On Jul 16, 2011, at 5:42 PM, Steven Peterson wrote: > > Steve: > dmb snipped this bit and replaced it with a "..." for a reason that > will be clear: > "Dharma is duty. It is not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed > by others. It is not any artificial set of conventions which can be > amended or repealed by legislation. Neither is it internal duty which > is arbitrarily decided by one's own conscience. Dharma is beyond all > questions of what is internal and what is external." > > If Pirsig says that Dharma is duty and is beyond all questions about > what is internal (free will) and what is external (determinism), then > it seems pretty obvious that dmb errs in in asserting that this SOM > question is so important to the MOQ and also in asserting that free > will is necessary for duty (moral responsibility).
Marsha: Right. Dmb is conflating the SOM and MoQ; they're two different metaphysics. The MOQ rejects the Cartesian self as a ridiculous fiction and replaces that concept of the self with the MOQ's concept of the self as a complex ecology of static patterns. The Cartesian self is the problem and the MOQ's self is the solution to that problem. But Dmb has confused and conflated these two concepts so that he ends up rejecting the MOQ's solution. Then the MOQ's solution, not to mention the author of the MOQ, is misconstrued as the ridiculous fiction. He can't distinguish between the poison and the antidote, between the wreckage and the repair job. It's a good thing that he is neither a doctor nor a mechanic, otherwise somebody would almost certainly get injured, if not killed. If someone asserted that it's a shame to have dirty hands and offered soap as a solution, Dmb would "interpret" that to mean that hands are dirt and we ought not have them. Yep, he really knows how to take a problem and make it much worse. Major talent there. ___ 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
