[MD] Free Will

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Dan,

Matt said:
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 said:
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...

Thinking of [DQ] 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. ...

Matt:
That's not the ambiguity I meant.  I didn't mean a textual ambiguity 
on Pirsig's part, but an idea I've before called the indeterminacy of 
Dynamic Quality thesis.  I think Pirsig is more or less clear about the 
difference between Dynamic Quality and chaos.  What I meant is that 
the distinction between DQ and chaos _comes along with necessarily_ 
the ambiguity between them in the present felt experience of a 
person.  That's how I've interpreted Pirsig's discussion of degeneracy 
on Lila 255-59.  Pirsig asks the question, "how do you tell the saviors 
from the degenerates?"  And then he moves back to descriptions of 
New York.  As far as I can tell, he doesn't give that question an 
answer, nor anywhere else that doesn't appeal back to the felt 
experience of betterness.  Nor _should he_: I think that's the smart 
move and it should be codified as a principle, as important as the 
principle that DQ is betterness.  Because if you combine the latter 
with a method for telling the difference between saviors and 
degenerates, you've hyptostatized betterness, encapsulated it like 
Plato.  If you don't, but say that if it _feels_ better, then it _is_ better, 
then you've licensed the first-personal point of view free reign to call 
itself a savior and be _therefore justified_.

Matt said:
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 said:
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...

Matt:
I guess I don't see how what you've said here connects to what I said 
about primitivism.  To say one should avoid the primitivist fantasy isn't 
to say anything about the evaluation of simplicity qua simplicity.  Also, 
I don't see the difference between "cause-and-effect" formulations 
and "preconditional valuation" formulations for what you say next--

Dan said:
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:
I think it's a mistake to think that the MoQ "does away with cause and 
effect."  I don't think that's exactly what Pirsig meant (much more 
about that below).  Also, I don't see how cause-and-effect thinking 
impedes our ability to reach the (smart) position of seeing how our 
(karmic) history "molds and determines the course of our life."  
That's essentially the historicist standpoint Hegel helped into 
Greco-European philosophical thinking in the 19th century.  I don't 
think what I said about primitivism clouds anything you said here 
about karma.  But I also don't think anything you said here justifies 
the description of (karmic) history as a "delusion."

Dan said:
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:
Perhaps that's where you misunderstood me.  I was talking about a 
particular formulation you made, and what cautions me about it.  I 
was not talking about the interpretation of Pirsig at that moment, nor 
especially the proper interpretation of Buddhism, which I am not e
quipped to discuss or adjudicate.

When someone talks in a certain manner about an object of inquiry 
held in common, and particularly if precisely what is said is 
underdetermined (largely because of space constraints and not 
being able to say everything at once), I think it is sometimes apropos 
to forward one's own reasons for not talking in that manner (if one 
has reasons).  Such a comment is not meant as accusation, but as 
explanation (for why one doesn't talk in that way) and as request 
(for assent to the picture of why not, or denial that that is what is 
meant).  What you've suggested about understanding karma from 
your point of view suggests that we agree in avoiding what I called 
primitivism.

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 said:
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 said:
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:
Is it?  I think we're talking past each other here a little bit.

I thought there was a narrative according to which this is true: "free 
will allows us the ability to choose what we do and who we are."  
You called this narrative dysfunctional.  I think that calling this 
narrative dysfunctional suggests that we ought to look for a 
functional one: which makes narrative change the point.

You however respond by making a point _in_ the 
metaphysical/epistemological debate about free will: we change from 
one narrative to another, but what makes that choice free?  I thought 
we already agreed that neither one of us cares about that debate.  
That means whatever freedom I'm talking about is not that kind of 
freedom, but whatever kind of freedom needs to be supposed so that 
it is possible to change one's narrative about how the world works 
(e.g., the freedom to reflect on one's narratives: one practical form 
of this is money enough to afford free time to do so).

Does that make more sense?  Did I accidentally imply the 
meta/episte debate we want to eschew?

Dan said:
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.

Matt:
As an extension of my comment about preconditional valuation above, 
I guess I don't really see how Pirsig's redescription of causation really 
expands our minds in a way that's unavailable for causation-thinkers.  
It seems strained to say that Pirsig opens up a whole avenue of 
thinking about conditions that precede actions when its the "chain" 
quality of _both_ preconditional valuation and causation that allows 
one to go backwards (or forwards).  I couldn't see any line of thinking 
about the example of murder you posited that a person thinking 
causally couldn't follow.  As far as I can tell, a "precondition" is a 
"cause."  Pirsig's redescription doesn't seem on its face to change the 
structure of the chain.  It seems just as easy to say that "A is a causal 
nexus of training from coaches and the economics of industrialization 
plus professionalized recreations" as it is to say "A is a preconditional 
valuational nexus of coaches, manufacturers, etc."  A is not 
responsible for throwing _a_ baseball, especially in a cosmic sense, 
but I can understand that from thinking about causes, too.  And A 
_is_ responsible for throwing _that_ baseball, unless you want to be 
like Clarence Darrow and argue that because we are the set of our 
preconditions/causes, you should exonerate everyone from 
wrong-doing.  But that strikes a blow at the heart of normative 
activity, which is to say evaluative activity, which is to say Value, 
where one thing is better than another.  So, we still judge A 
according to A's preferences, and we do that whether we're thinking 
causally or preconditional valuationally.

Dan said:
[previous example from my paper: "Person C with a gun to their 
head is forced to kill person X: we do not hold person C 
responsible."]

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:
I think you misunderstood the gist of my paper on that point.  
Remember, I made a distinction between moral and causal 
responsibility, and that causal responsibility is a (dare I say) 
precondition of moral responsibility.  The example of Person C was 
intended to illustrate--not _correct_ moral reasoning--but the general 
theoretical point that causal responsibility isn't coextensive with moral 
responsibility.  In fact, if someone _does_ think that causal 
responsibility is coextensive with moral responsibility, that _still_ goes 
to reinforce the point there because one has still made/understood 
the distinction between causal responsibility and a moral standard 
that grafts onto causal responsibility.  To judge a particular case 
differently is to have a different moral standard, and it was the 
overall point of my paper to establish that moral standards adjudicate 
_what kinds of freedom_ may or may not be necessary for moral 
reasoning.

Now, in the above, I don't think you _have_ actually quibbled with the 
moral reasoning stated in the example, because it seems you made 
the Pirsig value-first move in calling _all_ responsibility _moral_ 
responsibility.  But that's besides the point for the issue I was 
discussing, I think.  After the "everything is value" move, if you are 
going to make any sense of real life moral reasoning, then you're 
going to need to start making distinctions between different forms of 
culpability (e.g., legal, physical, societal) within the overall sense 
that we are all morally responsible for every action we make.

You have to understand the precondition of that paper: it was written 
for a class _on_ the free will vs. determinism problem, a problem 
that you, I, and Steve all think is lame and a nonstarter when cast at 
that metaphysical/epistemological level.  I apparently thought it was 
back then, too, in 2002.  For the best way to read the thesis of that 
paper is as a giant "mu."  It was to say that if determinism is the 
thesis that we are caught up in causal chains, then it is not 
destructive of moral reasoning because moral reasoning is 
something that occurs partly _because_ of causal chains.  Moral 
reasoning _needs_ causal chains.  And if that's the case, why on 
earth would determinism destroy moral reasoning?

Now, given that's the case about that paper, it is also the case that 
all of the reasoning is in the vocabulary of causation.  And you want 
to press the point that using a vocabulary of preconditional valuation 
would open up new lines of thinking about moral reasoning.  I'm still 
not sure what they are, but the above at least serves to set straight 
what I was trying to do with the vocabulary of causation.

Dan said:
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:
The only way to articulate why I don't see the expansion is to say that 
Pirsig isn't the only person to have given us a vocabulary in which to 
talk about us as not only individuals.  The entire edifice of 
post-Hegelian philosophy is directed at understanding humans as 
culturally constituted, which is to say, as a set of patterns.  And none 
of them has had to abandon the vocabulary of causation to make 
sense of this expansion.

And by the way, how do you know when your "actions are motivated 
by static dictates"?  That seems like a bad question to me, but one 
forced on us by predicating freedom on "when" that is not the case.  
It seems just to call up again the free will vs. determinism debate.

(And I caution against answering my rhetorical question with forms 
of "my actions are not motivated by static dictates when they move 
against the grain of current conventions."  Answers of that form are 
the only way to know that you _aren't_ being static, but because of 
the indeterminacy of DQ thesis, it also doesn't tell you whether it's 
good or bad freedom.)

Matt said:
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 said:
I suppose that would depend on just who one asked.

Matt:
That sounds like a non sequitor, Dan.  You can ask individual persons 
for what they think about themselves and how they wish to live their 
own lives _and_, additionally and separately, ask them what they 
think about the general movement of cultural history.  But the two 
are not the same, and I was _not_ talking about how I live my own 
life, but about cultural history.  And when you are talking about that 
object, you can be wrong or right about it, whatever one's individual 
opinion.  The correctness of my claim that "people are less 
concerned..." is something that's either wrong or right, not something 
that depends on who you ask.  You _will_ get different answers about 
whether that claim is right or wrong, but their (my) ability to justify 
that answer will determine the competence of their ability to answer 
that question responsibly.

Matt