[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Ham Priday]

Dear Mark, Gav and Marsha --

Mark says:

> I can correlate "responses to Quality" to say that what Ham
> terms: "reality of experience [being] relational", is in fact
> "responses to Quality".  From ZAMM, I do not believe
> that a premise of absoluteness contradicts what Pirsig has
> written, so I am unclear what Ham is referring to.

Ham is referring to Pirsig's postulate that Quality equals Reality.  This is 
inconsistent with his pronouncement that "experience is the cutting edge of 
reality."  If Quality is fixed as a constant of the universe, it canot be 
modified or actualized by experience, for experience is relative to the 
subject 'I'.  In short, experience serves no purpose in Pirsig's cosmology.

> I believe that Ham's premise is that there is no reality outside
> our own, which does indeed have relativistic tones. To say this
> would imply that when we die, the world dies. In my opinion,
> experience is but a part of existence. There is a reality outside
> of experience, there has to be else wise we are just negating
> nothingness in a vacuum.

I am NOT saying that there is no reality outside of our own.  I am saying 
that "existence" is our own reality, and that it's experiential and 
relational.  Ultimate Reality transcends existence, and is absolute and 
unconditional.  What happens when we die is another question beyond the 
scope of the present discussion.

> This may be assumed to be so, but then what is regulating how we
> create our reality? Who is making that decision?  What we experience
> is our brain in a constant dance with that outside. So are we the brain,
> or are we the dance?  If we are the dance, where does the
> music come from?

There is no "regulation".  WE (as free subjects) are the creators of our 
experiential reality.  We make the decisions and "dance the dance".  We 
dance to Essential Value, the music played by an orchestra we cannot see, 
hear or experience.  We set the rythym for this dance according to our 
measure of its Value to us.

> Now, I would also add that Quality denies empirical Truths such as
> Ham proposes. Indeed if "truth is relative", then even that statement
> is relative in itself. This notion would deny any kind of scaffolding to
> anything and would result in some kind of existential meaninglessness.
> Worse yet, it would also relegate all opinions to meaningless statements.
> I believe we are beyond that point. There is a context to our realities.

Quality (Value) neither denies nor affirms.  WE are the active agents of our 
reality.  It is we ourselves who affirm its value by objectivizing our 
being-in-existence to represent it.  The meaning of existence is implied by 
Mark's assertion: "There is a reality outside of experience, there HAS TO 
BE."  No one can deny this, nor can anyone prove it as Truth.  That is what 
sets us free to measure this reality in our own valuistic terms.  What we 
are measuring and definining is relational Value, the ground of our 
existential reality.  Relative values, such as Quality and Morality, are 
defined experientially by man.  What philosophers strive to achieve is a 
hypothesis (metaphysics) that explains the Ultimate Reality beyond 
experience and man's relation to it.

Essentially speaking,
Ham