[MD] Free Will

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Dan,

I'm not sure whether you meant it as such or not, but I read 
everything in the first two sections of your response as in agreement 
with what I was saying.  The below picks up after that:

Dan said:
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?

Matt:
I have trouble equating Dynamic Quality or freedom with the absence 
of patterns for the Pirsigian reason of the concomitant distinction 
between and ambiguity between DQ and chaos/degeneracy.  I have 
non-Pirsigian qualms about the ideas of "karmic delusion" and 
"evolutionary garbage of history" because they strike me as 
primitivistic responses to the present keyed at a metaphysical level.  

Primitivism (a concept best developed by A.O. Lovejoy) is the kind of 
response one has when one thinks that there was a Golden Age in 
the past that the present has debased in some manner.  Usually its 
the transformation of the simple into the sophisticated, which makes 
primitivism a typical kind of response to modern society ("things were 
simpler when I was young...").  Buddhism, in those twin ideas, 
seems to put that in-history response at the metaphysical level, which 
makes _history itself_, the creation of time, the thing that debases 
reality itself.  (This, in form, is very similar to the Judeo-Christian 
narrative arc of Eden/Fall/Redemption.)

That doesn't seem to me like a good way to describe the movement 
of history.  I prefer to think of Dynamic Quality at the higher levels as 
more sophisticated kinds of freedom made possible by the lower, 
simpler levels, and it's difficult for me to sustain the idea that these 
higher freedoms can be described as simple absences, rather than 
complex absences created by simple presences.  (E.g., the presence 
of the social level makes the freedom/absences of the intellectual 
level possible.)  I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what 
I tend to think.

Dan said:
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.

Matt:
I think you misunderstood how Ron deployed that idea, and how I 
played off it.  As I understood it, Ron wasn't saying there was _an 
end to explanation_ (i.e., a point at which the explanatory process 
will shut down), but rather talking about how the MoQ as a 
metaphysical system ties together all the smaller systems of 
explanation offered by the special disciplines (physics, biology, 
sociology, philosophy of mind, of language, etc.).  "Sewing together 
the ends of explanation" was Ron's gloss on what you just 
commended: "a better way of understanding and organizing 
reality."  The reason why Ron's idiom works well here is that it not 
only houses Pirsig's suggestion that the MoQ doesn't necessarily 
replace any individual sciences or disciplines, but is rather the 
framework that situates all of them--it also suggests the idea that 
explanatory sequences are things that have a beginning and an end: 
a set of premises, that then inquiry works through, and then finally 
emit in a conclusion.  It's the whole sequence that is the explanation 
(just as scientific explanations are not what they are in just their 
conclusion, but also in the entire process of coming to that 
conclusion), and the MoQ gathers together the threads at the 
conclusions and braids them together.

Dan said:
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:
I'm not sure I see your line of inference here.  The first sentence 
sounds like thing Steve's been pressing, what I also pressed when I 
talked about Nagel briefly: the amount of free will we have in our 
lives seems to disappear the closer we look at situations.  Were the 
second two sentences just glosses on how, because our truths are 
embedded in stories that are constructed out of the cloth that makes 
us up, we can change this dysfunctional narrative?

What is curious, and suggests to me the complexity of the issue over 
freedom, will, control, and responsibility, is how the fact of us being 
constructed out of our social/intellectual patterns conditions the idea 
that we can change the story we tell about ourselves that we have the 
ability to choose how we make up what we do and who we are.  
Where did the social/intellectual patterns come from, other than an 
"us," Pirsig's social We?  In other words, "who we are" is a function of 
the the cloth that makes us up, but it is also us that makes it up.  And 
if it's a dysfunction to think that we have the ability to choose our 
stories, how is it that we are going to change the story we are living 
in/through?

I think we can hold all those thoughts together, but I think we'd have 
to modulate away from thinking that the story of having choice is 
dysfunctional, or refine just what it is that is dysfunctional about our 
current story.

Dan said:
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.

Matt:
On moral responsibility and free will, if you have the time, perhaps 
take a look at an old paper I wrote in college on my website 
(http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/03/free-will-and-determinism-contours-of.html).  
It runs through a series of thought experiments to try and pull out 
certain features that we appear to attribute to the attribution of 
moral responsibility.  I _would_ rather talk about "freedom" than 
"free will," and the thought runs that: are you morally responsible 
for shooting your mother's leg if you have a gun against your head 
and the intruder is threatening to kill you if you don't?  There might 
be refined senses in which you are yet still morally responsible for 
that act (because as the paper makes pedantically clear, moral 
responsibility begins with causal responsibility), but most of us would 
also say that the act of _coercion_ makes your actions _less your own_, 
less _freely chosen_.  

It's those practical kinds of freedom that Steve and I, and it seems 
you from your final comments abut Steve (and Ron, too?), think make 
an impact on moral reasoning, but not epistemological/metaphysical 
kinds of freedom, which is the kind Aristotle kicked off thinking about 
in his discussions of fatalism and are codified in the "free will vs. 
determinism debate."  To itemize "free will" in a practical kind of way 
would perhaps start with calling "will" the source of an action that 
creates a specifically moral-causal responsibility; and "free" a qualifier 
that allows you to distinguish between moral and causal responsibility, 
so that one might be causally responsible (I did will the shooting of 
my mother's leg) but not morally responsible.

Elegance and simplicity in explanation is a general explanatory value, 
but so is completeness and command of evidence.  It's the interplay 
between them helps us evolve simple explanations into, not 
circumlocutory complexity, but _sophisticated_ explanations.

Dan said:
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.

Matt:
I just watched the South Park episode on Tiger Woods (from Season 
14, now on InstaFlix).  It's all about that glitch in our social mores 
about sex and celebrities, at least in terms of expectation.

What I meant about sex being constrained and now it shouldn't be is 
that I do think if you looked at the course of human culture (and I 
would limit myself to Greco-European cultural history) you would see 
an evolution in our proprieties about sexual relations, a movement 
that would show that the strictures and constraints have lessened.  
One good indication of that slackening is not _actual_ slackening, but 
the idea that they should be slackened.  That was _not_ always the 
case.  The intellectual level has shifted, but that doesn't mean the 
social level has yet.  Social practices such as marriage and 
monogamy aren't by themselves indications of constraint, it's rather 
the societal norms of approbation and disapprobation that attach to 
whether one _participates_ in those practices that I think is a better 
indication.  And I do think it is a fact of the matter today that people 
are less concerned about whether other people get married at all, 
and in that sense lifetime-monogamous.

Do we still have Puritanical mores in our culture, America especially?  
Absolutely.  But that shouldn't stop us from trying to chart our 
differences from the past.

Matt