Hi all, (dmb), Please consider this Lila quote: "It isn't Lila that has quality; it's Quality that has Lila. Nothing can have Quality. To have something is to possess it, and to possess something is to dominate it. Nothing dominates Quality. If there's domination and possession involved, it's Quality that dominates and possesses Lila. She's created by it. She's a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn't any more to her than that. The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years of the history of the entire world. She's a kind of jungle of evolutionary patterns of value. She doesn't know how they all got there any more than any jungle knows how it came to be."
Now do you see anything in that picture that fits the usual understanding of the term "free will"? There isn't anything more to you, me, or Lila than values. It makes no sense to say that we choose our values when we ARE nothing but our values. Likewise, it makes no sense to say that we are determined by our values when we ARE our values. Therefore, the whole free will/determinism debate as it is traditionally understood must be rejected out of hand as not coming up in the MOQ. Pirsig literally says, "In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn't come up." I don't know how it could be more plain than that. The only person who could see free will versus determinism as a puzzle that needs a solution is a person who accepts the subject-object picture as given and finds it cogent to ask "Does Lila have Quality?" and "Is this Quality in the subject or the object?" How is it any different to ask, "to what extent is man's behavior willed internally (a property of the subject) or imposed externally (reducing all subjects to objects)? The answer here is not "a little of each." This question gets rejected along with the SOM premise upon which it rests. Instead, the question of freedom is reformulated as an issue of static versus dynamic quality as, "to what extent is human behavior best characterized as static quality and to what extent is it dynamic quality?" 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
