[MD] The MOQ and religions.

[Ham Priday]

John and Marsha --

[John, on 12/6]:
> Experience can't be what you describe, either unpatterned or without
> staticity.  The very defining of experience requires a static pattern in
> order to be experienced.  The idea of "before" is itself a static pattern
> of existence relative to time and obviates the pure nullity you postulate,
> imo.
>
> But "unpatterned experience" is far worse because it's a philosophical
> self-contradiction.

[Marsha, on 12/27]:
> Is it a philosophical self-contradiction in the same way as seeing orange
> or blue?  If not, then how is it a philosophical self-contradiction?

[John replies]:
> It's a contradiction because experience is a patterning.  Thus you can't
> have "unpatterned patterning" in a philosophically logical way.  Not
> unless you want to do some explaining of yourself young lady!

[Marsha persists]:
> John,
> Quality is unpatterned experience and patterned experience, so no,
> experience is not necessarily patterned; that can be realized first-hand.
> Experience often involves patterns, but sometimes it does not involve
> patterns.

I have to side with John in this debate, not because experience can't be 
anything we want to call it, but because Pirsig specifically defines it as 
"any pattern that appears long enough to be noticed within the flux of 
immediate experience (i.e. within Dynamic Quality)."  But Marsha is also 
right if you take seriously Pirsig's assertion that "Quality is the first 
slice of undivided experience."  (It is doubtful, however, that a logician 
would accept a thing as "undivided" once sliced.)

The ambiguity in these statements is easily resolved by regarding experience 
as "patterned awareness" and sensibility as the emotive state induced by 
pure (unpatterned) Value.  Pirsig's
holdout for direct ("pre-intellectual") experience to support his 
transcendental Quality is the cause of this confusion, and it has led to 
incomprehensible descriptions like this:
"Immediate experience is experience where there is no distinction between 
what is experienced and the act of experiencing itself." -- [Anthony McWatt: 
Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality]

Epistemologically, experience is clearly both an "act" (which is itself 
differentiated) and the cognizant awareness of "distinctions" or patterns. 
I call experience the process of "objectivizing", and I distinguish it from 
value-sensibility which is primary to experience and esthetic or emotional 
(rather than "intellectual") in nature.  Unfortunately, MoQ's author failed 
to make this distinction.

But more important to philosophy, I think, is the concept that existence is 
a differentiated reality in which All is perceived as "each and every" by a 
subject in relation to its object(s).  Every moment, every experience, every 
thought, every idea is differentiated from every other.  And the substantive 
ground of this reality is the Value from which we are each estranged at 
birth.  We can experience and know only what we construct from this Value --  
good, bad, or indifferent.

Yet, the fact that this pluralistic construction is not chaotic but has an 
order (or "intelligence", if you will) that is universally apprehended and 
appreciated strongly implies a creative source that transcends all 
difference and otherness.  Although Mr. Pirsig would like us to think of 
this source as DQ, I cannot accept Quality as an absolute.  Quality for me 
is only the valuistic "realization" of otherness, and it requires a sensible 
agent.  We are all "One in Essence".  The source I propose is uncreated, 
unconditional, and beyond experience.  It is the essential "not-other" from 
which the appearance of otherness is derived.

I hope this will help to clarify your differences.  Thanks for allowing me 
to intrude in this discussion, and let me take this opportunity to wish you 
both a healthful and spiritually fulfilling New Year.

Essentially yours,
Ham