[MD] Subjectivity in the MOQ

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Willblake --


I haven't had the pleasure.  (Do I call you Will or Mark?)

> Ham,
> You provide an interesting evolutionary view of the free will of choices.
> How does Quality fit in?

I don't know that my view of free will is "evolutionary", but it is 
fundamental to my concept of human existence.
First of all, I prefer the term Value to Quality, despite the fact that the 
MoQ's author has equated the two.  Value is a measure of what we 
individually desire or want in life -- the desiderata of our experience.  I 
consider it the driving force of human activity which, if properly nurtured 
and allowed free expression, can achieve a "giant leap for mankind" in all 
endeavors.  We are all innately value-sensible creatures, but all too often 
our values are suppressed by external influences that preempt them, such as 
coercion or suppression by the state, control by the society, or moral codes 
accepted on the authority of others.

Essentially, value is the affinity of sensibility for its estranged source. 
In the individual it is manfested relationally as "wanting" -- the 
psycho-emotional response to esthetic, moral, and conceptual attributes of 
experience which itself is a construct of value.  The phenomena (objects and 
events) of experience are objectivized representations of the individual's 
value-sensibility.  Pirsig defines experience as "the cutting edge of 
reality", which, to me, is the chisel that carves finite being out of the 
undifferentiated "otherness" that  surrounds us.  The otherness that we 
"carve up" is Essence less the sensibility of our experiential awareness, 
and the "chisel" is the nothingness of the subjective self which delineates 
all things as objects in accordance with its (our) proprietary 
value-sensibility.

As you can see, I think it is a mistake to dispense with subjects and 
objects for the sake of a grandiose "worldview".  We can't escape the fact 
that existence is a differentiated system which we "co-create" and 
participate in as individual subjects.  Existence is our "reality" as 
value-sensible beings-aware, but it isn't metaphysical Reality, nor is value 
its ultimate source.  Value doesn't exist unless it is realized, and it is 
the role of the sensible agent to bring value into the world as beingness. 
I interpret Plato's question to Phaedrus, "And what is good, Phaedrus, and 
what is not good -- need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" as meaning 
that the realization of value is subjective, not that "morality is 
universal" as advanced by the Pirsigians.

I hope this gives you some idea of how Value "fits into" my Essentialist 
ontology, and it's quite a different concept than MoQ's "primary empirical 
reality".  While I can accept value as the essence of experiential reality 
and man's link to his ultimate source, without a sensible value agent, 
reality is meaningless.

Welcome aboard, Willblake2, and thanks for the question.

Essentially yours,
Ham