Pirsig in Lila:
"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."
Steve commented on the quote:
In the MOQ, all we are and in fact experience itself is Value. We are not
determined by values. We are not "free to choose" our values. We ARE our
values. "Choosing" is the manifestation of what we ARE as sets of values with
the capacity to respond to DQ. In the MOQ, it is the fact of such choices
(value patterns) from which "the will" or the self is inferred rather than the
other way around. In contrast, the SOM notion of free will is of an autonomous
subject with metaphysical primacy. dmb keeps saying that if we drop the notion
of a choosing subject (though he does say he drops the notion of a metaphysical
soul), then morality goes out window. I see that as about the most un-MOQish
thing one could possibly say. The MOQ is about asserting an understanding of
the world as a moral order through _denying_ the subject-object picture.
Instead of free will as the possession of a self, Pirsig retools the notion of
freedom (note that in the quote you posted he shifts from "free will
" to "freedom") as the capacity to respond to DQ. And in LC he says that you
are going to talk about free will in MOQ terms as this capacity, then you may
as well say that rocks and trees and atoms have free will. But let's not slip
the SOM version of a freely choosing subject with metaphysical primacy in
through the back door here. Pirsig's notion of freedom associated with DQ is
very different from traditional SOM free will that is suppose to distinguish
humanity from the animals.
dmb says:
You say we ARE our values and we are not free to choose those values. But then
you also say we are not determined by our values. These statements contradict
each other. Like I said, this looks like some kind of value-determinism wherein
the static patterns are the causal forces that determine our thoughts and
actions. I think this misconception begins with a misreading of the quote
above.
William James can help to illuminate the meaning of the quote. In his essay
"Does Consciousness Exist?" James contrasts his own view of consciousness with
the idea, to use his analogy, that consciousness and its content are two
different things the way paint can be separated into the oil or latex and the
pigment suspended therein. In this analogy the thinker is distinct from the
thoughts so that we say the mind contains ideas, so that there is a
consciousness that has thoughts. This is what Pirsig is denying in the quote
above. He's saying Lila doesn't HAVE static values and she doesn't HAVE Dynamic
Quality either because there is no Lila above and beyond that. James famously
said "no", if by "consciousness" you mean the entity that has the thoughts,
there is no such thing. Consciousness, he says, is just a name for the fact the
the content is known. After explaining the usual Cartesian and neo-Kantian view
of consciousness through the oil and pigment analogy, he says...
"Now, my contention is exactly the reverse of this. EXPERIENCE, I BELIEVE, HAS
NO SUCH INNER DUPLICITY; AND THE SEPARATION OF IT INTO CONSCIOUSNESS AND
CONTENT COMES, NOT BY WAY OF SUBTRACTION, BUT BY WAY OF ADDITION - the
addition, to a given concrete piece of it, of other sets of experiences, in
connection with which severally its use or function may be of two different
kinds." (Emphasis is James's, 1144)
This is what people are talking about when they say consciousness doesn't
exist. This is the ridiculous fictional self that Pirsig rejects and that's
what he's denying in the quote about what Lila (and everyone else) is. But,
James says, this means that consciousness exists as a process, as the thinking
itself. You might know about the ill-fated attempts among European
phenomenologists like Husserl who thought they could examine the structures of
consciousness itself through careful introspection and he was famous for
"discovering" that consciousness always has a content. He called it
"intentionality", this idea that consciousness seems to always have a content,
like you can never get the pigment (content) to settle to reveal pure oil of
consciousness. James was a very different kind of phenomenologist. I think he
would have said, had he lived long enough, that you'll never find the
consciousness as distinct from the content because the content IS the
consciousness.
It seems to me that you, Steve, are portraying Lila (and everyone else) as the
helpless product of evolutionary forces such that she (and we) have no choice
or freedom. Like I say, this becomes a kind of value determinism wherein we are
not just shaped and influenced but utterly controlled by the static patterns we
inherit. But that simply defies Pirsig reformulation wherein we do have the
capacity to respond to DQ, the capacity for creativity and spontaneity and the
spur of the moment decisions that drive the evolutionary and developmental
process. Without this, there could be no contrarians, no new hypotheses, no new
songs, no rebellion or revolution or betterness of any kind. Without this,
everyday experience is de-realized and denigrated as illusory, if not delusory,
simply because striving and straining against felt resistances is a concrete,
empirical reality. We know it from first hand experience all day, every day.
This is the aboriginal, concretely lived experience f
rom which we derive our notions of causal laws and agency and passivity. The
traditional dilemma could go on and on because both sides can point to these
concrete realities as justification for their side, which is to say that
freedom and restraint are both empirically known. But the MOQ's reformulation
does not present these two elements as a dilemma, as a choice between mutually
exclusive options. Instead, we are free to some extent and restrained to some
extent. And it's not just a little bit of both because DQ and sq together are
everything we can experience or know.
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