[MD] The SOM/MOQ discrepancy.

[kieffer odigaunt]

Hello Ham,

2008/12/11 Ham Priday <hampday1 at verizon.net>

> If you will not read my thesis at www.essentialism.net/mechanic.htm (at
> least before allowing Arlo to persuade you otherwise), allow me to correct
> your speculative assertion.
>

Not 'will not' more 'can not'; I tried your thesis when it wasnt so long a
few years ago - glancing at it again i still find your terminology
inpenetrable and way too long to struggle with after balking at the first
few paragraphs.

>
> Essence is not a deity or a particle that creates a big bang and "then sits
> back while the universe unfolds."  That's the dogma I'm trying to do away
> with.
>

I think i had the particle idea after seeing your diagram of the circle with
the line down the middle - also if essence has an on going effect in the
universe then such a particle came to mind as being necessary for essences
handle on the universe.


> Space/time awareness is the mode of human experience.


Accepted.


> Essence is not subject to such dimensions. It transcends (encompasses)
> evolution and process because it is immutable and undifferentiated.  That's
> why it is incapable of finite description.
>

This is your projection


> All logicial propositions are based on the relational system we call
> existence.  Everything that exists is differentiated from every other by the
> nothingness that divides them.


No they are separated by their different qualities/properties.


> Essence knows/has no nothingness; it is not an 'existent' but absolute
> potentiality.  Creation is not something "added" to a deity, but a negation
> (i.e., reduction) of Essence to actualize Difference.


So you do admit of a deity!


> My philosophy (Essentialism) is predicated on an immanent Source whose
> reality is known to us only by its Value.


This sounds similar to MoQ.


> As value-sensible agents, we are drawn to the source fundamentally by the
> will or "instinct" to survive, philosophically by the need to "know",
> aesthetically by the attraction to symmetry and order, and emotionally by
> our human compassion.


We are only vehicles for the genes and memes; nature has given us the sense
of ourselves as autonomous individuals.


> Thus, value is what drives mankind from differentiated existence back to
> the uncreated Source. In other words, Essentialism is an anthropocentric
> concept of reality.


Our apparent ability to discriminate value now drives human evolution, but
this does not appear to be so for other forms of life on earth.

 The mistake of Pirsig and his interpretors is to posit Value (Quality) as
> primary to existence, thereby rejecting the individual subject without whose
> realization there would be no value.
>

but this sounds very similar to your 'immanent Source whose reality is known
to us only by its Value' above.

Ham, you have said that something cannot come out of nothing and this seems
to me the starting point of your work; but i reject this idea for several
reasons:
i) the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts - we are only a
collection of cells and yet those cells collaborate to give us mind.
ii) if something cannot come out of nothing then where does your Source come
from?
iii) and quoting Hawking 'if the universe is self-contained, having no
boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end; it would simply
be'.

-KO