Hi Horse, On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 1:56 PM, Horse <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Steve, Dave and others > > The general impression I get with this debate about Free Will / Determinism > is the same impression that I get with the Selfishness / Altruism debate. > It's somewhere between political and ideological. > That's to say that proponents of either side see the distinction as a > comparison of absolutes and somewhere along the line each side tries to > define the other side out of existence. > The position appears to be that there is only free will or there is only > determinism or, there is only selfishness or there is only altruism - it's > very rare to see a position which relates to the degree of one or the other > in a particular context. I remember being attracted to the MoQ because, for > the most part, it avoided absolutes in favour of context.
Steve: As I understand the traditional debate between free will and determinism is that they are indeed mutually exclusive. The terms are in fact each defined as in opposition to the other. Pirsig denies both horns of this supposed dilemma and then changes the subject. Instead of either/or, Pirsig says "mu." He has nothing to say about "will" and lots to say about "freedom" which he would like to associate with Quality (specifically DQ) and advises substituting the pursuit of it with the pursuit of Quality. RMP: "The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it "freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation." Best, Steve Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
