[MD] atheistic and content

[gav]

hi ham.

'To evaluate something as good or bad requires a cognitive subject, yet Pirsig denies a subjective agent as anything but a "pattern of Quality".  Obviously, this is an epistemological paradox, for we can't appreciate (have an affinity for) value if it is the very nature of our being.'

i like the rest of your post but i have probs with this part. cognition reflects upon the immediate sensing of value - and then they can def play a sort of feedback loop game. 

both the subject and object are abstracted from immediate flux - the perpetual becoming of time.

what is becoming - from whence the flux? well it is outside of time and space, although not really 'outside' - for there is no outside (or whence), outside requires the context of space (whence, of time). we need to give some poetic license when we start speculating on these things.

bohm calls this eternal omnipresent dimension the implicate order. amongst other things it explains non-locality and holograms. the explicate order unfolds into time and space from the implicate order.
in castaneda's books, don juan explains the yacqui concept of tonal and nagual which is very similar - nagual being the omnipresent eternal dimension. i interpret the DQ/sq split in the same way - Dq is omnipresent, eternal, sq is of time and space. the beauty of pirsig's terms is that they show that they are both still essentially one - quality.

i guess there are many more correspondences - buddhism and taoism spring to mind - so does jesus's 'before abraham was born i am'; so does deleuze when he refers to reality as always 'virtual-actual'

perhaps a shortcoming of the word 'quality' is that it is quite dry. it hasn't the deep emotional connotation of 'love' for instance; perhaps that is why pirsig and dmb and others eschew this 'romantic' dimension, which religion often likes to explore - again jesus was pretty big on it - and the beatles.

love and faith and a lot more joy - whatever is conducive to that, that's where i'll hang my intellectual hat.