Ron said to Steve:
Bob specifically states that when we follow Dynamic Quality we are free. He
states that natural selection aka evolution is dynamic quality at work,..
What you, Steve, seem to insist on, is that free-will or dynamic quality as
re-named by Pirsig's MoQ, can not be or should not be talked about. Yet we see
how he connects the two concepts not as diametrically opposed but as a cohesive
total explanation. What would be a more relevent and meaningful discussion on
the MD but a discussion involving deterministic static patterns and their
freedom to evolve? How does the denial and rejection of a dilemma ever solved
or "dissolved"? not by avoiding it or ignoring it as a non-issue but by it's
explanation, and the power that lies in Pirsigs MoQ is explanitory not
negation. The Dilemma is disolved by explanation, not ignoring the debate
entirely as meaningless.
dmb says:
I think that's right. Thank you.
Pirsig reformulates the issue so that freedom and restraint are connected to
Dynamic Quality and static quality - as opposed to the traditional theistic or
materialistic framings of the dilemma. To say that the dilemma doesn't come up
because the MOQ rejects both horns is to say that the MOQ rejects both freedom
and restraint. But if we do not ignore Pirsig's reformulation into terms that
avoid causality and SOM, where freedom and constraint belong to DQ and sq, we
can see that freedom and constraint are built right into the structure of the
MOQ and both elements permeate human experience. That's the whole of what we
are, not just the static values.
Pirsig says this reformulation is a simple resolution of the dilemma but he
also says the the MOQ has a whole lot more to say about ethics and he goes on
to introduce the levels of static patterns as a moral hierarchy, with each
succeeding level more moral than the next PRECISELY BECAUSE it offers more
freedom, more capacity to respond Dynamically. Because freedom increases as the
static patterns evolve, it makes very little sense to construe this
reformulation as a kind of value-determinism. Static patterns aren't
determining factors, like God's will or causality would be, because static
patterns are supposed to preserve the evolutionary gains toward freedom. Think
of the way the social level laws liberate us from the laws of the jungle, for
example. They constrain behavior but for the purpose of giving us the freedom
to do something beyond staying alive, filling our bellies or staying warm and
dry. Evolution is predicated on freedom and freedom is the goal. And the MOQ's
re
formulated claims are definitely NOT predicated on the assumptions of SOM,
scientific materialism, causality or Free Will as a metaphysical entity.
"The central point of the pure-experience theory is that 'outer' and 'inner'
are names for two groups into which we sort experiences according to the way in
which they act upon their neighbors." 1207
My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one
primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed,
and if we call that stuff 'pure experience', then knowing can easily be
explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which
portions of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure
experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge,
the knower, the other becomes the object known." 1142
"..my central thesis [is] that subjectivity and objectivity are affairs not of
what an experience is aboriginally made of, but of its classification.
Classification depends on our temporary purposes." 1208
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