Hi Dan, dmb, On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 9:04 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Steve said to Dan: > ...Correct me if I am wrong, but I understood that you disagree with dmb's > claim that Pirsig's conception of freedom is about the capacity of a rational > agent to freely choose among a set of options. > > Dan replied: > ... Did dmb say that a rational agent does the choosing? That sounds a lot > like Ham. > > > dmb says: > No, I didn't say that. In fact, I denied it in great detail several times - > in posts addressed to Steve. Obviously, comments like this make me very > skeptical about Steve's memory and/or sincerity.
Steve: If you don't take that position then what have we been arguing about for the past several months? No, what I said is nearly a direct quote of what you have been saying for some time. For example, just a couple days ago you said this... dmb 8/27: Look at the first sentence of this first paragraph from this highly respected encyclopedia of philosophy. That first sentence should be enough to tell you why your claim (above) is simply wrong. Why can you not see this? It says that the term "Free will" means the capacity of an agent to choose. You are simply denying that free will means what all the sources say it means. Repeatedly and in the face of many, many explanations and argument to the contrary. Let's step back for a moment to try to unblock this obstacle (before my head explodes), please. Read the following paragraph and then tell me what you think it says. I think it says that you are mistaken about the meaning of free will, agency, choice and morality. If we can't agree on the meaning of these terms then communication is not possible, as is the case now, apparently. What does this paragraph mean to you, Steve? Stanford BEGINS its article on Free Will: “Free Will” is a philosophical term of art for a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives. Which sort is the free will sort is what all the fuss is about... Steve today: ...Some denial of my description of dmb's position on what free will is. Now I agree completely with the Stanford definition of free will, but I disagree that the MOQ supports it. That Stanford quote is how free will is ordinarily defined, but "the capacity of an agent to choose" (quoting dmb exactly despite his denial) or "a particular sort of capacity of rational agents to choose a course of action from among various alternatives" (quoting dmb's quote despite his denial) is not at all what we have in Pirsig's formulation of freedom as "to the extent that we follow dynamic quality..." or the extent to which we _perceive_ dynamic quality in the NYT formulation. It is a completely different conception of freedom in term of DQ/sq as the "hot stove" illustration of what it is like to follow DQ makes clear. 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
