[MD] What is the MOQ?

[Ham Priday]

[Arlo]:

> Hmm. Can you try to answer this question without evoking
> paragraphs of rhetoric?  Did or did not the universe exist
> before "man"?  And explain to me how your cosmology
> accounts for the first "man"?  Does man appear fully formed?
> Does he evolve out of another animal?  And, while I doubt
> you'll say the second, if so then how did this earlier
> animal exist without "man" to experience it?

"Before" and "after" are time-related precepts to which we are all 
habituated as SOMists.  So the fact that awareness "creates" our experience 
of the world does not change the way evolution works in our scientific 
(intellectual) interpretation of process.  If that's too much rhetoric, I'll 
simply say that, since we experience reality as a sequence of events, Homo 
sapiens as biological creatures appear to have evolved from earlier primates 
in Darwinian fashion.  Pirsigians would call this an SOM ontology, however, 
probably defining evolution as a space/time pattern of quality.

What you fail to appreciate is the principle that experience is primary to 
existence.  Prior to experience there is no time, space, change, or being. 
Experience creates being by differentiating value (by nothingness) into a 
diverse system of objects and events.  Since human beings are 
'beings-aware', awareness is proprietary to the individual.  But because 
there is but one reality, the universe appears identical for each of us, 
relative to our individual locus in space/time.

I should add that it isn't necessary to change our precept of a space/time 
universe for all practical purposes.  But for a philosopher who believes in 
an undifferentiated, immutable source, some other cosmology is needed to 
account for actualized existence.  Pirsig appears to have convinced a number 
of people that the world of appearances can be explained by 
compartmentalizing Quality.  Other philosophers have postulated Being or 
Consciousness as the primary source.  I find these metaphysical sources 
inadequate because they all presuppose a division of cognitive subjectivity 
and objective physicality.  Instead, I opted for Essence which may be 
conceived as an absolute "Is-ness" that encompasses all without opposition, 
transition, or differentiation.  Everything else is a reduced (redacted?) 
appearance of Essence.

> And, I have no desire to "ponder" solipsism.
> But thanks for asking.

The essentialist ontology is not solipsism, although Essence itself may be.
And thanks for the questions you have asked.

Regards.
Ham