From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Fri Aug 27 2004 - 20:07:01 BST
Ham Priday to Paul Turner, Platt Holden, Mark Steven Heyman, Scott Roberts
Sent: Friday, August 27, 2004 2:50 PM
Subject: Re: MD The empirical verifiability of value
Greetings to my favorite tattoo enthusiasts!
Paul writes to Ham:
> As far as Pirsig is concerned, there is no "leap" involved in believing
> that quality is real and verifiable. If you think quality isn't real, then
> you are saying that it is better to believe that than it is to believe
that
> it is real. The MOQ axiom of "some things are better than others" cannot
be
> denied without contradiction.
> The leap occurs in believing that quality is Quality i.e. that it *is*
> reality.
That analysis is not worthy of your fine intellect, Paul. The "leap" is not
believing that Quality is "verifiably real". The leap is realizing that
reality is essentially "subjective" or immanent. I was struck, as Mark was,
by Scott Roberts' musing in a related thread on MOQ and Logic/Science:
> scott:
> What about the mystery of consciousness? Unless someone can show me
> how one set of electrons and quarks can be aware of another set --
> not just flip a switch to indicate a yes or no answer to the
> existence of some pattern or other, but to experience the conscious
> phenomenon of seeing that pattern in all its four-dimensional glory --
> then there is a mystery, as long, that is, as one assumes that
> consciousness is derived from the nonconscious.
The prose is beautiful, almost musical. But what caught my attention was
the last line: "there is a mystery, as long as one assumes that
consciousness is derived from the nonconscious". My question is, why must
we make this assumption?
We make it because everything we experience is viewed as an "otherness" to
ourselves. We are brainwashed to this proposition from the day we start
learning about reality. Science, which is the imprimatur of verifiable
knowledge, is based on this philosophy. Read Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre,
Rand, North, Whitehead -- they're all telling us this because they're
existentialists. Thought itself is believed to be an electro-neural process
in the brain that evolved in nature. Man strives to "extend" this evolution
by constructing a machine with the sensibility to react to objective data as
the conscious mind does. All is otherness. To see reality in any other way
is intellectual heresy -- or just plain foolishness.
But consider for a moment what this belief system implies. If everything
that is real is an "objective other", what does that say about our
"subjective awareness" of it? That it is unreal? That it is an illusion
of Nature? That it is excluded from participation in ultimate reality?
The logic of that philosophy is unreasonable and untenable to me.
I submit that some aspect of consciousness is at least as "real" as the
objective world we perceive. Instead of accepting the notion that
proprietary awareness is a disconnected product of material reality, I've
turned this cosmology upside down. My philosophy posits human sensibility
(the "psychic" component of consciousness) as the "creative agent" of an
all-encompassing reality rather than an incidental, passive effect. This is
not the empirical reality we "know", of course, and I discuss some
teleological reasons why this must be so (the principle of autonomous
freedom being one of them). But if man's reality is more than a flickering
reflection of its source, it must be grounded in the "essence" of the
source. Is this any less logical than the existential perspective which
presupposes "beingness'' as the ultimate reality?
You can deny the Source. You can apply the label Quality to it and say that
Quality IS "it". (Alan Watts in his Zen-based thesis "The Supreme Doctrine"
said "You are It!") But you are still bound to a metaphysics of being
(i.e., material reality). While the concept may not be new to Eastern
mysticism, I believe that a concept of Essence whose Value is immanent to
man represents a significant leap in contemporary Western philosophy.
So I remain . . .
Essentially yours,
Ham
>
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