[MD] Thus spoke Lila

[rapsncows at fastmail.fm]

Ham, Horse,

Horse, thank you for pointing out this handling of RMP's value!  I will
deal with it shortly.  I have maintained that Ham has a significantly
different concept of Value.  Which is cool; but it has to be recognized
and admitted that his 'value' and Pirsig's value are far from the same. 
Ham, you can't just say that RMP meant what you now think when he wrote
the letters 'Value' back then, just because you also attach the letters
'Value' to what you now think.  Come on!

>From your thesis, Ham, the definitions at the end:

" Value –   The relational affinity for the wholeness of  Essence
which binds subject to object.  Realized by its arousal of desire or
passion, and ultimately reclaimed by Essence, Value is the metaphysical
ground of existential reality and the teleological motivator of human
experience.

Value-sense –  The human cognitive capacity to realize essent-value
through the intellection (negation)  of  objective beingness; the cause
of the psycho-emotional affect referred to in this ontology as "value
affirmation"."

Concretely, within the body of the thesis, in fact, your dealing with
the rose:

"The bottom line is that we can know only what we can experience.  Even
facts and descriptions that come to us second-hand—from textbooks and
lectures, for example—originate as sensory values in someone's
experience and are filed away in our memory bank as if they were
directly experienced.  In truth,  nothing can be said to exist that is
not capable of being experienced.  This implies that not only our image
of the world but the nature of reality itself may be experiential, in
which case the brain functions as an effectual mechanism to create  the
experience, rather than simply reacting (affectively) to pre-existing
external stimuli.  Despite existentialist views to the contrary, a
critical understanding of experience leads to the conclusion that the
essence of reality is implicit in its values rather than its physical
"beingness", and that value sensibility must therefore precede material
existence."

so, our senses sense *your* 'value'.  Pirsig's value comes in more along
the lines of 'general moral judgment'.  Your value-sense may eventually
lead to certain emotions or feelings in the subject, but RMP's value is
pointing directly at that feeling - and what's more, it is pointing to
such value it exists culturally, socially, which is why this arises from
a conversation about anthropology!

For RMP's meaning of 'Value', I'll take it back to Chapter 4 of 'Lila'
(I would suggest re-reading, as I am not going to be overly thorough in
quoting):

"When he told them [Indians on the reservation] he was Dusenberry's
friend they would always say, 'Oh yes, Dusenberry -- he was a *good*
man,'" --- Ham, this *good*, which RMP italicized himself in the
original, is a general moral value judgment.  It is not a singly sensed
Hamian Value.

"Dusenberry could sit there all weekend and gab on and on with them
about their families and their friends and anything they thought was
important, and he just loved that.  That's what he was really in
anthropology for.  That was his idea of a wonderful weekend."  ---
'important', 'loved', 'wonderful': these reveal the values held by the
indians and Dusenberry! "But Phaedrus ... as soon as he got into it his
mind always drifted off into his own private world of abstractions and
the conversation died." --- RMP valued these 'abstractions' (which count
for naught in your 'essence').

"At the college there [Bozeman], now a university, he took out the best
books he could find on anthropology," --- 'best' shows his 'value'
judgment.  For you, the 'value' would be the visual stimulus of text,
right?  There is no simple, direct value, in your sense, which permitted
him to just find these best books!

"He could write a totally hones, true and valuable book on the subject,
but..." --- 'valuable book'?  You must laugh at this, right Ham?  The
book is an illusion, all there is is the sensibility which seems to be
pages and text, but which is an illusion which you create, right?

"A thesis of this sort is colorful and interesting but it cannot be
considered useful to anthropology without empirical support." --- isn't
this similar to the fact that you maintain that you create your reality
by value-sense, since there can be no other empirical support?  Or am I
strecthing this, maybe? ... "What it always means is that you have hit
an invisible wall of prejudice. ... Later, as his Metaphysics of Quality
matured, he developed a name for the wall ... 'cultural immune system'. 
But all he saw now was that he wasn't going to get anywhere ... until
that wall had been breached." ... ("Many of the anthropologists seemed
bright, interested, humane people ..." --- again, these words show what
RMP means by value.  And this value is constructed by judgement, and is
not directly sensible.) "The key to getting through the wall lay in
re-examining the philosophical attitudes of Boas himself." ---
'philosophical attitudes', again, are general, AND, abstract, not
sensible.  The are what lie behind the directly sensible phenomena that
come from a Boas *doing* his anthropology, and which RMP sensed (with
his sensibility, as you mean it).

"Margaret Mead said [of Boas], "He feared premature generalizations like
the plague, and continually warned us against it."  Generalizations
should be based on the facts and only on the facts." --- facts being
akin to your 'Value', no?  "'It is indubitable that science was his
[Boas' again] religion,' Kroeber said.  'He called his early conviction
materialistic [valuistic?].  Science could tolerate nothing 'subjective'
[synthetic?]; value judgments - and by infection even values considered
as phenomena - must be absolutely excluded."

"How are you going to prove in terms of the laws of physics that a
certain attitude exists within a culture?" --- 'attitude' and 'culture'
are keys to RMP's idea of 'value'.  So, rather: how are you going to
prove in terms of Hamian Value(-sense) that a certain attitude exists
within nothingness? --- "What is an attitude in terms of the laws of
molecular interaction?  What is a cultural value?  How are you going to
show *scientifically* that a certain culture has certain values? 
[Paragraph] You can't. [Paragraph] Science has no values.  Not
officially. ..."

"The trouble was that man isn't suited to this kind of scientific
objective study."

"Some, following Boas' scientific purity said there were no values at
all. [Paragraph] That idea that anthropology has no values Phaedrus
marked down as the 'spot.'  That was the place where the wall could best
be breached.  No values, huh?  No Quality?  This was the point of focus
where he could begin an attack. [Paragraph] What many were trying to do,
evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning
all theory, by agreeing not to even *talk* about such theoretical
reductionist things as what savages do in general.  They restricted
themselves to what *their* particular savage happened to do on
Wednesday.  That was scientifically safe all right - and scientifically
useless."  --- Ham, seriously, I have been asking you to show me how
your theory of 'Value-sense' permits a proprietary I to *do*.  All I see
is that you can tell me what I sense, now, but you forsake anything
behind that sense as illusion, and you provide a 'useless' I: an I that
can sense, but cannot *do*!

"If you can't generalize from data [facts; Hamian Value?] there's
nothing else you can do with it either."
"Data without generalization is just gossip."

"When Mahony sent Sidis's book 'The animate and the inanimate' to
another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it 'a fine
cosmological piece' that astoundingly predicted the existence of black
holes - in 1925!" --- such prediction is the exact opposite of what how
your Value-sense reduces the rose to pure illusion! Further, I wonder
what is in a cosmological piece entitles as such, I'm sure it appeals to
ideas of dynamic and static. (http://www.sidis.net/ANIMContents.htm)

"The problem wasn't that it wasn't true.  The problem was that nobody
was interested."  --- it is the 'interest' which is RMP's value, not the
sensible event that permitted the individuals of the culture to come to
their judgments that there was nothing of interest.

Chapter 5:

"He would get out of the impasse by expanding the format. [Paragraph] :

> 
> [From Horse] "The key was values, he thought. That was the weakest spot in the whole 
> wall of cultural
> immunity to new ideas the anthropologists had built around themselves. 
> Value was a term they
> had to use, but under Boas’ science value does not really exist."

"Elsewhere Kluckhohn had said, 'Values provide the only basis for fully
intelligible comprehension of culture because the actual organization of
all cultures is primarily in terms of their values."  --- Ham, I never
saw the word 'culture' in your thesis - though you did talk about
freedom and America.  But your Value is about sense, which is, at most,
only indirectly related to culture.  Right?

anyway, this is enough, for now at least; we can look into chapter 5 if
you want.

let me just note that this below was mis-attributed to me:

> On 12/12/2010 18:30, Ham Priday wrote:
> > Hi Horse [Tim mentioned] --
> >
> >> '=' in the sense that Quality = Reality is saying that they are the
> >> same thing.
> >> If I refer to Venus, the Morning Star or the Evening Star by saying 
> >> Venus = Morning Star = Evening Star, I'm not saying there is an 
> >> equivalence, I'm saying that they are exactly identical. The only 
> >> difference is the form of the linguistic label. There is no 
> >> difference in their value.
> >

Tim
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