[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
"Resisting impulses and desires" usually translates in MOQ terms as "social and/or intellectual patterns sometimes trump biological patterns under certain circumstances." But there is no more freedom in such situations understood as the product of the freedom of an independent willing agent than there is in that biological patterns such as flying birds resisting the impulse to fall in acquiescence to gravity. 


dmb says:
I don't follow your reasoning. First of all, "falling" is not an impulse. Since nobody thinks of free will as the freedom to defy gravity, I do not get your analogy.
Also, why does the question of free will have to be framed around an "independent" agent. In what sense is such agency independent? Why can't the issue be framed as agency within the whole range and context of static patterns? The levels are not independent or discontinuous metaphysical categories and we are not independent of them. Isn't that what Pirsig opposes when he opposes the metaphysics of substance? Whether we're talking material substance, mental substance or divine substance, we'd be talking about the essential nature underlying phenomena. That is essentialism, the metaphysics of substance. 

Einstein, by the way, believed in Spinoza's God, which was conceived as the substance underlying all of nature.