[MD] The percolating SOL

[david buchanan]

Marsah said:
I would never claim to be able to think backwards, so I have no speculation about a primary cause.   But my answer to Ham, ' The previous value event.' was based on my experience of meditation.  Would that be goofy, Dave?

dmb says:
It was Ham's question that I found goofy and fake. But since you're asking, I think your answer to that goofy question was contradicted by the Pirsig quote you posted later. Value or Quality is the first thing we know and I see no reason to posit anything prior to the first thing we know. Besides, to say that the previous value comes before value isn't really an answer at all. It just repeats the question or rather begs for a repetition of the same question. What is the cause of value? What is the cause of the previous value? Or the one before that or the one before that, etc..
Like time and space and all those other Kantian intuitions, causality is deduced from experience. We can see that one event repeatedly follows another but we never see causality. Pirsig goes beyond all this but...
>From chapter 11 of ZAMM:
"Secondly, if one starts with the premise that all our knowledge comes to us through our senses, one must ask, From what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself?
Hume's answer is "None." There's no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it's just something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. It has no real existence in the world we observe. If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one must logically conclude that both "Nature" and "Nature's laws" are creations of our own imagination.
This idea that the entire world is within one's own mind could be dismissed as absurd if Hume had just thrown it out for speculation. But he was making it an airtight case.
To throw out Hume's conclusions was necessary, but unfortunately he had arrived at them in such a way that it was seemingly impossible to throw them out without abandoning empirical reason itself and retiring into some medieval predecessor of empirical reason. This Kant would not do. Thus it was Hume, Kant said, who "aroused me from my dogmatic slumbers" and caused him to write what is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophical treatises ever written, the Critique of Pure Reason, often the subject of an entire University course.
Kant is trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic. He starts out at first along the path that Hume has set before him. "That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt," he says, but he soon departs from the path by denying that all components of knowledge come from the senses at the moment the sense data are received. "But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn't follow that it arises out of experience."
This seems, at first, as though he is picking nits, but he isn't. As a result of this difference, Kant skirts right around the abyss of solipsism that Hume's path leads to and proceeds on an entirely new and different path of his own.
Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses. These he calls a priori. An example of a priori knowledge is "time." You don't see time. Neither do you hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it. It isn't present in the sense data as they are received. Time is what Kant calls an "intuition," which the mind must supply as it receives the sense data."



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