[MD] Is Quality Different from (Mother) Nature?

[Ham Priday]

Hi Joe --

[Ham, previously to Mark]:
> The human body and its neuro-sensory system are the biological
> "instrument" of sensibility.  But the Value of which it is sensible
> comes from the prime essence.  This is what Science, with all its
> investigative resources, is unable to discover.  It's not something
> you can research and confirm from empirical evidence.

[Joe]:
> Carbon!  It is found in coal, and in a sentient being. The simplest
> explanation is that it exists differently in the two instances and has
> different qualities.  It is not derived from a "prime essence" of carbon.
> Indeed, "prime essence" is a contradiction when speaking of an
> individual since individuality is a logical contradiction to primacy.
> Where there is one, prime, two logically follows.  Two carbons
> exist differently and the contradiction disappears.

UREKA!  You have found it?

Carbon is the building block of organic chemistry, so it has been called 
"the element of life".  Actually, water (hydrogen and oxygen) are more 
essential to life than carbon.  But, like all elements in the periodic 
table, carbon has a specific atomic weight which distinguishes it as an 
element.  Isn't this individuality as much a "logical contradiction to 
primacy" as is the human individual?  Yet carbon and its molecular forms 
(including organic) must be derived from an "uncreated" soruce.

Your rule that "two logically follows from one" is a mathematical principle, 
not a metaphysical concept.  Mark had suggested that Quality could be 
replaced by a number of words, including "prime source".  But the "primary 
source" has nothing to do with "prime numbers"; it connotes the essence that 
is primary to numbers, difference, and relations.  Everything that exists is 
separate and "individuated" from everything else.  Does this "contradiction 
to primacy" invalidate an essential source?  Logically not.

The fallacy in basing ontology on a substantive element like carbon is that 
an element is a "thing", and things are experiential constructs of value. 
Pirsig based his ontology on Quality which is not a physical thing but 
requires a sensible agent to realize it.  So neither carbon nor quality can 
be the fundamental reality, even though both are derived from a primary 
source.  When you deny the fundamental source, you deny existence as a 
causal possibility.  You can't have a created world without an uncreated 
source.  Ex nihilo nihil fit -- nothing comes from nothingness.

Essentially speaking,
Ham