[MD] Empirical and Historical

[Ham Priday]

Ron, Craig, Platt, Bodvar, and All --

I would like to offer some suggestions concerning the confusion that has 
appeared in recent posts.  Hopefully they will be seen as constructive 
rather than derisive.

On 7/11 Ron said:
> the idea of anything coming before experience is, in fact,
> an idea.
>
> The experiences you are experiencing right now,
> understanding and describing it is conceptualizing it,
> remembering it, is conceptualizing it.
>
> Therefore it is more empirical than sensory empiricism,
> because it is the now of experience not any conception of it.
> Quality, experience, is reality.

This prompted Craig to ask:
> So the idea of experience comes before experience?

On 7/15 Platt asked ...
> Or is paradox our lot in life when it comes to thinking
> about reality?

To which Bodvar responded:
> I don't see it as paradoxical unless we regard intellect in its
> SOM role as shuffling around of ideas in our mind.
> It's MOQ role is the value of the subject/object (mind/matter)
> DISTINCTION or AGGREGATE.

Which led to further speculation by Platt:
> Maybe there are two MOQ's.
> 1) the mystic MOQ of direct experience,
> 2) the idea MOQ consisting of DQ/SQ with a hierarchy
> of static patterns.
>
> MOQ 1 is monism, without pattern, consisting solely of value.
>
> MOQ 2 is dualism, patterned, consisting of many ideas.

The only thing that is clear here is that trying to build a cogent thesis
out of confused terminology is exasperating.  Since most of you have also
contributed to the thread on Reductionism, my suggestion is that you apply a 
little reductionism to this empirical mess.

For example:
Experiencing, distinguishing, defining, conceptualizing, intellectualizing, 
AND evaluating are ALL corollaries of human sensibility.  We use these 
mental functions to apprehend and describe an objective world.  The point to 
remember is that Sensibility, the subjective "self", is primary and 
fundamental to all of these functions.

Also, I have always maintained that Static and Dynamic are misconstrued in 
Pirsig's epistemology.  He speaks of experiential patterns as "static" while 
defining their essential source as "dynamic".  This is a perversion of 
Plato's theory of forms, which ARE static.  Things, events, species, 
qualities, numbers, lines and figures can be conceived (intellectually) as 
immutable forms.  Yet, ordinary experience is never static.

A leaf which was brown last month may be green today.  A human being who is 
a foot long at birth will grow to a height of 5 feet or more as an adult. 
The electrons and photons that account for our perception of a static form 
are in constant motion.  Unlike a motion picture from which a "freeze frame" 
can give us a snapshot of the action, if quantum motion were to suddenly 
cease, there would be nothing to experience and no subject to perceive it.

We exist in a world of dynamic, differentiated otherness.  Empirical 
existence is the appearance of phenomena in process.  We don't experience 
the instantaneous "now" because it is static nothingness and doesn't exist. 
The "idea of experience" IS experience -- the ever-changing, differentiated 
qualia that represent Value.  So there is no need to speculate about 
ideation "coming before" experience.

What we "sense" is Value.  What we conceptualize (intellectually, after the 
fact) are the existentially defined phenomena that experience creates 
(valuistically).  The defined dynamic properties of existential phenomena 
are what we call "empirical knowledge".  But the ultimate source of 
sensibility, value, change and difference is itself immutable.

Have I said anything here that contradicts the Quality premise of the MoQ? 
If not, are these suggestions worth considering in the interest of clarity?

Respectfully submitted,
Ham