Steve said to dmb:
"Resisting impulses and desires" usually translates in MOQ terms as "social
and/or intellectual patterns sometimes trump biological patterns under certain
circumstances." But there is no more freedom in such situations understood as
the product of the freedom of an independent willing agent than there is in
that biological patterns such as flying birds resisting the impulse to fall in
acquiescence to gravity.
dmb says:
I don't follow your reasoning. First of all, "falling" is not an impulse. Since
nobody thinks of free will as the freedom to defy gravity, I do not get your
analogy.
Also, why does the question of free will have to be framed around an
"independent" agent. In what sense is such agency independent? Why can't the
issue be framed as agency within the whole range and context of static
patterns? The levels are not independent or discontinuous metaphysical
categories and we are not independent of them. Isn't that what Pirsig opposes
when he opposes the metaphysics of substance? Whether we're talking material
substance, mental substance or divine substance, we'd be talking about the
essential nature underlying phenomena. That is essentialism, the metaphysics of
substance.
Einstein, by the way, believed in Spinoza's God, which was conceived as the
substance underlying all of nature.
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