[MD] Consciousness (explained?)

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Steve (and Platt) -- 


On 8/18 you said to Platt:

> I sympathize with this view [that sensibility is the ground
> of being and creator of the world].  If consciousness is "value 
> sensibility" we can also think of
> consciousness as what it is like to BE value.   And if everything is 
> Quality, then consciousness goes all
> the way down, then we don't need to ask when consciousness
> emerged.  But I hate to say such things because it sounds
> a lot like new-agey nonsense. Oh well.

It is not nonsense at all, Steve.  We ARE "conscious of what it is like to 
BE value."  It's called "experience", and it represents our 
value-sensibility as beingness -- as finite 'existents' in the experienced 
world of time and space.  If you substitute "Value" for "Quality" in the 
next sentence, you'll see that it expresses the concept that phenomena 
(i.e., everything in existence) is an experiential projection of Value.  In 
a word, human beings are value sensible creatures.

One other minor adjustment is necessary to make that sentence conform to my 
epistemology.  Conscious awareness is a finite reduction or derivative of 
what I call Sensibility.  So, it isn't Consciousness that "goes all the way 
down" (because only a creature can be conscious), but the Absolute 
Sensibility of the primary source.   The same is true with Value, which we 
do not experience in its "pure" form but only as representative objects and 
events.  Yet, as value sensible agents, we are all aware of Value by our 
emotional and intellectual response to it.

This is why Platt prefers the term "aesthetic sensibility", because he is a 
connoisseur of art and music.  However, human sensibility encompasses not 
just aesthetic appreciation but qualitative, quantitative, and moralistic 
judgments about everthing we experience.  It is the "experience generator", 
and in that sense value-sensibility is, as Platt says, "the ground of being 
and creator of the world."  So, although Platt claims to exclude "Ham's 
metaphysics", his valuistic view of consciousness actually supports it.

I suspect that, with a little introspection and a less rigid interpretation 
of Mr. Pirsig's philosophy, other MoQists here might come to the same 
conclusion.  (But perhaps that's asking too much.)

Thank you, gentlemen.  It's gratifying to know that my influence may have 
made a small dent in the official dogma.

Best regards,
Ham