[MD] Mill: Quality & what is freedom?

[David M]

Arlo, Mike, others

May I suggest a definition of freedom for discussion:

Freedom exist whenever a situation in underdetermined,
i.e.whenever what will next occur is uncertain because
the future is open, where open means that more than one
future is possible.

Now given an open and underdetermined situation what
actually happens (reducing the many-possibles to the single actual
event) may be brought about by either chance or choice -at
least those are the usual suggestions.

Choice of course implies some kind of agency, usually possessing
values and making a decision about which possible to make
actual, this is where quality-values come into play.

Of course, making choices implies being aware that there are
different possible futures available to choose between. So how
free you are depends on your grasp of what is possible, being
stuck with common sense or what counts for normal behaviour
in your society may be making you a lot less free than you could be.

In this way you are limited by the reach of your imagination.

Of course we need to recognise Pirsig's levels. To create new
& more complex possibilities requires a certain amount of
construction. A photon/energy can buzz off to pretty much any where
it feels like, but it cannot decide to make oxygen actual without
going through the steps of forming matter, protons, electrons, etc.
Only as certain possibilities are made actual is it possible to allow
new possibilities to have 'entry' into actuality. Such is cosmic evolution.

Whole point of MOQ is to see that there is much more dynamic
freedom in reality than SOM would make you realise. SOM
ends up postulating a many-worlds theory rather than admit how
open reality is and how important the relationship between agency
and quality must be.

The truth is not hard to see here. SOM is an attempt to see reality
in terms of order and control. SOM science has to go to great lengths
to reduce every day reality to controlled experiments to remove all
openness from events to find the limited, yet nonetheless real, necessities
that do exist (i.e. SQ). What MOQ should enable us to see is that we live in 
a
highly open reality with some limited and modest order that does
enable what creatively emerges to be preserved and used as a basis
for evolution upwards from level to level.

Society, of course, both enables new freedoms to emerge and acts
to suppress our greater freedom so as to keep us in our place in the
current hierarchies of power.

Any use?

David M


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Hamilton" <thethemichael at gmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Friday, June 02, 2006 4:59 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Mill: Quality philosopher


SA,

> Could you please expand on what this 'genuine liberty'
> is?

I doubt it - Arlo's done an excellent job already. Mill might be able
to provide some good  reinforcement, though. The following passage
from Mill is interesting because it shows a degree of influence from
the ancient Greek concept of 'eudaimonia' (which Matt mentioned
recently with regard to the 4th level), often translated nowadays as
'human flourishing':

--------------------------
"He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of
life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one
of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his
faculties. He must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to
foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to
decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to
his deliberate decision. And these qualities he requires and exercises
exactly in proportion as the part of his conduct which he determines
according to his own judgment and feelings is a large one. It is
possible that he might be guided in some good path, and kept out of
harm's way, without any of these things. But what will be his
comparative worth as a human being? It really is of importance, not
only what men do, but also what manner of men they are that do it.
Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in
perfecting and beautifying, the first in importance surely is man
himself. Supposing it were possible to get houses built, corn grown,
battles fought, causes tried, and even churches erected and prayers
said, by machinery — by automatons in human form — it would be a
considerable loss to exchange for these automatons even the men and
women who at present inhabit the more civilized parts of the world,
and who assuredly are but starved specimens of what nature can and
will produce. Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model,
and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which
requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the
tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."
--------------------------

I've been a bit naughty so far by not giving references. Probably
easiest to just link to this public-domain text of 'On Liberty':
http://www.constitution.org/jsm/liberty.htm
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