[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[Ham Priday]

Thanks, Mark, and Hi Marsha, Steve, and dmb --

On Sat, 7/16/11 at 11:49AM, Mark "118" ununoctiums at gmail.com wrote:


> Quality is neither a property of the subject or the object.  It is
> what "lies between".  I have spent many posts explaining this
> but will try again.  Objects (or subjects) do not contain Quality;
> they express it.  What we note about an object is its expression.
> We cannot know the fundamental nature of an object, only
> those qualities which are imparted by it.
>
> I realize that this "in between" causes confusion, and Ham and
> I went back and forth on it.  As you know, the subject/object
> divide does not work with MoQ.  As I understand it, some
> were barred from this forum for attempting to do just that.
> So, let me think of an analogy.  When we are on a boat on the
> ocean.  We do not feel the ocean, what we feel is the expression
> of the ocean through waves.  The waves are a Quality of the
> ocean.  We go up and down in rhythm to that Quality.  It is not
> a far step to see that this is the same as our relation to objects,
> or the cosmos in general.

Mark should be commended for his efforts to make Quality (or what I would 
call Value) more understandable, and his ocean waves analogy is an 
appropriate one.  I also agree that the term "patterns" does not do justice 
to this concept.  Neither does "indefinable DQ".

I was trying to think of a better word than "differentiation" for the state 
of existence in which we all participate.  The best I could come up with was 
"contrapositionality", which relates to antithesis as well as contrariety. 
Webster's defines contraposition as "the relationship between two 
propositions when the subject and predicate of one are respectively the 
negation of the predicate and subject of the other."  What does this mean?

Look at it this way: Value (Quality) only exists when it is realized. 
Realized Value must have a Knower.  That Knower is the sensible subject and 
the actualized object (Being) is a valuistic expression of the knower's 
sensibility.  The "proposition" that we need to confront here is Oneness. 
What we are really asking is: How does Oneness make its Value known?  The 
answer is that it creates a Knower (i.e., sensible agent) in contraposition 
to itself.

If we imagine Sensible Oneness (Essence) as the Being of Value, it becomes 
clear that, in order for its value to be realized, Being and Knowing must be 
contraposed.  The relation of Knowing to Being -- what Mark calls "what lies 
between" -- is Value.  To get to this actualized state of differentiation, 
the subject and predicate ("I AM") of Oneness are negated to create a new 
proposition; namely, the subject and predicate "I KNOW" and "THIS IS".  In 
between is the Value sensed by the agent who experiences "this is" 
autonomously and deals with it freely as he will.

Does this paradigm make my ontogeny any more comprehensible?  If so, how 
much of it contradicts the MoQ thesis?  I'll leave these questions up to you 
folks.

Valuistically speaking,
Ham