[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
Right, Pirsig says the dilemma doesn't come up. And in the very next lines he says, "To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior is free."


Steve replied:
And note how Pirsig has just shifted the discussion away from the notion of free will or even will in favor of talking about freedom which he then associates with DQ.

dmb says:
What? Pirsig's statement is about the extent to which one's behavior is controlled or free. How in the world do you figure that is NOT about one's will or the freedom of one's will? He's talking about the extent to which people are free or not within the terms of the MOQ. I think you're bending over backwards to deny the obvious in several different ways and this is certainly one of them. Like I said, the MOQ avoids this dilemma by saying that our behavior is both free and controlled. The MOQ does not avoid this dilemma by REJECTING both horns but rather by saying they are not mutually exclusive options. The MOQ says freedom and restraint are both empirically known and they're both real to various extents.


Steve said:
 ...The above interpretation makes it sound like the MOQ is just some wishy-washy middle ground between the S and the O in SOM (it's a little of each!!!) rather than a rejection of the fundamental premise of SOM which underlies the tradition free will/determinism debate. Is the quality in the subject or the object? Is the locus of control for human actions internal to the subject or externally imposed by objects? Its pretty much the same false choice that the MOQ was invented to dissolve rather than mediate.

dmb says:
Well, no. Obviously the MOQ is not framing freedom and restraint as a matter of subjectivity and objectivity but in terms of static and Dynamic, which is the quality of order and the quality of freedom respectively. And this is not some wishy-washy middle ground on this particular dilemma but the MOQ's first and most central distinction, as well as a description of what we are. 


Steve said:

... free will is a meaningless term in the MOQ. If you insist on talking about free will, Pirsig says we might just as well apply the term to atoms who we do not think of as responsible as well as to people who we do hold responsible, so possession of free will is not what makes one morally responsible in the MOQ. In addition, Pirsig doesn't even talk about moral responsibility anywhere. He is not interested in the praise and blame game and deciding who to punish and who to reward since that is a social pattern.


dmb says:
We might as well say that atoms act on their preferences. Yes, that's the idea. The ability to respond to DQ goes all the way down, which means freedom goes all the way down. At the inorganic level this freedom is extremely limited but nowhere is it completely absent.
Also, to say that Pirsig doesn't talk about moral responsibility strikes me as very, very weird. The MOQ paints a picture in which everything is an ethical activity, in which all of reality is conceived as a moral order, even the so-called physical order of the universe is moral right down to subatomic particles. And he is interested in what is morally praiseworthy and blameworthy. Recall, for example, his explanation of the problem with racism. It's wrong to condemn anyone for their so-called race precisely because that is unchangeable and nobody has a choice about that and it is irrelevant anyway. But, he says, our beliefs and values are changeable, we do have a choice and it does matter. Just because he's not using specific terms like "responsibility" does alter the fact that Pirsig's work is all about values and morals. The MOQ puts morals and ethics not just at the center but from wall to wall and throughout every square inch. So I find your assertions totally implausible. (Causality is an amoral concept, whereas preference is not.)


Steve said:
...What I've said is that in the MOQ the notion of moral responsibility is in no way predicated on free will. ...We DO choose some of our values in a way, but we only choose what to value on the basis of other values, no? What other basis could there be if the world is nothing but value? ... We make choices. Sure, but what does it mean to say that your choices are free? They aren't free, they are manifestations of your preferences, and we don't freely choose our preferences. In the MOQ we ARE our preferences, so the MOQ clearly denies both horns of the supposed dilemma.  ... If my so-called determinism means that we make choices based on our values, then that is just not the usual mechanistic view of determinism where everything follows a fixed predetermined set of physical laws.

dmb says:
I think your position is wildly incoherent. It seems you don't even understand the problem, let alone the solution. Sure, we make choices but they are determined? That idea simply defies the meaning of the term "choice". If our actions are determined they are, by definition, without choice. We do get different pictures if we say we are determined by our values rather than by the laws of cause and effect, but this is only consistent with the switch from modern scientific determinism to postmodern cultural and historical determinism. You seems to be advocating a messy, fractured version of both kinds in order to deny freedom and morality. But the MOQ is not any kind of determinism. The order and constraint of static quality is an evolutionary gain and that's what allows us to make choices.

dmb quoted Pirsig:
He says "moral judgements are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground stuff of the world, then moral judgements are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world." What sense does it make to say we have no choice about "asserting values and making judgements"? Surely it takes a will to assert anything and what is judgement but a deliberate choice?

Steve replied:
So now you've discovered a new metaphysical entity in the MOQ called the will? Of course not. We assert our values all the time. And what is deliberation but an intellectual pattern of value? Our values our made manifest in the choices we make (deliberated or not). The difference in our views here is that I don't think that there is anything to the MOQ way of describing the situation (associating freedom with DQ) that is at all like what is traditionally meant by the term "free will."


dmb says:
No, Steve. Nobody said anything about the will being a metaphysical entity. And of course the MOQ is saying something different than what is traditionally meant. We're talking about the ability to act at one's own discretion or not, according to the MOQ. You seem to be saying that we have to reject the notions of freedom and moral responsibility because we have rejected the traditional metaphysical version of Free Will. But that just ain't so. In the MOQ, freedom is the highest value and it is codified the the final moral code, the code of art. We are described as a complex forest of static patterns migrating toward DQ, toward freedom. And the evolved order is not just an elaborate set of restraints so much as a preserved, stable record of the freedoms gained in the past. Freedom and restraint is the whole game here, mister twister. That's the positive goal that the hippies didn't quite see. Because they tended to confuse biological quality with Dynamic Quality, they rejected social and intellectual values for the wrong reasons, for reasons of negative. The idea here is they got caught up in freedom FROM rather than seriously thinking about the freedom TO. Free love and feeling groovy, sadly, is usually just another name for giving in to lust and sloth. That's not freedom so much as a rejection of social level morality and degeneration back to biological values. And on this point, Pirsig's comments wouldn't make any sense if he thought that we had no choice in the matter because we are determined by these social and cultural norms. He says that we ought not simply reject those social level restraints nor should we blindly follow them either. We ought to pick them up and dust them off to examine their point and purpose. Then we can keep the ones that still make sense and ditch the rest. This is not something a determinist could say, not even a "value determinist" - if there were such a thing. 

Isn't Dharma the highest form of moral duty? Isn't that what the Sophists were teaching? This is a sense of responsibility for the unwritten laws that are imposed by nobody. That's the freedom TO. That's the positive goal, undefined Quality. That's the kind of freedom one needs to be an artist in the MOQ's sense of the term "Art". That's why free will is NOT a meaningless concept and that's why the MOQ is not a form of determinism.