolute source.

[Krimel]
History is memory. It is formulated incrementally by individuals as personal
history. It is recorded with increasing fidelity collectively, first as
spoken word, then as written word, then as printed word, then as photos and
film and audio tape and now as digital media. 

The present era is a dangerous time precisely because we are losing our
ability to forget.

[Ham]
Space/time is the dimensional mode of human experience.  Value is the 
essence of that experience.  Existence could not be more than what is 
experienced because we create what we experience.

[Krimel]
My own opinion is that if you spent less time speculating and positing and
focused a bit on how we construct our personal realities and what our
"theories" actually tell us and how they work, you would be taken a bit more
seriously. At least then when you use a term like space/time we could have
some confidence that you knew what you were talking about.

[Ham]
How does Pirsig know that Quality is the "primary empirical reality"?

I don't "know" these things as objective facts.  I intuit them by 
introspection, logical analysis, and with the help of luminaries like 
Plotinus, Cusa, Eckhart, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Heidegger.  (I also try to

rule out "maybes" according to the principle of Occam's Razor.)

[Krimel]
I ran across this just yesterday in a lecture series on the philosophy of
religion by James Hall of the University of Richmond. In his first lecture
in the process of defining what philosophy is, he says this:

"Philosophy is about having reasons for what you think and until the reasons
show themselves, skepticism does crop up fairly often.  Philosophy is a kind
of reflective thought; leaning back in your chair reflecting, thinking. That
leads people to think that philosophy amounts to just rank speculation.
Philosophy is just irresponsible sitting back in your study with your feet
up, freewheeling without any kind of responsibility to evidence or anything
of the sort. Well I will have to admit that historically there have been
philosophers, who did that; who really wouldn't recognize a controlled
variable experiment or a test if they ran into it on the street. But in the
20th century, at any rate, philosophy as just speculation or just free
wheeling reflection on this, that or the other, really, really won't cut it
any more."

I recommend that you print this and tape it to your refrigerator and check
your list above. If you cross out the rank speculators you won't have much
of a list left.

Note:
I think what is really at the heart of your thinking but which you seldom
mention is this:

You do not want to die. 

You are really just constructing a logical façade that lets you believe you
will live forever, that some "essence" of you will survive for eternity.

You would rather invent your own language than accept what is stated clearly
in the Jewish scriptures: 

"Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour
that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of
spirit, and there was no profit under the sun."