[MD] Is experience just DQ?

[Hamilton Priday]

Hi Marsha and All --

    > Greetings Ham,
    >
    > I care what you say. Everybody's input may offer insight, so I certainly
    > do care what you say.
    >
    > Marsha 

I appreciate your expression of solicitude, Marsha.  Actually, yesterday’s message got away from me as I tried to save it to my drafts file.  Since my wife is doing most of the e-mail messaging these days, I’ve not kept up with the “technology”.  But your response to the quotes I sent provides a platform on which to make some points that came to mind when I reviewed them. 

Let me first address Dan’s argument: “We do not experience Dynamic
Quality. 'It' IS experience.”  

Obviously, Mr. Pirsig had a philosophical reason to divide Quality into two forms or modes.  The problem, as I’ve previously stated, is that the descriptors “dynamic” and “static” are not consistent with what we experience or intuit about reality.

The reality of experience is a “dynamic process” in which subjects and objects come into existence, are transformed by interacting and/or aging, then disappear from the world.  We can only speculate as to what “Ultimate Reality” is, but there is no evidence or logic by which to conclude it is “dynamic”.  If, as Pirsig implies, Quality (Value) is the true Reality, then this differentiation of created time and space, subject and object, good and bad, and a myriad of things in process is only an “experiential perspective” of Value.

Note that Pirsig himself, as quoted by Dan, refers to experience as “change” (process?), inferring that its Primary Source (DQ, Value?) is uncreated.    

“...in the MOQ, there is no pre-existing subject or object.  Experience and Dynamic Quality become synonymous. Change is probably the first concept emerging from this Dynamic experience.” 

Now, I don’t expect the MoQers to reverse their position on static and dynamic; yet if they did, it would afford them a more logical paradigm for the creation of the value spectrum that constitutes experiential existence.  And, though the author doesn’t define his Source, it’s a reasonable assumption that his DQ transcends the process and differentiation of created things—that it is, in fact, eternal and immutable.  Not that it has to be, but isn’t such a paradigm more compatible with the ontologies of Plato, Buddha, even the theologians?

As you know from my book, I posit the Source as Essence, and define it as the primary, unconditional Reality from which all experienced things are negated.  The creation process is “valuistic” in that the brain delineates “objective otherness” from Value which is the essence of conscious (subjective) sensibility.  

But Essence is more than either Quality or Value, because these sensible attributes are only “man’s measure” of things.  Undifferentiated Sensibility (including what we would call “intelligence”) is essential for the exquisite cosmic order and balance which characterizes physical existence.  Even modern physicists have concluded that the DNA transformations responsible for the evolution of living organisms could not have arisen from cause-and-effect probability. 

So, in conclusion, Dynamic Quality is NOT experience.  Rather, it is the source of Value from which experience is derived.  You and I are finite existents whose experience of the particular represents the Value of the Whole.  Only conscious sensibility above the level of differentiated space/time existence can be One with Essence. 

Again, thanks for the opportunity.  I can only hope it adds some clarification to the dialog previously quoted.

Essentially yours,
Ham