On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 1:43 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > dmb said to Steve: > Is there such a thing as a bad pattern of quality? Again, logically speaking, > this is nonsense. > > > Steve said: > 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 says: > Biologically speaking, there is no such thing as "Rape". That term expresses > the horror of biological values being asserted in violation of the dignity > and "the will" of victim. The sex act only counts AS rape when it is > perpetrated against the will of the participant. If "the will" is a fiction, > then the victim has no grounds for charging her attacker with a crime and the > rapist cannot be held responsible for that act. Are you maybe starting to > rethink the consequences of your insistence that there is no such thing as a > self with a will? Do you suppose that only Cartesians can be raped?
Steve: There is no problem here with replacing will with Quality since obviously rape is a low quality pattern for the victim. Obviously I was taking the victim's perspective here in calling rape an example of a bad pattern of value. Such examples abound. This isn't an issue of free will versus determinism where "the will" is regarded as "the chooser." There is no violation of freedom to choose in the free will sense of the terms. The wrongness in MOQ terms is a matter of a biological pattern asserting itself over a social pattern rather than a stepping on someone's capability to respond to DQ (which is what free will means in Pirig's terms). > dmb said: > 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 said: > You can define "the will" in any way you want. ... 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. > > dmb says: > You mean, Pirsig defines free will as this capacity but it is not EXCLUSIVE > to humans. Humans do have a free will and so does everything else to some > degree. Okay, if stopped there we could agree. So I will just stop there - > and leave out the part where you backtracked... Steve: You snipped in the "..." my point that your definition would make free will redundant and my point that "the chooser" is a fiction in the MOQ and in addition some text supporting that claim.. Steve previously: 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. 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
