OK then, Mark --
Hi Ham, Thanks for reminding me of your question. NO! MoQ is not a philosophy which subscribes to determinism of any kind. Everything is an ethical activity. Ethics imply Will. Everything has free will, from you down to the electron, and up to the universe. Pirsig makes this quite clear in Lila.
So, Pirsig's cosmology of Dynamic Quality proceeding on its unalterable course toward "betterness", and carrying everything in the universe with it, is not (in your opinion) deterministic.
It's hard to see how this can be an "ethical" activity, let alone one involving Free Will. Apparently belief in an ethical (moral?) universe requires one to accept the ancient animistic notion that quantum particles exercise the same freedom that man does. As a scientist, you realize of course that if hydrogen atoms had "decided" not to pair up with oxygen atoms, there would have been no water to support life on this planet. Likewise, had small bodies in space not been attracted to bodies of larger mass, planetary orbits such as our solar system would have been impossible. But, I suppose the laws of nature are assumed to be "patterns" of Quality which "freely" go with the flow.
Again, Pirsig states that the entirety of creation is moral activity. One cannot claim morals if there is no intention. Each person has its own interpretation of morality, as does everything else. As humans we can understand (at least a little bit) where another human is coming from, but we have not idea how morality is interpreted by other things. All we can see is that things aspire to greatness. As such, we cannot create morality, we can however, interpret it in our own way. There are so many things that can be built out of sandstone (Quality), us human do one thing, the river does another. There is no difference, it is all astonishing.
I can accept your statement that there is no morality without intention. What I cannot accept is that "things interpret morality", or that they should even need to. Only man can realize his aspirations because only man is sensible to Value. For me, you see, the physical world is an anthropocentric system, the form of which is actualized in the process of converting value-sensibility into the experience of being. The laws of physics are inherent in the Essential Value which we can only experience as finite, relational beingness.
[Ham, previously]:
Hopefully, this valuistic analysis will not be viewed as another "Ham attack" on Pirsig's Quality thesis.
[Mark]:
No, this is no attack at all. Quality is what subjects and objects are made of. All that we can sense is the quality of something. That is, if it is hard or soft, if it is bright or dim, etc. We have no knowledge of the thing itself. Because everything interacts through Quality (DQ) to form the material or conceptual (sq) it seems appropriate to call this a Quality world. I am not sure what you mean by sensible subjects, do they have to contain nerves?
A "sensible subject" is not a brain but the proprietary Self. No, it does not contain nerves, cells, or organs because isn't a biological entity, but is rather what some call the "soul" or "seat of consciousness". I use the term "awareness", which I think comes closest to defining value-sensibility. The central nervious system and all the bio-physical apparata constituting what we call a "human being" are existential instruments of the subject's awareness. Like the physical objects in the world about us, the organism by which we are identified is actualized from Value in the process of experiencing.
What is significant about my epistemology is that the subjective Self is NOT a physical entity. If it were, we could not possess the power of autonomy but, instead, would be. bound to the same physical laws that make evolution a deterministic process. In my opinion, Pirsig had to do away with the autonomous self in order to posit the universe as his Quality-based empirical reality. In this way he could promote the MoQ as "radical empiricism".
Thanks for explaining your worldview, Mark. I hope this post will serve to wrap up the fundamental differences between our respective metaphysical persuasions.
Yours in the pursuit of higher understanding, Ham 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
