[MD] Free Will

[Ian]

Hi Matt, good to have you back in the mix.

Don't have full editing facilities right now, but two points....

Plus c'est la meme chose - seeing things better looking back is indeed a myth. It has looked like that since 4000BC (Horace)

And your (Nagel) point - the closer we look (analyze) the less actual freedom (DQ) we have. Agreed.

At the risk of winding dmb up, I find it ironic that the more we have academic arguments "about"  MOQ the further away we are taken "from" MOQ. Closer to that old church of reason.

(Craig, I owe you a response.)
Ian
( What's so funny 'bout ..... )

Sent from my iPhone

On 21 Jun 2011, at 20:00, Matt Kundert <pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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                         
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