[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

[Krimel]
Even Ham knows that experience is a personal thing. On this particular point
the MoQ is entirely in the realm of subjective. When each of us has an
experience that experience is primary and we as individuals infer subjects
and objects from it. We distinguish self from other. Claiming that reality
IS experience the way you do confuses the reality of each individual with
the reality from which each of us emerges, inorganically, biologically,
socially and intellectually. This is not metaphysics it is psychology. 

Ron:
What is the difference between the reality of each individual and the
reality they emerge from? Can you make that distinction? if not, why?
because you may only know your own experience and can never know what
"true" reality is, therefore how is it confused if the distinction
can't possibly be made or comprehended? 

[Krimel]
That which is born into the world lives a short span and dies. Within that
short span the living make all the reality they will ever know. But three
score years and ten in not enough time to build stars or galaxies or even
cypress trees that sprouted long before the birth of Jesus. To be part of a
process is not to be the process; neither is it to be separate from the
process. I know the truth of my own life. I am who I was. I am who I am. I
am not yet who I am becoming. We emerge from what came before and we create
some portion of what will be.

[Ron]
Krimel, It perplexes me how you can understand that reality is composed of
fields of energy yet still maintain that the self is a separate and distinct
"entity". How is this? 

[Krimel]
A single bubble is not the head on a glass of beer but it is not separate
from it either.

If we are not separate entities perhaps you will recall what kind of beer I
had for lunch.

[Krimel]
Regardless of where it originates the idea that dynamic quality is good or
better or best strips it of being meaningful or useful. It once again is
Pirsig pointing at the moon but missing the mark.

Ron:
" Regardless of where it originates" sheesh who are you sounding like?,
Greek "Good" was "excellence" or "virtue", Essentialism attributes
excellence as a possession as an attribute of  a kind of person or of the
way one thinks. It objectifies the concept, it makes the action an entity
possessed. Doing this destroys the notion of Greek "excellence".

Greek Excellence is the state or quality of excelling, it is an act of
doing. It is dynamic. 

[Krimel]
These are the attributes that Pirsig ascribes to Quality in ZMM. DQ is a
product of Lila. I have said over and over that it is a mistake to conflate
the two. It amounts to nothing less that removing Quality from the
Metaphysics of Quality.

[Ron]
In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes every virtue as a balance
point between a deficiency and an excess of a trait. The point of greatest
virtue lies not in the exact middle, but at a "golden mean" closer to one of
the extremes than the other.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic, said that perfect prudence is indistinguishable
from perfect virtue. Thus, in considering all consequences, a prudent person
would act in the same way as a virtuous person.

The same rationale was followed by Plato in Meno, when he wrote that people
only act for what they perceive will maximize the good. It is the lack of
wisdom which results in the making of a bad choice, rather than a good one.
In this way, wisdom is the central part of virtue. However, he realized that
if virtue was synonymous with wisdom, then it could be taught, a possibility
he had earlier discounted. 

Ron: and here is the sinker:

He then added "correct belief" as an alternative to knowledge, proposing
that knowledge is merely correct belief that has been thought through and
"tethered". 

[Krimel]
Ron, please stop quoting the Wiki to us. Either pass on a link or put it in
quotes or better yet tell us what you think it means.

Ron;
Here's a use, stop clinging to essentialist notions and use it as just one
way of describing phenomena in lieu of THE way, which is what Dave was
trying to say, it opens you up to other ways of looking at phenomena
which when averaged, may provide a MEAN which may be more accurate than
pure, swallowed hook, line and sinker essentialism of self-other
metaphysics. 

[Krimel]
I don't think that's what Dave is saying at all. What you describe was a
version of "essence" that in modern times would be subsumed under set
theory; essence as the defining characteristics of a set. These
characteristic would not as you claim be the defining attributes of any
particular thing but would determine whether a particular thing is a member
of a sets. What I was criticizing was Dave use of essentialism as synonomous
with monism.

And I have never pointed to any single way and said it was THE way. Dave
appears to be saying that within the MoQ there is no ontology. As I
understand it ontology is about "what is". If, within the MoQ there is
nothing, as he says, that really doesn't leave us much to know. Since
epistemology is supposed to be about knowing that pretty much eliminates
that. Without ontology or epistemology Dave's metaphysics seem little more
than a Cheshire Cat grinning in a void.