[MD] Free Will

[david buchanan]

dmb said:
... The MOQ says DQ is the quality of freedom ... Without DQ nothing could grow or change... DQ degenerates into chaos.  Without DQ, static quality would fossilize or die of old age. 


Marsha snarked:
So is the DQ that dmb is defining about DQ or is it non-DQ?



dmb says:
I've paraphrased what Pirsig wrote in Lila and repeated in his 2005 summary of the MOQ:
"As to which is more important, Dynamic or static, both are absolutely essential, even when they are in conflict. As stated in LILA, without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last."
A few lines later, he says the same thing about metaphysics:
"The static language of the Metaphysics of Quality will never capture the Dynamic reality of the world but some fingers point better than others and as the world changes, old pointers and road maps tend to lose their value."

And in Lila, he and James both say there must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality because concepts are static and reality is dynamic. We find this idea throughout ZAMM as well, particularly in his explanation of our mythos as an evolved set of analogies and undefined Quality as the generator of all defined things. When the mystic insists that reality is outside of language, he's making the same point in yet another way. 

If all these explanations do not make the point clear, then I don't know what else to tell you. It seems pretty clear that the hang up is all about definitions. Definitions are the foundation of reason and all these words, as Pirsig uses them, have a coherent, consistent meaning. But you like to capriciously alter the meaning of words at and so confusion and frustration is the inevitable result.