[MD] Descartes in a MOQ light.

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Bo --


Glad to see you back in the fray.  Although we had some brief discussions 
concerning the significance of subjectivity a year ago, you took a hiatus 
from this forum before I had an opportunity to fully explore your concept 
that the intellectual level is SOM.  I recently visited the MOQ archives to 
re-read your SOL essay.

As you probably know, I have a problem with the "levels" ontology, and the 
assignment of "intellect", "intelligence", "subject", and "mind" to 
different levels of Quality (value) makes no sense to me.  If you can make 
allowances for this departure from "standard MoQ procedure", I'd like to 
pose this line of thinking on you and get your reaction,

Since ontology is the study of relational being, it deals with physical 
existence which, in my view, is always a subject/object (SOM) relationship. 
Therefore, for me, conscious sensibility (awareness) is the subjective 
"existent", and the intellect or mind is the cognizant faculty of the 
proprietary subject.
That leaves the "objects" of awareness and the "value" they hold for us 
unaccounted for, except as they are defined by the laws of cause-and-effect 
and biological evolution.  However we choose to describe objective 
phenomena, the relational world is pluralistic, and its primary 
characteristic is Difference.  Thus, all knowledge, intelligence, logic, and 
conceptualization is differentiated awareness, and the proprietary self 
(which is the locus of awareness) is also differentiated from every other 
self.

In your essay, you include a diagram showing both a "romantic" and a 
"classic" split of Quality, purportedly based on Pirsig's metaphysical 
construction, and you criticize the author for positing "intellect" as a 
separate kind of Quality.  Here's what you wrote:

> P. toyed with a Quality-based metaphysics to replace the
> S/O-based one, something that resulted in a romantic/classic split
> and as we see from this diagram "Classic Quality", subtitled
> "intellectual", is the S/O aggregate. (ZMM page 243).
>
> The Romantic/Classic split was left for the Dynamic/Static one in LILA,
> but "intellectual quality" remains as a static level and ought to be the
> VALUE of the S/O divide, but Pirsig had found a new way of disposing
> of the S/O, namely the said "standard procedure" that says that the two
> lower levels are "objective" and the two upper are "subjective".

What struck me when I first saw it in your post was the phrase: "the Value 
of the S/O divide."
I don't see value as particularly intellectual, nor is intellect necessarily 
a value (in the Pirsigian sense),  However, I do believe that all value is 
relational, and the S/O divide is the foundation of relations.  So why not 
say that VALUE itself is the subject-object relationship?   Such an onology 
makes a lot of sense to me.

First of all, Value represents the copula between subject and object; it 
binds them together, dynamically reversing the duality.  Secondly, if the 
subject is pre-intellectually aware of its object as the "value of 
otherness", and intellectually objectivizes the value into the appearance of 
finite objects, we have a workable ontology for the creation of a physical 
universe.  Finally, and probably most important to the MoQers, Pirsig can 
still call value Quality and define it as "the primary empirical reality" 
because, metaphysically speaking, Value is the essence of SO existence.

Notice that I have managed to express agreement in large part with your SOL 
argument, and some agreement with Pirsig's ideology, without referring to 
levels and patterns.  Would you oblige me, in turn, with your assessment of 
this ontology, hopefully without "leveling" your response?

Thanks, Bo.

--Ham