[MD] Indeterminism

[Ham Priday]

OK then, Mark --


> Hi Ham,
> Thanks for reminding me of your question.
>
> NO!  MoQ is not a philosophy which subscribes to determinism
> of any kind.  Everything is an ethical activity.  Ethics imply Will.
> Everything has free will, from you down to the electron, and up
> to the universe.  Pirsig makes this quite clear in Lila.

So, Pirsig's cosmology of Dynamic Quality proceeding on its unalterable 
course toward "betterness", and carrying everything in the universe with it, 
is not (in your opinion)  deterministic.

It's hard to see how this can be an "ethical" activity, let alone one 
involving Free Will.  Apparently belief in an ethical (moral?) universe 
requires one to accept the ancient animistic notion that quantum particles 
exercise the same freedom that man does.  As a scientist, you realize of 
course that if hydrogen atoms had "decided" not to pair up with oxygen 
atoms, there would have been no water to support life on this planet. 
Likewise, had small bodies in space not been attracted to bodies of larger 
mass, planetary orbits such as our solar system would have been impossible. 
But, I suppose the laws of nature are assumed to be "patterns" of Quality 
which "freely" go with the flow.

> Again, Pirsig states that the entirety of creation is moral activity.
> One cannot claim morals if there is no intention.  Each person has
> its own interpretation of morality, as does everything else.
> As humans we can understand (at least a little bit) where another
> human is coming from, but we have not idea how morality is
> interpreted by other things.  All we can see is that things aspire to
> greatness.  As such, we cannot create morality, we can however,
> interpret it in our own way.  There are so many things that can be
> built out of sandstone (Quality), us human do one thing, the river
> does another.  There is no difference, it is all astonishing.

I can accept your statement that there is no morality without intention. 
What I cannot accept is that "things interpret morality", or that they 
should even need to.  Only man can realize his aspirations because only man 
is sensible to Value.  For me, you see, the physical world is an 
anthropocentric system, the form of which is actualized in the process of 
converting value-sensibility into the experience of being.  The laws of 
physics are inherent in the Essential Value which we can only experience as 
finite, relational beingness.

[Ham, previously]:
> Hopefully, this valuistic analysis will not be viewed as another
> "Ham attack" on Pirsig's Quality thesis.

[Mark]:
> No, this is no attack at all.  Quality is what subjects and objects
> are made of.  All that we can sense is the quality of something.
> That is, if it is hard or soft, if it is bright or dim, etc.  We have no
> knowledge of the thing itself.  Because everything interacts through
> Quality (DQ) to form the material or conceptual (sq) it seems
> appropriate to call this a Quality world.  I am not sure what you
> mean by sensible subjects, do they have to contain nerves?

A "sensible subject" is not a brain but the proprietary Self.  No, it does 
not contain nerves, cells, or organs because isn't a biological entity, but 
is rather what some call the "soul" or "seat of consciousness".  I use the 
term "awareness", which I think comes closest to defining value-sensibility. 
The central nervious system and all the bio-physical apparata constituting 
what we call a "human being" are existential instruments of the subject's 
awareness.  Like the physical objects in the world about us, the organism by 
which we are identified is actualized from Value in the process of 
experiencing.

What is significant about my epistemology is that the subjective Self is NOT 
a physical entity.  If it were, we could not possess the power of autonomy 
but, instead, would be. bound to the same physical laws that make evolution 
a deterministic process.  In my opinion, Pirsig had to do away with the 
autonomous self in order to posit the universe as his Quality-based 
empirical reality.  In this way he could promote the MoQ as "radical 
empiricism".

Thanks for explaining your worldview, Mark.  I hope this post will serve to 
wrap up the fundamental differences between our respective metaphysical 
persuasions.

Yours in the pursuit of higher understanding,
Ham