Hi dmb,
> Steve said: > ... What is to be praised is what is good. What is to be condemned is what is > bad. If a human being is a complex ecology of patterns of value, then what is > to be condemned are the bad patterns in that forest of patterns. What is to > be praised are the good patterns. ...There is only the self which IS this > ecology of patterns. > > dmb says: > Is there such a thing as bad patterns of quality? Again, logically speaking, > this is nonsense. Steve: Yes, of course there are good and bad patterns of value. I would say that rape is a pretty good example of a bad pattern, but let's not get side-tracked. dmb: And what about the capacity to respond to DQ. Isn't that part of the MOQ's reformulation of the self too? Isn't that exactly where the freedom comes into it? Steve: Yes. > > Steve said: > ... Where we disagree is with regard to the importance of "the will" to the > MOQ. > > dmb says: > Okay. The dispute seems to be over whether or not "the will" is the exclusive > property of the Cartesian self or not. Can the idea have any meaning within > the MOQ's reformulation of the self? Can "the will" be conceived as the human > capacity to act freely, to act in response to Dynamic Quality. Steve: You can define "the will" in any way you want. Note that if you do define it this way "free will" is a redundancy. Pirsig defines "free will" itself as this capacity, and he says that this is not a human capacity. Everything has this capacity to varying degrees. Pirsig never talks about "the will" specifically since it just gets replaced by value in the MOQ. Free will is just "free value," the Quality of freedom, DQ. This is a very different definition of the term "free will" from the traditional SOM view. "The will" is the sense of the free will determinism debate is conceived of as "the chooser." There is no such entity that selects among the patterns of value that comprise a person in the MOQ. This chooser is instead conceived of as an inference from the value patterns. It is not then something that could possess or not possess "free will" as Pirsig explains below... Pirsig Lila: "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." dmb: I really don't see why "the will" has to be superglued to the Cartesian self. I don't use the term that way. Steve: No, it doesn't have to be used in that way, but in the concept of the traditional free will determinism debate "the will" refers to "the chooser." There is no such entity in the MOQ description of the situation. dmb: Pirsig isn't talking about the Cartesian self when he says "one" is not free to the extent that "one" is controlled by static quality and the extent to which "one" is free to respond dynamically. Steve: Presumably, by "one" he mans any collection of static patterns of value with the capacity to respond to DQ. dmb: The MOQ can reject the classical dilemma without denying freedom, control, the self, morality. Why is "the will" so incapable of being re-conceived along these lines? Your insistence on banning the concept altogether strikes me as quite petty and unimaginative. Steve: Again, I see the will as re-conceived in the MOQ as Quality or Value. Free will is DQ. When you invoke the notions of "control" and "the chooser" then you have slipped back into SOM. 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
