[MD] Quick one: causation

[Ham Priday]

Bo --

You think and write with such clarity, it's amazing to me that your ontology 
can be so confused (or is "conflated" the proper word?).

On 1/14 you wrote:
> In my post to David (Swift) I said that Kant deemed TIME along
> with SPACE and CAUSATION to be "modes of perception" so
> in a Kantian context you are right, time is a subjective filter that must
> exist "apriori" in the subject for it to make sense of experience, but
> then Kant was the ultimate somist and we are not somist.

Since we all live as existents in an SOM reality, our experience and 
conclusions establish a perspective "in the Kantian context".  There should 
be no disagreement as to how this SOM reality is constituted because it is 
the world we relate to and interact with on a daily basis.  Yet, in our 
discussions, you persist in reassembling commonly acknowledged attributes of 
human perception into an artificial paradigm that "dehumanizes" them, 
stripping man of his full cognitive capacities.  Now I realize that your 
worldview is heavily influenced by Pirsig's Quality thesis.  But if we can't 
agree on the constitutents of empirical reality, how can we ever expect to 
reach accord on metaphysical reality?

I assume your comment to D. Swift concerned his assertion that "Quality is a 
physical thing", which may have been in deference to Chris's "physical 
theory of causation".  In any case, if "Time, along with Space and 
Causation" are modes of human perception (i.e., experience), then Time is 
not a "subjective filter" a priori to the subject, it is integral to the 
nature of subjectivity.  Or, more precisely, space/time is the dimensional 
factor of human experience that limits subjective awareness to the "here" 
and "now".  "Filter" is a useful term for describing the limited range of 
the brain and sensory system in interpreting experience.  Because sensory 
information is filtered by this organic limitation, experience is 
incremental, and we perceive (intellectualize) objective reality 
incrementally, as a continuum of events occurring serially in space, 
relative to ourselves.

[Ham, previously]:
> 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 ...

[Bo]:
> Here you are back at the "man the measure" idea.  Existence a
> result of Value's interaction with the subject, but as we know Pirsig
> had left that in LILA's MOQ. There is the Dynamic Value that has
> spawned the known Static levels ... and only on the intellectual
> level did mankind start to speculate about time and space and
> causation.

Yes, dear Bo, man is the measure of Truth and Value in existence.  And man's 
"being in the world" is Value's interaction with the subject, whether Pirsig 
had second thoughts about that concept or not.  As for Dynamic Value 
spawning Static Values, I'll admit to total incomprehension of what that 
means.  But this postulate, like the "intellectual level", verges on 
metaphysical theory and should not discombobulate what we already know about 
SOM reality.

I also suggested (to Marsha) that we have philosophy because there is no 
alternative to words for explaining reality.

> Agree, but don't you see how this bounces back on you Ham?
> The subject like language disappears in any description of reality.
> If one insists on either being existence's deepest ground one has a
> language or a subject metaphysics. This may be above Marsha's,
> but you "..my som Brutus"

If you're implying that words are useless, why are we talking?  Language is 
only the tool of social communication -- certainly not the ground of 
existence.  Subjective awareness isn't the ground of existence, either, but 
it's the sensible locus of experience which defines it.

[Ham]:
> ....  And, Bo, as I've said before, when you reject subjects and
> objects, you eliminate Value.

> Me rejecting S/O?  On the contrary it the highest static
> (intellectual) value.

The way I see it, Value is what stands between subject and object, 
alternately attracting or repelling the subjective psyche, depending on the 
subject's value-sensibility.  What we seek and what we avoid in existence 
really has little to do with intellect.  It's our differentiated 
psycho-emotional relationship to otherness (in my ontology, the Value of 
Essence).  Being-aware is what we ARE, and Value is the essence of this 
interdependency. ...
> That's how we become individuated beings who differentiate
> Value into the multifold objects of our experiential reality.

[Bo]:
> Or ....  it isn't the individual but its LANGUAGE! No, dear Ham,
> either the individual subject disappears or a new subject
> metaphysics must be constructed.  Something you possibly have
> done with Essentialism.

Well, Bo, thus far I've avoided bringing it up because you didn't want to 
discuss it, but Essentialism is a new metaphysics.  I don't call it a 
"subject" metaphysics, although it is definitely more subjective than 
objective.  It posits Sensibility and Being as One in Essence, and it is 
based on Cusa's first principle which is the "coincidence of contrariety". 
Existence is the actualized or "differentiated mode" of Essence.

[Ham, previously]:
> ...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 "nothingness".  That's the selective
> process by which human beings make order and
> continuity out of non-symmetry and chaos.

[Bo]
> Matter of fact I agree, this is the cumbersome Q-physics  Science
> belongs to the intellectual level where matter is governed by forces
> or fields in a most causational way. A moqist however knows that
> on the metaphysical plane it's about inorganic value patterns and if
> the experiments start to shows uncanny results it's due to S/O not
> being reality's ground. Dynamic/Static is and at some stage static
> inorganic patterns start to become dynamic.

I suspect we agree on more than either of us admits.  These statements are 
most revealing.  Perhaps you will explain for me how you distinguish 
"dynamic" from "static" in the context of values.  Are they meant to infer 
"transcendent" or "non-transcendent", differentiated or non-differentiated, 
or simply definable versus undefinable?  I've never asked before, and these 
labels have always puzzled me, especially as I regard Essence as immutable 
and
unchanging, whereas existence is evolutionary and transitory or provisional.

Thanks, Bo.  Once again I deceive myself into thinking we are making 
progress.

Dare I say...

Essentially yours?
Ham