[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

Pirsig in Lila:

"It isn't Lila that has quality; it's Quality that has Lila.  Nothing can have Quality.  To have something is to possess it, and to possess something is to dominate it.  Nothing dominates Quality.  If there's domination and possession involved, it's Quality that dominates and possesses Lila.  She's created by it.  She's a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality.  There isn't any more to her than that.  The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years of the history of the entire world.  She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary patterns of value.  She doesn't know how they all got there any more than any jungle knows how it came to be."


Steve commented on the quote:
In the MOQ, all we are and in fact experience itself is Value. We are not determined by values. We are not "free to choose" our values. We ARE our values. "Choosing" is the manifestation of what we ARE as sets of values with the capacity to respond to DQ. In the MOQ, it is the fact of such choices (value patterns) from which "the will" or the self is inferred rather than the other way around. In contrast, the SOM notion of free will is of an autonomous subject with metaphysical primacy. dmb keeps saying that if we drop the notion of a choosing subject (though he does say he drops the notion of a metaphysical soul), then morality goes out window. I see that as about the most un-MOQish thing one could possibly say. The MOQ is about asserting an understanding of the world as a moral order through _denying_ the subject-object picture. Instead of free will as the possession of a self, Pirsig retools the notion of freedom (note that in the quote you posted he shifts from "free will" to "freedom") as the capacity to respond to DQ. And in LC he says that you are going to talk about free will in MOQ terms as this capacity, then you may as well say that rocks and trees and atoms have free will. But let's not slip the SOM version of a freely choosing subject with metaphysical primacy in through the back door here. Pirsig's notion of freedom associated with DQ is very different from traditional SOM free will that is suppose to distinguish humanity from the animals.



dmb says:
You say we ARE our values and we are not free to choose those values. But then you also say we are not determined by our values. These statements contradict each other. Like I said, this looks like some kind of value-determinism wherein the static patterns are the causal forces that determine our thoughts and actions. I think this misconception begins with a misreading of the quote above. 

William James can help to illuminate the meaning of the quote. In his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" James contrasts his own view of consciousness with the idea, to use his analogy, that consciousness and its content are two different things the way paint can be separated into the oil or latex and the pigment suspended therein. In this analogy the thinker is distinct from the thoughts so that we say the mind contains ideas, so that there is a consciousness that has thoughts. This is what Pirsig is denying in the quote above. He's saying Lila doesn't HAVE static values and she doesn't HAVE Dynamic Quality either because there is no Lila above and beyond that. James famously said "no", if by "consciousness" you mean the entity that has the thoughts, there is no such thing. Consciousness, he says, is just a name for the fact the the content is known. After explaining the usual Cartesian and neo-Kantian view of consciousness through the oil and pigment analogy, he says...

"Now, my contention is exactly the reverse of this. EXPERIENCE, I BELIEVE, HAS NO SUCH INNER DUPLICITY; AND THE SEPARATION OF IT INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AND CONTENT COMES, NOT BY WAY OF SUBTRACTION, BUT BY WAY OF ADDITION - the addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different kinds." (Emphasis is James's, 1144)

This is what people are talking about when they say consciousness doesn't exist. This is the ridiculous fictional self that Pirsig rejects and that's what he's denying in the quote about what Lila (and everyone else) is. But, James says, this means that consciousness exists as a process, as the thinking itself. You might know about the ill-fated attempts among European phenomenologists like Husserl who thought they could examine the structures of consciousness itself through careful introspection and he was famous for "discovering" that consciousness always has a content. He called it "intentionality", this idea that consciousness seems to always have a content, like you can never get the pigment (content) to settle to reveal pure oil of consciousness. James was a very different kind of phenomenologist. I think he would have said, had he lived long enough, that you'll never find the consciousness as distinct from the content because the content IS the consciousness. 

It seems to me that you, Steve, are portraying Lila (and everyone else) as the helpless product of evolutionary forces such that she (and we) have no choice or freedom. Like I say, this becomes a kind of value determinism wherein we are not just shaped and influenced but utterly controlled by the static patterns we inherit. But that simply defies Pirsig reformulation wherein we do have the capacity to respond to DQ, the capacity for creativity and spontaneity and the spur of the moment decisions that drive the evolutionary and developmental process. Without this, there could be no contrarians, no new hypotheses, no new songs, no rebellion or revolution or betterness of any kind. Without this, everyday experience is de-realized and denigrated as illusory, if not delusory, simply because striving and straining against felt resistances is a concrete, empirical reality. We know it from first hand experience all day, every day. This is the aboriginal, concretely lived experience from which we derive our notions of causal laws and agency and passivity. The traditional dilemma could go on and on because both sides can point to these concrete realities as justification for their side, which is to say that freedom and restraint are both empirically known. But the MOQ's reformulation does not present these two elements as a dilemma, as a choice between mutually exclusive options. Instead, we are free to some extent and restrained to some extent. And it's not just a little bit of both because DQ and sq together are everything we can experience or know.