On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:20 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Steve: There indeed would be a contradiction in saying that we do not choose our values and are also not determined by our values in SOM, but in the MOQ we ARE our values. So to say that either our values choose or are determined by our values is nonsense or at best an empty tautology like saying we value our values. 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
