[MD] "Could have acted differently" v. "the extent to which we perceive DQ"

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Dan:
...Your phrasing "static quality illusions" seems to point to the fact that SQ=Illusion, and I was responding to that. I do maintain, however, that "illusions" do not exist within a MOQ, illusions are what emerge from the SOM that a MOQ seeks to overcome.  ... "S's" and "O's" do not "exist". That is the trap of SOM the MOQ argues against. ... the "illusion" I am referring to is the "existential" reality of said "thing"... I get that, there are no primary objects (or subjects) that precede direct experience. And on that level to call the primacy of objects an "illusion" makes absolute sense to me. But experientially? Wasn't this Pirsig's point in ZMM? How can anyone say the bombs were "illusions"? 
... I'd say that seeing "free will" as some existential "out there" thing that floats around and controls experience is certainly an illusion. But the concept of "free will" is an intellectual pattern of value, a way we explain and make sense of our experience.  Of course, I have said I don't think it is the best way we can explain this, I personally think agency/structuration is a better metaphor than free will/determinism. But my argument is that "free will" is only an illusion when it is offered as some existential "object" that exists independent of experience. But as a mediating intellectual pattern of value, it can have high or low value based on its success in not only describing experience but giving YOU the tools you want to navigate the stream of experience.



dmb says:
I think you're right on both major points here and those points are well said too. In fact, I was trying to make your first point recently in the "algebra of illusion" post. The algebraic equation works against claims about what things "really" are beyond their appearances but the MOQ doesn't make any such claims. It begins by rejecting claims as to what things "really" are. It says that your idea of the earth and sky and everything else is just that, an idea. It says don't reify that idea, don't believe that your idea is how things "really" are. So if you plug the MOQ's assertions into the equation, it's like using a double negative. You'd end up reversing yourself, because the MOQ and that equation are both meant to work against the claims of Platonists, essentialists, realists and the like. It would be a matter of being opposed to essentialism AND opposed to the opponents of essentialism at the same time. The MOQ doesn't ask if an idea corresponds with reality as it really is. It simply asks if an idea works AS an idea. Ideas have to work in experience and so they agree with reality as it's experienced in that broader sense, but this is not correspondence to an objective reality of things. Truth is not matching your ideas to the way things "really" are so much as it is a good marriage between your thinking and your living, a good fit between the conceptual tool and the empirical flux.


I've been trying to make your second point to Steve for quite a while now.


What's the simplest way to make that point? The MOQ does not reject ALL conceptions of free will. The MOQ has its own particular sort of free will, its own version of what it takes for one's behavior to be free and its own particular sort of determining factors. (I also agree that agency and structuration is a good way to think of these two elements - or simply freedom and restraint.) I think it's pretty obvious that we can totally reject the concept of free will as the capacity OF the autonomous self, OF the Cartesian self, OF the rational self or OF the Christian soul, without also rejecting the MOQ's radically empirical version. We can reject free will AS the property of these various metaphysical entities without rejecting the general concept of free will. It's the metaphysical additions to and explanations of free will that we're rejecting, not the freedom itself. In the MOQ, this freedom is not predicated on any pre-existing metaphysical posits. It's an empirical, experiential fact, one that richly deserves serious consideration because we're talking about human life and human freedom, after all.


If we reject any kind agency, all versions of free will as illusions then we are very likely to end up in the determinist's camp, wherein free will and morality are both considered to be illusions. This would be almost directly opposed to the MOQ, wherein morality and freedom are paramount, wherein freedom is the goal of evolution and protecting the ongoing process of evolution is what we mean by morality. As you may have noticed, I think this point is a pretty big one. It's so central to the MOQ, I think, that it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say it's a tragic mistake to miss this point. Everybody's battle involves these two elements; sq and DQ are the quality of order and the quality of freedom. You ARE those two elements. Evolution and growth is the dance of those two elements.