[MD] Free Will

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:08 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> Hey Ron,
>
> Matt said:
> The trouble with Pirsig's metaphysical strategy, in specific relationship
> to the multifarious free will debate, is that his explanatory strategy is
> to treat Value as a primitive: you treat it as the only given, and explain
> everything else from that first step.  That strategy is very successful on
> a number of fronts, but not in explaining what value is, or how it works.
> How could it?  You've already been asked to cede its equipment as a
> given for explaining everything else.  This is why Quality can remain,
> explanatorily speaking, undefined.
>
> Ron said:
> By equating value with experience, Pirsig is placing the explanation in
> the now of experience, what it means to "be". Everyone knows what
> it is. Which is a really neat way to sew all the ends of explanation
> together in Value as being.

Dan:

Experience is both undefined and infinitely definable. By stating
Dynamic Quality and experience are synonymous, we all know what "it"
is, but the definition just keeps on going, like a continuous stutter.

>
> Matt:
> Yeah, but its _too_ neat for the purposes of attacking practical
> problems in moral and political philosophy (let alone real life).  What
> kind of explanation is it if the purpose of the explanation is to tell you
> that you already know, which is just a way of saying, "Why did you ask
> for an explanation?"  The kind is some form of epistemological,
> specifically one in which the epistemological framework requires one
> to answer certain kinds of questions.  Pirsig's explanatory strategy is
> to make you wonder why you asked the question, to make you see the
> framework and start tinkering with the framework so you can pose
> better questions.  In other words, things that make you go mu.

Dan:

LILA (from what I gather from Ant's dialogue with RMP) is meant to be
a play on the old koan: does a dog have buddha nature, or not? But it
doesn't necessarily follow that we shouldn't ask for an explanation.
It is to show that the explanation goes on and on. We keep defining
and re-defining as our experience grows and evolves. At least, we
should, if we are to grow as human beings.

Many of us become stuck in gumption traps, endlessly repeating endless
loops of doing the same thing over and over again, yet somehow always
expecting different results. Call it a comfort zone... a comfortable
place to stay, but the trap also stifles any creative energy one has
to break out of the zone. Deterministic static quality patterns leave
little room for choice. To break free requires letting go of all
patterns. And just how does a person go about doing that? Vacations
help, but they are only a temporary measure. Vacations end. And the
grind starts all over again.

"In motorcycle maintenance the mu answer given by the machine to many of
the diagnostic questions put to it is a major cause of gumption loss. It
shouldn't be! When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of
two things: that your test procedures aren't doing what you think they are or
that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged.
Check your tests and restudy the question. Don't throw away those mu
answers! They're every bit as vital as the yes or no answers. They're more
vital. They're the ones you grow on!" [ZMM]

You NEED to ask the question before you can begin seeing that the
question needs to be enlarged... that there is more to a question than
an answer... that the answer goes on and on. What RMP is really
talking about here isn't a motorcycle, but us. We know something is
wrong with our life. We feel it. But the answers we get to the
questions we ask are indeterminate. If we pay attention to those mu
answers, though, we grow, we evolve, we become better. If we only
focus on the yes and no answers though, we get stuck. And our society
values yes and no answers over mu.

>Matt:
> So, you're right that "Pirsig is placing the explanation in the now of
> experience," but that should just make one realize how much more
> work there is to do in producing all those myriad "ends of
> explanation" that you know, now, will be sewn together by Pirsig's
> metaphysical explanatory strategy.

Dan:

If all patterns are evolving toward Dynamic freedom, or the absence of
patterns, then aren't intellectual quality patterns also evolving
towards freedom? And isn't that what "mu" is all about? the "not" of
what "is"? Are we not all swimming in karmic delusion? filling
ourselves with the evolutionary garbage of history?

I remember a scene from the old Bill Murray movie "The Razor's Edge"
where he is told to climb a mountain and live by himself in a little
hut. He carries the books with him that he's been carrying half his
life. While meditating, he seems to come to a realization that the
books are just that: karmic garbage. And he begins to burn the pages
both in an effort to keep warm and an effort to free himself. You can
see it by the look on his face.

What this is pointing to is that there is no "ends of explanation"
that we can know, nor are they sewed together by the MOQ. The MOQ is a
better way of understanding and organizing reality, but it recognizes
its own limitations. It only works until something better comes along.

>
> Ron said:
> I think moral responsibility is tied into freedom of will in terms of
> value being "the good" and Pirsigs use of breaking up species of the
> genus of "good" into 4 levels of moral order really expands the
> understanding of what we mean by "moral" behaviour".
>
> Matt:
> I'm not sure I see what was explained.  First, I think it's important
> that we say not "moral responsibility is tied into freedom of will," but
> rather "freedom of will is tied into moral responsibility."  The object
> of the inquiry is to explain our modes of moral responsibility--if it
> wasn't, for Jamesian reasons Steve has just made explicit, it isn't
> clear why we should care about free will vs. determinism.  And my
> comments about what Pirsig wrote explicitly about free will and
> determinism were intended to convey that Pirsig was, indeed,
> forwarding a James-like solution, which is also just to say that Pirsig
> was not saying anything directly relevant to moral responsibility, but
> rather solving an epistemological problem incurred by thinking about
> free will in isolation from moral responsibility.  As I had said, it just
> wasn't his quarry in that section.
>
> Second, what isn't perspicuous to me is where "freedom of will"
> came into any of the rest of that sentence.  It _might_ somewhere,
> but it isn't clear how you perceive what Pirsig's arrangement of things
> puts freedom of will into play and makes sense of how "value being
> 'the good'" is supposed to make an impact on our thinking (for
> example, one might think the phrase simply redundant) or makes
> sense of the four levels of moral order (or the other way around).
> The static levels don't _explain_ anything about moral responsibility
> by themselves, they just put into place conceptual resources that
> then need to be exploited for that purpose.
>
> For example, one might tie in Pirsig's explicit comments about free
> will by saying that when, say, you eat you are being biologically
> determined, but when (according to other explicit comments by
> Pirsig) you have sex, you are being Dynamically free.  But who's this
> "you"?  Ah, it's the biological you.  Pirsig calls that you "Me."  And on
> the other side of the break between the biological level and social
> level, between the end of "object" and the beginning of "subject," is
> the "We."  The We is at a higher level than the Me, and so has some
> jurisdiction over constraining the Me and its pursuits of freedom.  At
> earlier stages of society (goes this explanation), it made sense to
> constrain your sex partners because social and economic roles were
> determined by genealogy.  This is to say your place in society was
> thought of as a _property_ (and think of it straight up on the analogy
> with economic property: who gets the land? the kingship? if nobility
> is a property in the blood, what happens when you start mixing
> blood?).  But now we have later stages of society: it produced the "I."
> So now we have three levels Me-We-I (and we can think of these
> according to Freudian id-superego-ego terms or Platonic
> darkhorse-whitehorse-charioteer terms).  Once we get here, to where
> our particular kind of "we" is, we can see that while the We should
> constrain Me, the entire point of We is to produce I's, and not get in
> the way of it.  So now we have freedom of thought, and that thought
> has realized that the idea of properties of nobility in the blood is stupid,
> so it tells We to let up on Me in certain cases (creating the double
> meaning of the freedom of effing: the freedom of thought producing
> the freedom of sexual partners).

Dan:

Timothy Wilson wrote an interesting article in the Edge
[http://edge.org/conversation/social_psychological_narrative] this
month that seems to echo what you are saying. Please allow me to quote
a couple paragraphs:

"There has been a question lurking in the back of my mind for all
those years, which is how can we take this basic knowledge and use it
to solve problems of today? I grew up in the turbulent 1960s, in an
era where it seemed like the whole world was changing, and that we
could have a hand in changing it. Part of my reason for studying
psychology in the first place was because I felt that this was
something that could help solve social problems. In graduate school
and beyond I fell in love with basic research, which is still my first
love.  It is thrilling to investigate basic questions of
self-knowledge and consciousness and unconsciousness. But those other,
more applied questions have continued to rattle around and recently
come to the fore, the more I realized how much social psychology has
to offer.

"One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the
objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of
the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the
way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories
people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing.
What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or
for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end
up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way."

Dan comments:

It appears to me that one of the narratives that is dysfunctional is
the notion of having the ability to choose what we do and who we are.
We make up stories and then we come to believe those stories are true.
In fact, though, they are constructs, built up out of social and
intellectual quality patterns.

>Matt:
> But where was free _will_ in all of this?  Where's the will, and what
> kind of freedom does it need?  It seems to me that Pirsig's levels
> lead one to think that, following Greek-cum-Enlightenment thinking,
> we have different wills, or rather, we will from different places, our
> impetus to act comes from different places: biological, social,
> intellectual.  Pirsig's levels also suggest that complicated, historically
> inflected lines of reasoning are needed to determine how particular
> phenomena should be judged.  The levels help categorize things, but
> there's no way one could understand _why_ sex _was_ constrained
> but now _shouldn't_ be constrained without shooting up into those
> categories some actual historical thinking.  And that's just to say that
> when one wants to talk about moral responsibility and freedom of
> will with Pirsig's MoQ, all Pirsig's MoQ does is give you some
> conceptual resources: they still need to be motivated, and you have
> all the hard work ahead of you.  And _after_ you've done all the
> work of showing where freedom and will fall into Pirsig's categories,
> you still have to yet to show the incompatibilities with other
> conceptual arrangements (e.g., the ones conditioned by the same
> pure-epistemological-problem shrugging off maneuver that Pirsig
> begins with).

Dan:

I am not sure I follow you here, Matt. Nor am I sure that moral
responsibility and free will are intertwined the way you seem to be
suggesting (or is it Ron who's suggesting that?). It appears (to me)
that you are making this a lot more complex than it need be. But I
prefer the simple explanation to the complex one, so that may be a
bias on my part.

For instance, I am unsure what you mean by sex being constrained but
now it shouldn't be. I see no indication of that in real life. People
still marry and for the most part are monogamous. Those who have
unconstrained sexual urges seem to find themselves in trouble...
witness a long list of celebrities who've been caught at or admitted
to various scandals.

I do agree the levels are provisional. They help organize reality in a
better way. It is good to remember though that the levels are static,
defined, determined quality and in the framework of the MOQ, they are
migrating towards Dynamic Quality, or freedom from all patterns.

>
> That last comment isn't directed necessarily at you Ron, but it is at
> people who take issue with Steve's recent advancing of redundancy
> arguments against the notion of a _free_ will.  Steve's interested in
> normal, practical kinds of freedom, but what he doesn't have
> patience for are the metaphysical kinds of freedom that seem to
> serve no purpose in connecting with the practical kinds.  If Value is
> Pirsig's assumed starting point, and for value to exist you must be
> able to freely choose between X and Y, then Pirsig has _assumed_
> the existence of free will, and made it the kind of thing that every
> existing thing has.  He has neither explained it nor argued for it
> (though he has argued for why we should reject SOM's arrangement
> of things).  He has also, by making it the kind of thing a rock has,
> made it nearly useless as a concept--if it stays at its assumed-status
> starting point--for practical reasoning.  To bring free will back down
> to earth and make it useful again is just find yourself, as a theorist,
> in the area of thinking Steve is suggesting is the only useful place to
> occupy: wanting to talk about practical kinds of constraint and
> freedom, not metaphysical kinds.

Dan:

>From what I understand, Steve has been forwarding Mr. Harris's
thoughts on free will and determinism. And also, from what I have
read, they seem compatible with RMP's thoughts and the MOQ in general.

Thank you,

Dan