[MD] The Quality of Free Will

[david buchanan]

Dave T saw the Dalai Lama on television: 
... I saw him in a TV clip snap at a questioner who asked him a question about the Buddhist principle of "no-self."  .., He said something like (and this really pissed her off), "If you have no self, who is it that is going to change?"


dmb says:

Right. And if you have no self, who is the "one" controlled by static patterns and who is the "one" that's free to the extent that DQ is followed? I'm referring to the "one" in Pirsig's reformulation of the old free will - determinism dilemma. 

That's what I'm talking about when I ask why "the will" cannot belong to the MOQ's self. Why does freedom and restraint have to be superglued to the Cartesian subject? Why is it that such freedom can only ever exist as the exclusive property of an independent entity? The crucial mistake seems to be an illegitimate leap, one that construes the rejection of SOM's self as a rejection of any self at all. If you have no self, who is it that is rejecting the self? No self at all? Think about it. How would THAT work? 

"The MOQ resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. They are not two mysterious universes that go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one." (Lila, 299)

This is the section where Pirsig gives us the MOQ's answer to the question of the independence of science and intellect. "The answer it gives is, 'not at all.' A science in which social patters are of no account is as unreal and absurd as a society in which biological patterns are of no account. It's an impossibility," he says. See? This is also the section where he corrects Descrates' famous declaration: "I think, therefore I am." Pirsig says, that Descrates' thoughts are not independent of the 17th century French culture in which they were expressed. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship and his culture is not independent of the biological values either because of that same evolutionary relationship. As James puts it, the problem is an artificial conception of the RELATION between knower and known, namely that they are two discontinuous entities. Rejecting the Cartesian self is to reject the self AS an independent entity. It simply doesn't follow that we cannot have a legitimate alternative to the Cartesian conception of the self. And that's what Pirsig offers; an alternative. Think about this larger evolutionary framework and the way it denies the independence of subjects and objects and then look again at Pirsig's description of Lila:

"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 entireworld. 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 keeps saying since Lila just is her values and there is no added metaphysical entity beyond that. This is true enough as far as it goes, but this doesn't mean that selves have no existence at all. Steve and I and everyone else exist DEPENDENTLY within this larger evolutionary framework. 

"In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning. There is no such thing 'human rights'. There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else. This ..can be straightened out by the MOQ. It says that what is meant by 'human rights' is usually the moral code of intellect-vs.-society, the MORAL RIGHT of intellect TO BE FREE of social control. ...According to the MOQ these 'human rights' have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are ESSENTIAL TO THE EVOLUTION of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real." (Lila, 307)

"There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily TO FREE PEOPLE from these biological chains." (Lila, 307)

The MOQ is structured to reflect this evolutionary morality and so are we. That's what Lila is. That's what we all are. And hopefully we're doing better than Lila, who's nowhere intellectually and pretty far down the scale socially too. The MOQ goes even further so that inorganic molecules are postulated to have created life because it "better" and the evolution of life depends on those "spur of the moment decisions" out there in the jungles. Societies were created to overcome the constraints of biological necessity and intellect to overcome the restraints of society. All of his is postulated as being driven by following DQ, by the movement from rightness to betterness. Each stage is better than the one before precisely because it offers more freedom and less constraint.

That's why Pirsig says the MOQ has so MUCH MORE to say about ETHICS than a simple resolution of the free will - determinism dilemma. He re-frames the issue in a larger context, in a context that couldn't be any larger, and the issues of freedom and constraint run through the whole thing. There is no part of us that is not involved in this struggle of evolutionary morality. 

But some people take Pirsig to mean that these concerns can be dismissed as a meaningless product of SOM. Man, that is way, way off the mark. It's not even close.