[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[Ham Priday]

Hi Mark --


> What a great word!  A while back I was posting about
> Venn Diagrams.  When I looked up your word, for some
> reason Wiki was at the top.  And, what do you know,
> it goes right into these Diagrams.  I think it is a good way
> to explain the creation of "other".  The term also implies (I
> think) that self and other arise independently which flies
> straight in the face of determinism and Buddhism. ...
>
> And so, how can I use it in logic to rephrase the tenants
> of MoQ?  DQ and sq must co-arise independently.  That is,
> the notion that DQ creates sq is only true if sq creates DQ.
> This makes sense to me, and I see no contradiction there.
> Additionally, the levels must arise independently.  I have
> always stood for the notion that all levels existed from the
> beginning.  The filling of the niches which Quality provides
> for these levels does vary.  Finally, Quality = Reality.  Well,
> I won't even go there for fear of stoking the wrath of Marsha.

You might be stoking my wrath as well, Mark, as that equivalency isn't an 
axiom of Essentialism.  Quality (Value) equals Reality only if the "reality" 
in question is existence.  Ultimate Reality is ESSENCE.  And, while I make 
no attempt to describe this ineffable source, can there be any doubt that 
Sensibility and what appears as Beingness are both innate in its Oneness?

I expect the Pirsigians to refute this, since the official doctrine is that 
Quality = Reality, as you say.  But if Quality cannot exist unless it is 
realized, neither can Reality.  Which means that Quality cannot stand by 
itself, cannot be the fundamental source of reality.

> I suppose the only problem I see in terms of merging
> Essentialism and MoQ together is the concept of negation.
> Perhaps you could give a try at how this would work out.

This is like asking a Christian to merge Deism with Atheism, Mark.  A 
philosophy without Essence cannot be Essentialist by definition.  I can talk 
about the Value of Essence as a fundamental premise, compared with Pirsig's 
Quality; but I can't with any integrity pretend that Value is the ultimate 
reality.

Concerning negation, which seems to be an impediment for everyone I've 
talked to, I can only repeat my argument that the creative potentiality of 
an absolute must logically be exclusionary (i.e., negational) in nature.  A 
finite agent can create an "other" by adding an object to its experience; 
what is already absolute, however, cannot add to its nature.  Finitude, 
therefore, is a self-imposed exclusion--a negation--of Absolute Essence. 
Can you account for creation any other way?

Thanks, Mark
Ham

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On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 11:12 AM, Ham Priday <hampday1 at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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 lies between" -- is 
> Value.
> To get to this actualized state of differentiation, the subject ("I") and 
> predicate
> ("AM":) of Oneness are negated to create a new proposition; namely, the 
> subject  > and predicate "I KNOW 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