Steve said to Dan:
Since the Cartesian self is denied, the free will is denied since there is no
autonomous agent to posses the faculty known as free will.
dmb says:
I'm not so sure it follows. Does the denial of the Cartesian self also entail
the denial of agency? It seems to me that freedom and the self are
re-concieved, not eliminated altogether.
Dan said:
Note that he says the term "cause" can be completely done away with when we are
describing reality, which seems to infer that the notion of causation can also
be done away with in the framework of the MOQ, without any loss. He [Pirsig]
goes on to say: "The only difference between causation and value is that the
word "cause" implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of "value"
is one of preference." [LILA]
dmb says:
That's just it. When we get rid of causality and replace it with preference we
are getting rid of mechanical laws and replacing them with agency. If subatomic
particles and iron filings can express preferences, and if biological evolution
proceeds on the basis of "spur of the moment decisions", then the expression of
social and intellectual level preferences also involves some kind of agency.
This kind of agency is not conceived as the rational decision-making of the
will, a transcendental self or ego consciousness because these preferences go
all the way down. The implication is that we've traded a mechanistic,
unconscious cosmos for one that is alive and aware in every little corner.
Nothing is inert or dead or automatic, which means nothing is determined and
everything is mutable to some degree.
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