[MD] freewill

[MarshaV]

Just in case this was suppose to be your explanation...   

 
 dmb says:
>>> Right, Marsha is reading the rejection of the Cartesian conception of self as a rejection of ANY conception of the self.

Marsha:
No.  That is not what I said, and I didn't reject anything.  In fact, you have not addressed anything I actually did say.  You've gone off on a tangent of your own making.  Just like a politician.   


>>> dmb:
>>> This rejection is part of rejecting subject-object metaphysics.

Marsha:
It may be, but it has nothing to do my statement.   


>>> dmb:
>>> Sometimes Pirsig calls this the metaphysics of substance because Descartes had divided all of reality into mental substance and physical substance.

Marsha:
Your premise was wrong, so this makes no sense in relationship to my post.   Of course, that doesn't surprise me.  


>>> dmb:
>>> These are metaphysical posits and that's what is being rejected, the notion that there is some kind of entity behind thoughts and things. 

Marsha:
Which exact "metaphysical posits" are you talking about.    Posted by Pirsig's?  By Descartes?  By Santa Claus's?  


>>> dmb:
>>> But that doesn't mean that Robert Pirsig is a fiction.

Marsha:
He is a collection of static patterns of value.   Static patterns of value are useful illusions.  Yes?  


>>> dmb:
>>> It just means that he is made of the same stuff the rest of reality is made of and better conceived as a complex ecology of processes rather than some essential thing.

Marsha:
He is a collection of static patterns of value.  Or what?   


>>> dmb:
>>> Like Nietzsche and James, Pirsig is saying that there is no distinction between consciousness and content, that there is no entity that does the thinking or rather that the thinking itself is the thinker.

Marsha:
Ohhhhh, you have left the MoQ for a higher, broader intellectual context.   From what theoretical platform are these statements being made?   Do I get a hint?     


>>> dmb:
>>> When we say "it rains" we don't really mean to suggest that some entity separate from the rain preforms the task of raining. The rain itself is the only "it". And so it is with thinking. When we say "I think", it's just a figure of speech. It's just about the grammatical rules of English.
>>> In James's 1904 essay titled "Does Consciousness Exist?", he answers the title question in the negative. No, as an entity there is no such thing, he said. Consciousness is a function, a process. Whitehead described this as a direct attack on the Cartesian self. Bertrand Russell said James's essay "startled the world" for the same reason. 
>> 

Marsha:
"When we say "I think", it's just a figure of speech."  Duh...   I am not impressed by this blarney.   My statement to Arlo were within a MoQ context in relationship to "MoQ says" versus "Pirsig says".  


>>> dmb:
>>> But to simply say that Pirsig and you and me and everyone else is just a fiction not only misses the whole point of what is being rejected,

Marsha:
I only rejected that Pirsig, you, me and everyone are inherently existing entities.   That was the point  I was trying to make to Arlo.  


>>> dmb:
>>> it also leads to a rather vacuous nihilism.

Marsha:
The incorrect premise, makes this statement nonsense.   

>>> dmb:
>>> One might as well say that the bombs that dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima with just fictions and so were the hundreds of thousand so dead. In a world of pure fiction nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Shall we say that genocide and mass murder is "not this and not that"? What would be the consequences if we acted as if that idea were true?
>>> Or, what if we read the MOQ as saying that reality - including ourselves - is made of values all the way down? What if we acted as if that were true instead? Should we treat the world and ourselves as static patterns of VALUE or as a fiction? Do you suppose Marsha's nihilistic reading would have better consequences? Not me, brother. Even if it did make sense, which it doesn't, I think that reading is an outrageous moral nightmare.
>> 

Hyperbole!     
 
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