[MD] Quick one: causation

[Ham Priday]

Bo, Chris, Marsha --


Here's the gist of what Pisig says about causation in LILA:

   "The only difference between causation and value is that
    the word 'cause' implies absolute certainty whereas the
    implied meaning of "value" is one of preference."

I would suggest that there is another difference: the passage of time. 
Without the temporal dimension (of human experience), causation as the 
direct result of a prior action or event would be impossible.  If time is 
the mode of experience, rather than an inherent property of existence, Value 
is "causative" non-sequentially, while "preference" remains the property of 
the observing subject.  Creation then becomes a differentiated product of 
experience with Value as its source.  I define the subject of existence as 
value-sensibility, and the "actualized" world of experience as its creation. 
This avoids the necessity of chicken-and-egg, cause-and-effect scenarios and 
the "forests of pulpwood" which Pirsig laments being sacrificed to debate 
the issue.

Marsha says to David Swift:
> I hope that your strictly physical performance is some kind of
> interpretative dance, because if you are going to use words to
> explain it will have a mental component.

That's a red herring, Marsha.  There is no alternative to words for 
explication, which is why we have philosophy.

Bo says to Chris:
> As you will see this is the "ordinary" - in SOM-speak - physical
> causation Pirsig talks about, iron filings caused into a particular
> pattern by a magnet, and although his observation may be
> philosophically valid it sounds a bit contrived -- No causation
> because ...."we don't see it, touch it, hear it or feel it".  By such
> criterions a lot of phenomena become paradoxical.

I agree.  Iron filings "preferring" attachment to a magnet is a contrivance 
by any standard and is epistemologically unsound.  Preference requires 
sensibility, for one thing, and by what neuro-physiological principle does 
the author ascribe sensibility to an inert scrap of iron?  Clearly, desire 
and preference are exclusive to psycho-emotional subjectivity.  And, Bo, as 
I've said before, when you reject subjects and objects, you eliminate Value.
[Bo, continues]:
> As said I don't believe that value versions of the scientific
> disciplines (f.ex. a Q-physics where "B values precondition A")
> has a future. The SOL presents a more elegant solution by saying
> that intellect's S/O has created all paradoxes (while SOM) as
> MOQ's 4th. static level they all dissolve witout a trace.

Yes, but it isn't "intellect's S/O", it's the INDIVIDUAL's experiential S/O. 
Intellect is the cognitive capacity of a human being, not a level of Value. 
Difference is derived from the primary split between Sensibility and 
objective Otherness.  That's how we become individuated beings who 
differentiate Value into the multifold objects of our experiential reality.

Pirsig also asks something else that is controversial in a later paragraph 
(Chpt. 8) than the one quoted above:

    "But if there is no substance, it must be asked, why isn't
    everything chaotic?  Why do our experiences _act_ as if
    they inhere in something?  When you pick up a glass of water,
    why don't the properties of that glass go flying off in all directions?"

In point of fact, they do.  Hydrogen and oxygen atoms diffuse into the 
atmosphere, photons are reflected from the glass, and thermal energy from 
your hand is transferred to the water.  It just so happens that we don't 
experience these properties, just as we don't experience being bombarded 
constantly by x-rays, rf waves, and variations in atmospheric pressure and 
electro-magnetic fields.  I dare say, if we were able to experience 
everything going on in the cosmos, it WOULD be "chaotic".  Fortunately, we 
are designed to experience only a finite fraction of these happenings, and 
we intellectualize only the sensible events as "physical reality", negating 
all the rest as "nothigness".  That's the selective process by which human 
beings make order and continuity out of non-symmetry and chaos.

> This quandary will never be resolved from the premises that
> S/O is reality's deepest split. MOQ's dynamic/static premises
> must be applied and in this context all S/Os are STATIC
> intellectual patterns - included psychological/physical - and
> only valid at that level. No need to look for SOM problems
> that have been solved by the MOQ.

Again, "patterning" is the work of the human intellect.  Patterns themselves 
are not metaphysical reality; they are only intellectual projections of 
beingness that represent the values to which we subscribe.  The 
differentiated universe is our actualized world, a product of the 
sensibility/otherness dichotomy.  All the laws of cause-and-effect, logic, 
mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences are derived from human 
experience.  We depend upon them to survive and flourish as a value-sensible 
species.  But they are not innate or essential to ultimate reality.

Essentially yours,
Ham