Dear John B.,
You asked 28/8 22:17 +1000:
'does valuism relieve suffering?' which you define as 'unnecessary, illusory
or "self" induced, painful experience'. You suggest as solution for
suffering 'attending to what is in the moment, without imposing egoic
values'.
According to Pirsig in ch. 5 of 'Lila'
'things become enormously more coherent ... when you start with an
assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world'.
Most of us discussing the Metaphysics of Quality on this list will agree on
the value of assuming value to be not necessarily the only reality, but at
least the primary reality of which the rest is deduced (or we wouldn't be
here). If this value lies indeed in showing 'coherence', patterns that
enable understanding, it may help to understand what's 'real' and what's
'illusory'. Patterns of values are 'real' as is their change to the better,
their migration towards/by Dynamic Quality. 'Objects' and 'subjects'
(including the one we call 'self') are 'illusory'. Seeing our 'selves' as
just a set of stable and changing (in order to be versatile) patterns of
values, may put them into perspective and may save us from imposing them on
our experience.
'Basic trust', which you recommend, is trust BOTH in the stable patterns of
values guiding your behavior and conscious activity AND in the dynamic that
can be experienced in those patterns, their 'migration towards DQ'.
Subject/object thinking is indeed useful ... as long as it is A model
(facilitating conscious communication) and not THE model of reality,
fixating egoic, 'subjective' experience. As long as it doesn't fix us in the
role of 'map-makers' and obfuscates that we are also 'maps' and 'territory'.
You remarked:
'If humans are "just" collections of memes, it is hard to see how we might
identify what it means to be "harmful" to such a collection.'
Likewise one could say:
'If humans are just sets of stable patterns of values, what does high/low
quality experience for such a set mean?' (With 'suffering' being an example
of 'low quality experience'...)
The answer for me would that low quality experience threathens the
coherence, the 'patternedness' of the set while high quality experience
paradoxically BOTH strenghtens its stability AND opens it to change (in a
direction that is experienced as 'right'/'Meaningful').
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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