[MD] Freewill

[david buchanan]

Steve said:... I am saying that the term "free will" has a usage in the English language, and the MOQ's response to the question of freedom is incompatible with this everyday usage. ... and my point is that the MOQ's answer is to accept neither free will or determinism in their usual sense and I'm not talking about underlying metaphysical assumptions but rather the common ways that the term "free will" gets deployed in sentences.  ...To deny free will is to deny the uncaused causer (see also Pirsig's dissolution of the mind-body problem). To deny determinism is to deny the mechanistic universe. There is nothing incompatible with doing both.


dmb says:
Well, as I see it, you are maintaining a very weak position in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There are many ways to deny free will and just as many ways to deny determinism. There is more than one way to affirm either one. But, against the advice of the Stanford Encyclopedia, you have defined both horns as necessarily connected to SOM. That's too rigid and too narrow. You've given no reason for this arbitrary restriction and yet your whole position seems to hinge on it.  


dmb said:
...You've equated free will with an uncaused causer and equated determinism with a mechanistic universe. But, again, we are talking about freedom and control as it relates to the MOQ's self , as it relates to "one's behavior" in a universe that is value all the way down. I mean, we are still talking about the extent to which PEOPLE are free to act as they will and the extent to which our actions are determined.


Steve replied:
Here is where you err. If the MOQ described the extent that "people are free to act as they will" then we would be talking about a compatible concept that could reasonably be described with the same terminology. But the MOQ does NOT associate freedom with the capacity to act as they will.  ...The similarity needed to enable us to deploy the MOQ version of the term "free will" in sentences in the usual ways we do with the tradition version of free will is the notion of freedom as the ability to consciously will choices. But that is NOT what Pirsig can mean in associating freedom with DQ. In other words, in the MOQ, there is freedom, but there isn't free will.


dmb says:
If I follow your reasoning, you're saying that DQ is pre-intellectual, therefore the MOQ's version of human freedom is an unconscious freedom that couldn't possibly involve anything like a conscious, deliberate choice. Is that about right?

Well, like I tried to explain already, I think you are compartmentalizing DQ and sq so that never the twain shall meet. There's just freedom on the DQ side, but it's a special, mystical freedom over which we have no control, and then we are controlled on the static side entirely because it is the static. This mischaracterizes the relation between DQ and sq in a very big way, I think, and it leaves us with a totally meaningless version of freedom. 

Think of the two sustained, concrete examples in ZAMM; the motorcycle mechanic and the freshman writer of essays. To be artful about his work, the mechanic cannot operate on DQ alone. He's got to know a lot about the machine and he's got to know how to use the tools. He is using inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning and testing hypotheses as he goes. At that point, he is a motorcycle scientist, Pirsig says. Then, on TOP of all the mastery of the static patterns involved, he also has a feel for the work. He is open to DQ. He's so engaged in the task that a sort of unity between himself and the machine is achieved, a kind of flow experience or Zen experience in which you forget yourself. 

The freshman writers finally became convinced that they knew Quality or excellence when they saw it, even if they couldn't explain why. The textbook they were using had plenty of rules to follow and they could imitate the great writers who were used as examples in class. But they didn't really learn how to produce Quality from either of those things. It was ditching those things, and even the whole grading system, that finally convinced them to trust their own eyes, to see for themselves, to put the rule following and example following strategy aside and just look with fresh eyes at just about anything; a coin, your thumb, a single brick on the face of the opera house. Whatever. 

Man, why you always gotta be asking those five dollar questions? Will kindly just shut up and dig it? 

DQ is not some alien thing beyond our consciousness or our ordinary, daily activities. It's at the very heart of things. The amoeba "knows" it's better to move away from the sulfuric acid despite the fact that it cannot articulate or consciously deliberate. The spur of the moment decisions that drive biological evolution aren't intellectual choices and but this too is described as following DQ. I mean, the idea here is that the feelings that motivate you and me are also driving the whole process. The extent to which we follow static patterns is never 100%. In the complex forest of static patterns, there are layers and level of conflicting and it would be impossible to simply be controlled by all them. Choices have to be made all day long, starting with the decision to get out bed of the morning.