[MD] Hot Stoves and What To Do About Them

[david buchanan]

Ham said:
...Daniel Dennett and others have made the case that rational decisions can only be applied in a system that is consistent and predictable, and the "determinism" of natural laws makes this feasible.  ..Dennett said: "Determinism is not a problem.  What you want is freedom, and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible.  In fact, we have more freedom if determinism is true than if it isn't.  ...If determinism is true, then there's less randomness. There's less unpredictability.  To have freedom, you need the capacity to make reliable judgments about what's going to happen next, so you can base your action on it."

Steve replied:
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.


dmb says:

Dennett is going to differ from Pirsig to some extent, of course, but on these particular points they are pretty darn close. "What you want is freedom," he says, "and freedom and determinism are entirely compatible." If he's not advocating some kind of compatibilism, then the word has no meaning.


About thirty pages prior to Pirisg's reformulation, which says we are both controlled and free to some extent, he says:


"To cling to DQ alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos. ...Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although DQ, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other." (Lila 121)


The notion that DQ and sq are both necessary on the whole, to preserve the world, squares quite neatly with Pirsig's conception of the self as a complex jungle of static with the capacity to respond to DQ and with the reformulation of free will and determinism. The dilemma involved with the old formulation is a big problem because abandoning either position has devastating logical consequences. 


"If man follows the cause and effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong. On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to deny the truth of science." (Lila 155)


Without (at least some) determinism, Dennett says, there would be an unacceptable level of randomness and unpredictability. Static patterns, Pirsig says, provide a necessary stabilizing force and without them all you get is degeneration into chaos. I think we don't have to work very hard to see that they basically agree that we want freedom and order, novelty and predictability. That's why the old formulation was such a dilemma; because if you want to keep the truths of science, you have to abandon morality and vice versa.


"When this understanding first broke through in Phaedurs' mind, [like hearing that new song] that ethics and science had suddenly been integrated into a single system, he became so manic he couldn't think of anything else for days. the only time he had been more manic about an abstract ideas was when he had first hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself. ...It was, for him, a great Dynamic breakthrough, but if he wanted to hang on to it he had better do some static latching as quickly and thoroughly as possible." (Lila 157)


This is how Pirsig concludes chapter 12 and the discussion of free will and determinism. Please notice how the balance and compatibility between DQ and sq is being applied even to Pirsig's own thinking process. He's talking about an abstract idea as a Dynamic breakthrough. Unlike the hot stove example, this one is much, much harder to explain in terms involuntary reflex actions. The creations of a philosopher can't be so easily reduced to the physical or physiological structures supporting them.


Motorcycle repair and essay writing are the same way. DQ and sq are both necessary, the breakthroughs and the static latching are two phases in the experience. The work together and cannot right be conceived as separate compartments. All by itself, DQ is not freedom. It's just chaos. And static patterns all by themselves are not stable so much as they are dead. You have to know a lot of static stuff about engines to be an artful mechanic and yet you can follow all the rules of composition and grammar and still write a stupid, dull paper. You know what I mean? To get excellence, the DQ and the sq have to live together as partners.