[MD] [MD} The relativity of the MoQ

[plattholden at gmail.com]

Hey Ham,


On 28 Aug 2009 at 1:04, Ham Priday wrote:

> We view (i.e., experience) the world as pleasurable, beautiful, 
> moral, evil, or hopeless, depending on our value-sensibility.  It is 
> universal and personal at the same time, because we are Nature's beings as 
> well as individuated selves. 

That values are "universal and personal at the same time" is the same 
conclusion Pirsig reached in his SODV paper:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left one enormous 
metaphysical problem unanswered that became the central driving 
reason for the expansion of the Metaphysics of Quality into a second 
book called Lila. This problem was: if Quality is a constant, why does it 
seem so variable? Why do people have different opinions about it? The 
answer became: The quality that was referred to in Zen and the Art of 
Motorcycle Maintenance can be subdivided into Dynamic Quality and 
static quality. Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on 
and on forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the 
wake of this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are 
memories, customs and patterns of nature. The reason there is a 
difference between individual evaluations of quality is that although 
Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are different for 
everyone because each person has a different static pattern of life 
history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the static patterns influence his 
final judgment. That is why there is some uniformity among individual 
value judgments but not complete uniformity."

As I see it, you and Pirsig are not so far apart as you might think.
The major difference is that you emphasize the personal while he 
emphasizes the universal.  Happily, however, when it comes to 
valuation, you both place the individual (intellectual pattern) above the 
collective (social pattern). So does the U.S. (at least until recently), 
which is why the U.S. has been so much more Dynamic than socialist 
Europe. If Obamacare becomes law, however, a return to the 
authoritarian Dark Ages with "death panels" is virtually assured.  

Warm regards,
Platt