[MD] Thus spoke Lila

[rapsncows at fastmail.fm]

Ham,
let me know if I have totally mistaken your Value.  I have just thought
that, perhaps, some major misunderstanding came in via sensibility.  I
think this is a bit of a long shot though:

"Sensibility –  Pre-intellectual value-awareness which is the primary,
undifferentiated  attribute of the negate from which the individuated
Self emerges.   In Essence, the absolute integration of esthesis
(sensation) and quiddity (being)."

it seem I might apply this definition equally well to my understanding
of your work, which I have been working with, or the sensibility that is
necessary to experience RMP's value in DQ.  So, maybe, just maybe, I
have impugned you unfairly in this exchange on 'value'.

But I still don't see how your sensible I could be empowered to *do*.

Tim

On Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:02:29 -0800, rapsncows at fastmail.fm said:
> 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
> -- 
>   
>   rapsncows at fastmail.fm
> 
> -- 
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