[MD] MOQ levels

[Ham Priday]

Hi Steve --

I previously stated that it seems unreasonable to put so much emphasis on 
the differences between inorganic, organic, and social phenomena without 
regard to other attributes of experienced reality, including time, space, 
contrariety, evolution, consciousness, esthetics, freedom, and desire, all 
of which seem far more significant to the history of civilization..

[Steve]:
> These are inorganic patterns

Do you then consider biological evolution (change in time and space) an 
"inorganic pattern"?   Or, is it only a pattern at a specific time?  For me, 
organic development, such as the evolution of the species, is the nature of 
biological life forms.  Why what logic is a biological pattern called 
inorganic?

I included "contrariety" (meaning opposition and differentiation) and 
consciousness (cognizant experience) as major attributes of physical 
reality.  You questioned both, and said this about consciousness:

> Consciousness is a deduction from reality = Quality
> just as subjects and objects are or depending on what
> you mean by consciousness you could equate it with Quality.

It seems that, according to the MOQ, everything can be equated with Quality, 
But the word "every thing", like plurality and multiplicity, connotes 
difference rather than unity.  You can't make something out of nothing, and 
you can't make a monad out of what is differentiated, which is what DQ is 
claimed to represent.

You also said this about "freedom", another aspect of subjectively 
experienced reality:

> Freedom is a negative. It says that something is bad not
> what is good.  The MOQ translated freedom into this:
> "too much static is bad, a little more dynamic would be good."

That's incredulous!  Not to be annoying, but I have never before heard 
freedom referred to as "negative", with the possible exception of quotes 
from the Koran.  Do you really mean to suggest that the MoQ regards 
individual freedom as "bad"?   If you can support this assertion by a Pirsig 
quote, it will save me a lot of time, since it's antithetical to anything 
I've said about my philosophy and contradicts anything I've read (or hope to 
see) in traditional philosophy.

[skip]

> Maybe it would help to go to the origin of the MOQ.
> Pirsig was charged with teaching quality, but he couldn't
> define what it was. He concluded it could not be defined
> but that everyone knows what it is. His colleagues asked
> him if quality exists in the subject or the object.
> How would you respond to that question?

I address this question in my book (in terms of beauty) roughly as follows:

The aesthetician Umberto Eco posed the question: "Is beauty something 
ontologically self-subsistent, which gives pleasure when it is apprehended? 
Or is it rather the case that a thing appears beautiful only when someone 
apprehends it in such a way as to experience a certain type of pleasure?" 
Years before, Augustine had posed much the same question: "If I were to ask 
first whether things are beautiful because they give pleasure, or give 
pleasure because they are beautiful, I have no doubt that I will be given 
the answer that they give pleasure because they are beautiful."   David Hume 
believed that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," while Immanuel Kant 
maintained that beauty is not an objective quality, and our judgment about 
it is not empirical or arrived at through consensus, but is based on the 
observer's perception.

My own answer is that Value (MOQ's Quality) is what connects subjective 
awareness to its objective other.  The cognizant locus of existence is 
individuated value-sensibility.  Thus, Value is the copula in "being-aware". 
What is observed by the individual subject (self) is essentially the value 
of its otherness.  That otherness is broken down by the intellect into the 
things and events of one's actualized (space/time) being.  As I said before, 
a world that is not realized is a world without value.  Which goes for 
Quality, as well.

Regards,
Ham