[MD] Free Will

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 12:00 PM, 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:

Hi Matt

Yeah, just musing... I tend to do that sometimes. Not really expecting
a response...

>
> 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.

Dan:

Yes, equating Dynamic Quality with the absence of patterns can be
tricky. I think that was partly why RMP seemed to lean towards holding
Dynamic Quality as a positive:

Annotation 99.
Dynamic Quality and chaos are both patternless, and so it
would seem they have a lot in common, particularly the
fact that you can’t say anything about them without getting
into static patterns. But if you do, you can say that
Dynamic Quality is good and precedes static improvement.
It is the source of experience. Chaos, by contrast is the
condition of total destruction. You can’t call it either good
or bad. It is not the source of anything. [Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD]

When I asked him about this, though, he answered:

"...my statement that Dynamic Quality is always affirmative
was not a wise statement, since it constitutes a limitation or partial
definition of Dynamic Quality. Whenever one talks about Dynamic
Quality someone else can take whatever is said and make a static
pattern out of it and then dialectically oppose that pattern. The best
answer to the question, “What is Dynamic Quality?” is the ancient
Vedic one——“Not this, not that.” [Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD]

Thinking of it as not this, not that, is rather confusing too, as the
discussions here show. I know there are some parts in LILA that are
ambiguous. These quotes cleared up some of the ambiguity, at least for
me:

"I think the mathematical definition of chaos deals exclusively with
what the MOQ would call static objective patterns. The word
“dynamical” is a term of physics that refers to changes in space and
time. It is not the same as Dynamic Quality." [Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD]

Annotation 34:
"I think there may be a confusion here between Dynamic
Quality and chaos, which is certainly undesirable in a
computer. However, many engineering and scientific
discoveries are made by an apparatus not doing what it is
are supposed to in a way that is discovered to actually be
better than what it is supposed to do. This betterness is
then incorporated into future designs. That, then, is a
Dynamic process." [Robert Pirsig, LILA'S CHILD]

What RMP seems to be on about is that Dynamic Quality isn't patterned
in any way, but that it isn't chaos either. Chaos deals with static
patterns, especially the mathematical definition. He says here that
Dynamic Quality is the source of experience, but in another answer to
one of my questions, he states that Dynamic Quality can be seen as
synonymous with experience. I suppose he is saying the same thing, but
the latter statement was a much greater realization for me than the
former.

Matt:
 >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.

Dan:

I guess I don't see it that way. Karma is a tricky business,
especially since we in the West tend to view it as cause and effect
(paying it forward), and Eastern religions (at least in more modern
times) tend to view it as a cycle of life and death. So it seems best
to start out simple, or

Since the MOQ does away with cause and effect and replaces it with a
valuing of preconditions, the definition of karma changes too. Instead
of reaping what we sow (so to speak), preconditions give rise to
patterns of value. By valuing certain preconditions we set ourselves
up to be deluded into thinking we are free to choose, when in
actuality our karmic history (the garbage we tell ourselves over and
over again until we believe it implicitly) molds and determines the
course of our life.

>Matt:
> 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.)

Dan:

Well, I think it depends on what kind of Buddhism you are talking
about as well as the translator who is interpreting the texts. As long
as it is understood that karma is linked to the motives behind
actions, not to the consequences of actions, I think it is easier to
see what RMP is saying in LILA.

>Matt:
> 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:
Sure. An idea is a more sophisticated form of freedom than being told
what to do/how to do it. An idea, though, is simplicity itself. Where
does it come from? The sudden realizations that guide true creativity?
Yes, we steep our minds with static intellectual quality, but all that
does is inform us on what others have thought before us. There is
nothing original there. From where does that seed of originality
arise? That is what RMP is on about when he talks about Dynamic
Quality being the absence of all patterns, completely new, a surprise.

>
> 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:

Point taken.

>
> 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?

Dan:

Of course we can change the narrative. But I think that is beside the
point, isn't it? We simply change one narrative for another. That
doesn't mean we are making a choice freely.

>Matt:
> 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?

Dan:

I would venture to say narratives are both self and atmosphere. Yes,
we can change the narrative but most of us are so locked into it that
changing it is next to impossible. Only when faced with
life-threatening situations (suffering) are we compelled to free
ourselves from the narrative that guides our life, be it dysfunctional
or not.

>Matt:
> 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:

Well put.

>
> 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_.

Dan:
I re-read your paper and noticed this paragraph near the beginning,
which gave me pause when I first read it years ago. I made quite a few
notes on this paper, actually, but I'd have to look where I put them.
Probably on one of my old computer's hard drive. Anyway, you wrote:

"Responsibility means “to be the cause or source of.” If A were to
throw a baseball, it could be said that A was responsible for throwing
a baseball. Very simply, moral responsibility for one’s actions begins
before the determination of the freedom of the will, as is commonly
supposed. Moral responsibility begins with causal responsibility, or,
rather, moral responsibility begins with the differentiation between
individuals (ego differentiation), or (to use another vocabulary) with
the differentiation between causal chains (the Matt causal chain vs.
the Dennis causal chain). This also works in the case of placing
responsibility on a group of people, such as placing the
responsibility of slavery upon white Americans (if one were so
inclined to do). All white Americans would be considered part of the
same causal chain if that is how the chain is broken up."

Dan:

Historically, many blacks (not the slaves themselves, of course) were
as culpable for slavery as were the whites, but that is beside the
point. It is the causal chain that bothers me. The act of A throwing a
baseball values preconditions set in place by inorganic, biological,
social, and intellectual patterns of quality working at motivating a
preference to throw a baseball. A is no more responsible for throwing
a baseball than the coach who taught A to throw, or the manufacturer
who made the baseball. The preference A gives to throw a baseball
instead of, say, a rock, is the result of preconditions, not causes.

Now, recognizing that B values precondition A doesn't change the
outcome of A causes B, but it enlarges the questions we are asking
(and the answers we are given) about morality and responsibility. For
instance, your examples...

Take these four examples:
1) Dog A (with rabies) kills person X: we hold dog A responsible.
2) Insane person B (with no control over his actions) kills person X:
we hold person B responsible (to an extent).
3) Person C with a gun to their head is forced to kill person X: we do
not hold person C responsible.
4) Person D kills person X: we hold person D responsible.

are seen in a more expanded context. In 4), instead of saying Person D
caused person X's death, we say Person D valued preconditions that led
to Person X's death. What preconditions? Was Person X trying to kill
(or in some way threatening him/her with harm) Person D? Or did Person
D value preconditions of premeditated murder? In each case, the
outcome is the same. Person X is dead, and Person D is responsible. In
one case, though, Person D is exonerated. In the other, he/she is
convicted of murder.

3) is particularly interesting though. Gruesome, but interesting. The
movie Sofie's Choice comes to mind. Now, I hate nazis. Hate isn't a
strong enough word, actually. One of my all-time favorite scenes in
any movie is a tie between John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd (Jake and
Elwood) running the nazis off the bridge in Blues Brothers and the
Bear Jew coming out of that tunnel and wailing on the nazi officer
with a baseball bat in Inglourious Basterds. But I ramble... keep to
the point, Dan; keep to the point.

If we say Person C causes the death of Person X, we would be
technically correct. Yet, you are saying Person C isn't responsible. I
beg to differ. A court of law may exonerate him/her but morally, they
are still responsible. They valued the precondition of their own life
over the life of someone else. This isn't to say that they actually
had a choice in the matter, however.


>Matt:
> 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.

Dan:

Again, I think by replacing causality with the valuing of
preconditions, we have a more expanded set of both questions to ask
and answers to give. By understanding we are not "free" in any sense
of the word when our actions are motivated by static dictates, we come
to see that responsibility is bound up not only with us as
individuals, but with social and intellectual patterns of quality that
make up our culture... both self and atmosphere.

>Matt:
> 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:

Yes, I can agree with that.

>
> 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.

Dan:

Exactly.

>Matt:
> 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.

Dan:
I suppose that would depend on just who one asked. Mrs. Woods
obviously disagreed with Tiger's lack of constraint, otherwise she
wouldn't have gone upside his head with a golf club and chased him
half-way down the street. I mean, it's easy to make fun of such
situations unless one happens to be in that situation. And yes,
participation plays a very large role to be sure. Marriage and
monogamy are predicated on preconditions that value a preference for
only one partner (and yes, there are such things as "open" marriages
but those are the exceptions rather than the rule).

>Matt:
> 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.

Dan:

Of course not.

Thank you,

Dan