[MD] Hot Stoves and What To Do About Them

[Ham Priday]

Hi Steve --

Hi Ham,
> I wonder if Dennett takes determinism as the belief that natural laws
> are true as a metaphysical assertion or a pragmatic one. If the latter
> I agree with Dennett and in some weak sense a "determinist." If we
> take determinism to mean that there is a degree of predictability
> about the world, then few would deny it. But this is not how Pirsig
> defined determinism as the doctrine that "man follows the
> cause-and-effect laws of substance." I deny that sort of determinism
> along with Pirsig. Note also that reality is Quality, then even
> substances don't follow the cause and effect laws of substance but
> rather exercise preference.

Natural laws are true to the extent that they are predictable, which I 
suppose is what your mean by "pragmatic".  I don't know what you mean by 
"true as a metaphysical assertion".  I see nothing metaphysical about 
physical laws.

Nor do I see why man's judgments and decisions should be bound by the laws 
of nature.  If you drive a car you must make sure that there's gas in the 
tank, air in the tires, and that the vehicle is serviced often enough to 
repair or replace brake linings, batteries, spark plugs, lubricants, etc. 
But there's nothing about this maintenance that determines when or where you 
drive the car or whom you take with you.  Those are your free decisions.

The same is true of your personal choices in a deterministic universe.  The 
fact that you need to put food in your stomach on a regular basis, catch a 
few hours of sleep each night, and expect the sun to come up in the morning
doesn't restrict your freedom to choose work or play, your preference for 
chocolate or vanilla, the type of music you enjoy, or where you decide to go 
on your vacation.

You throw a monkey wrench in your analysis, however, when you insist that 
reality is Quality.  Quality (Value) is relative to the observer.  Otherwise 
we would all have the same values, and "preference" would be meaningless.
Why is it the Pirsigians don't understand this?  The Value of your reality 
is what you make of it.  You are the supreme judge and arbiter over your 
existence.  Quality isn't handed to you on a stone tablet.  YOU decide what 
is valuable, worthy, or moral in this life.  Man is the measure of all 
things; if this were not so, we wouldn't be talking about values as choices 
and preferences or debating whether certain kinds of behavior are moral or 
immoral.  The whole point of lining in a relational world is that we are 
free to value it differentially.

[Ham, previously]:
> We simply cannot participate as free agents in a perfectly moral universe
> when that universe is directing all our moves.

[Steve]:
> What if we are _part_ of the universe rather than metaphysically
> divorced from it? Then if there is an aspect of reality which is free
> (namely DQ) then we are also free to the extent that we are DQ.

That's making a conflated paradigm out of what is actually a very simple 
principle: Value is the essential ground of existential reality.  The "free 
aspect" of this reality is the sensible agent whose experienced universe is 
an objective representation of his differentiated values.

> Where I agree with you is in thinking that we can't "get around" the
> fact that we have to think of human freedom very differently in the
> context of the MOQ.  When Pirsig describes free will, he is not
> describing anything much like free will as it has been traditionally 
> understood.

I refuse to distort Free Will into something it is not simply to conform to 
a philosopher's radical definition of reality.

Thanks, Steve,  Your insights are good except for the box in which you try 
to fit them.

Essentially yours,
Ham