Re: [MD] Free Will
On Jun 20, 2011, at 4:56 PM, Micah wrote: In hindsight, there is no free will - but it's hard to live that way. Micah Greetings Micah, Beforehand, there was never a doubt to challenge either free will or causation; they were so embedded in my reality. It was a shock as they began to melt away. Interconnectedness was an easy replacement, like I knew it all along. Not sure exactly what you mean by but it's hard to live that way. Maybe this is where being female is an advantage. Maybe... For one example, pregnancy is a strong demonstration of being interconnected. Marsha ___ 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
Re: [MD] Free will
Marsha Well if we consider that all ongoing events or processes of all the 4 levels are using free will to exist and trying to make the best out of the situation under the actual conditions then it is obvious that there are many wills going on at the same time that are striving to provide themselve a better quality. Competition between different agents of free will is limitating each ones possibilities and desire. I guess we could easily agree about that. Therefore it is not only about the free will but also about who's free will we are talking. I had a nice talk yesterday night with my old friend and she is worried about her limited right to decide whether to live or not. Old persons are kept alive as long as possible without asking about their own opinion about the quality of their life. When someone are old and disabled in a number of ways unable to make choices on their own to keep a decent standard of living, many of these people would like to have the right to end their life, choose to not live any longer. The 'not' choice is also a choice, an expression of free will. The personal free will versus the societal free will. We may be talking about the same thing but in different words, I prefer to discuss experiences of things that are happening, real or what we can call it. Things that are not, doesn't show on screen, are in my opinion nothing else than boring, not fun and without commercial potential. Instead of contemplating over the meaninglessness of 't', 'i' or 'g' I find more interest in trying and comparing the pragmatic value of all the different combinations of these and other letters. How such a combination can make up a word and in its prolonging a set of words can build a complete sentence and so on. I am using my free will just writing this now sitting in a cheap pizza shop with the annoying sound from TV-commercials and a giant lawn mover running outside in the park over the street. No guarantee about the direction of the quality, it may be better or worse, but you can rest assure that I try my best. The pizza was great, salami, onion, cheese and green jalapenos. 4 times bigger than my ipad! All clean! With the power of steam bla bla bla. I see that I've got about one hour left before my next meeting. What can I do within that hour? What can I do that provides a better quality of life? Leaving the shop and moving into the park outside was a good Idea. The big lawn mover is gone and some birds are singing in the trees. I am sitting on a bench with my ipad in my lap, choosing what words to write to make a meaningful message. In front of me there are red pions and some other pale and dark violet flowers. A young alm tree has grown in the flowers and stretches its tiny light green twigs towards the sky. Yellow buses, small and bigger cars are passing behind my back in a continous stream. No smell of hot greasy pizza, no TV-commercial. This is better. A man dressed in white and with an insect protection hat is walking around on the roof of a theater. That was interesting. I can see that he is checking bee hives placed on the roof, in the middle of a big city. Strange. There must be a certain space of available future to perform the acts of free will and to know if it was a good choice the consequences must be experienced and evaluated after the event. Without time and causality free will is impossible to perform and experience. Have it Jan-Anders 20 jun 2011 kl. 16:05 marsha wrote: J-A, My post was not meant to be a smart quick-fire reply. I consider what you've written here to represent your point-of-view, and I respect that. My point-of-view is that free will is an intellectual static pattern of value that can be dropped, along with an autonomous causation. Dropping them has no affect on my ability to accept personal responsibility within a conventional (static) reality. I am not sure why you think the future requires freewill.Personally, I find a more mindful/intuitional response to experience provides a better quality of life. Marsha On Jun 20, 2011, at 6:56 AM, MarshaV wrote: J-A, Okay, this is your understanding of the way things are. Mine is: not this, not that. Marsha On Jun 20, 2011, at 5:27 AM, Jan-Anders Andersson wrote: Sorry Marsha and Steve but you are definitely on the wrong way here. Free will is not an illusion. Free will is the ultimate basic condition for unpredictability and ever changing identities. It may be scary to grasp the personal responsibility it takes but without free will there would be no future at all. Enjoy life Jan-Anders 20 jun 2011 kl. 10.36 skrev moq_discuss-requ...@lists.moqtalk.org: On Jun 19, 2011, at 6:57 PM, Steven Peterson wrote: On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 12:13 PM, Horse ho...@darkstar.uk.net wrote: So we're kind of back to the idea that 'Free Will' is an illusion! Sam Harris goes further
Re: [MD] Free will
Jan-Anders, All that you write may be conventionally true, but not necessary. Causal field, effect and the relationship between them are interdependent static patterns with their existence further dependent on the conceptual act of slicing and dicing experience into independent entities: useful illusions. That would make competition between different agents of free will also a useful illusion. One can function in a perfectly good manner without the narration questions and without the notion of freewill choice, by responding mindfully and naturally to the flow of events. And what is good, Phædrus, And what is not good... Need we ask anyone to tell us these things? No, we need not ask anyone, including ourselves. Marsha On Jun 21, 2011, at 7:54 AM, Jan-Anders Andersson wrote: Marsha Well if we consider that all ongoing events or processes of all the 4 levels are using free will to exist and trying to make the best out of the situation under the actual conditions then it is obvious that there are many wills going on at the same time that are striving to provide themselve a better quality. Competition between different agents of free will is limitating each ones possibilities and desire. I guess we could easily agree about that. Therefore it is not only about the free will but also about who's free will we are talking. I had a nice talk yesterday night with my old friend and she is worried about her limited right to decide whether to live or not. Old persons are kept alive as long as possible without asking about their own opinion about the quality of their life. When someone are old and disabled in a number of ways unable to make choices on their own to keep a decent standard of living, many of these people would like to have the right to end their life, choose to not live any longer. The 'not' choice is also a choice, an expression of free will. The personal free will versus the societal free will. We may be talking about the same thing but in different words, I prefer to discuss experiences of things that are happening, real or what we can call it. Things that are not, doesn't show on screen, are in my opinion nothing else than boring, not fun and without commercial potential. Instead of contemplating over the meaninglessness of 't', 'i' or 'g' I find more interest in trying and comparing the pragmatic value of all the different combinations of these and other letters. How such a combination can make up a word and in its prolonging a set of words can build a complete sentence and so on. I am using my free will just writing this now sitting in a cheap pizza shop with the annoying sound from TV-commercials and a giant lawn mover running outside in the park over the street. No guarantee about the direction of the quality, it may be better or worse, but you can rest assure that I try my best. The pizza was great, salami, onion, cheese and green jalapenos. 4 times bigger than my ipad! All clean! With the power of steam bla bla bla. I see that I've got about one hour left before my next meeting. What can I do within that hour? What can I do that provides a better quality of life? Leaving the shop and moving into the park outside was a good Idea. The big lawn mover is gone and some birds are singing in the trees. I am sitting on a bench with my ipad in my lap, choosing what words to write to make a meaningful message. In front of me there are red pions and some other pale and dark violet flowers. A young alm tree has grown in the flowers and stretches its tiny light green twigs towards the sky. Yellow buses, small and bigger cars are passing behind my back in a continous stream. No smell of hot greasy pizza, no TV-commercial. This is better. A man dressed in white and with an insect protection hat is walking around on the roof of a theater. That was interesting. I can see that he is checking bee hives placed on the roof, in the middle of a big city. Strange. There must be a certain space of available future to perform the acts of free will and to know if it was a good choice the consequences must be experienced and evaluated after the event. Without time and causality free will is impossible to perform and experience. Have it Jan-Anders 20 jun 2011 kl. 16:05 marsha wrote: J-A, My post was not meant to be a smart quick-fire reply. I consider what you've written here to represent your point-of-view, and I respect that. My point-of-view is that free will is an intellectual static pattern of value that can be dropped, along with an autonomous causation. Dropping them has no affect on my ability to accept personal responsibility within a conventional (static) reality. I am not sure why you think the future requires freewill.Personally, I find a more mindful/intuitional response to experience provides a better quality of life.
Re: [MD] Free Will
Steve said: I would say that a Jamesian pragmatic evaluation of the situation goes like this: if determinism were true, we would behave exactly as we already behave and have no choice in the matter even though we have the feeling of willing some of our acts. If free will is true, then we would behave exactly as we behave but _do_ have a choice in the matter. If determinism is true, then your belief in free will is causally determined. If free will is true, then I am freely choosing not to be able to make sense of it. Either way, we behave exactly as we behave. This so-called metaphysical problem is a difference that makes no difference in how people behave in practice. The feeling of having a choice points to something that is either real or illusory, but either way, we still do what we do, so this problem is a fake problem with no consequences. dmb says: Well, no, that's not true. As a young man James was so depressed over the idea that determinism might be true that he very nearly killed himself. And he mocked the logic trap you point to by saying his first act of free will is to believe in free will. Further, one of the most important ways James's PRAGMATISM is supposed to settle metaphysical disputes is to ask what practical difference it makes to adopt one view or the other, as you point out. But what most people don't quite realize about James's pragmatism is that depression and suicidal feeling are among the practical consequences. In fact, James doesn't talk about pragmatism as such until the second lecture. The first one is devoted to the role temperament and affect play in the construction of our philosophies and the rival schools that have developed as a result. As he saw it, temperament is the reason we have so many dilemmas in philosophy; empiricism and rationalism, humanism and theism, materialism and idealism, c lassic and romantic, determinism and free will, tough-minded and tender-minded, Aristoteleans and Platonists, etc., etc.. And how we feel about these rival visions is part of what he means by practical results. Steve said to John: You assert that we are free to act upon our values, but I read the MOQ to be saying that someone can't help but to act upon his values Please demonstrate your ability to value something you don't value as a matter of will by, say, willing yourself to value theocracy over democracy or something simpler like willing yourself to prefer chocolate when you already prefer vanilla. We don't choose our values, we are our values. ...In fact all a person is is a bunch of values, so it is even wrong to say that they are _his_ values. Lila doesn't have Quality, Quality has Lila. ...I've always granted that we make choices. My question for you has been, what does it mean to say that this choosing is free? We certainly have will. We have moods, preferences, intentions, etc. But where do these come from? In what sense are they free? dmb says: Maybe it would be helpful to be more explicit and specific about the meaning of the term will. It seems that there two different ideas about what the will is and both of them have some fairly serious problems. As a metaphysical entity, it seems to be something like the immortal soul but I think we agree this is a Modern, Cartesian, Kantian kind of thing that disappears when SOM is rejected. But then you seem to be replacing that metaphysical sense of the will with a sense of will that means preferences and desires. I'm pretty sure that's just not what the term means. In fact, I'd say the will derives its meaning by contrast with preferences and desires. It is defined as the power or capacity to resist one's impulses, to choose NOT to act upon our desires, to defer, delay or even deny them any satisfaction. In other words, free will is NOT the capacity to change your preference from vanilla to chocolate but the capacity to act on that preference or not. Free will is NOT the capacity to choose your preferences or control what you like but rather the capacity to choose from among the conflicting, competing values and preferences. It is the capacity to decide which values you're going to act upon, not the power to control the preference itself. You can't choose to dislike ice cream but you can decide whether or not you're going to buy it or spoon it into your mouth. This is the ordinary dictionary definition and the common sense notion of the will, as in it takes a lot of will power to resist my favorite dessert. I think the MOQ's slogan wherein we don't have values so much as values have us is a way of saying persons are not autonomous or independent or singular. In the same way that James denies the existence of consciousness as a thing or an entity but does not go so far as to deny its existence as a process and a function, so it is with Lila or any other person. To say Lila is a complex forest of static patterns is not to say she is a ridiculous fiction or
Re: [MD] Free Will
Hey Dan, I'm not sure whether you meant it as such or not, but I read everything in the first two sections of your response as in agreement with what I was saying. The below picks up after that: Dan said: If all patterns are evolving toward Dynamic freedom, or the absence of patterns, then aren't intellectual quality patterns also evolving towards freedom? And isn't that what mu is all about? the not of what is? Are we not all swimming in karmic delusion? filling ourselves with the evolutionary garbage of history? Matt: I have trouble equating Dynamic Quality or freedom with the absence of patterns for the Pirsigian reason of the concomitant distinction between and ambiguity between DQ and chaos/degeneracy. I have non-Pirsigian qualms about the ideas of karmic delusion and evolutionary garbage of history because they strike me as primitivistic responses to the present keyed at a metaphysical level. Primitivism (a concept best developed by A.O. Lovejoy) is the kind of response one has when one thinks that there was a Golden Age in the past that the present has debased in some manner. Usually its the transformation of the simple into the sophisticated, which makes primitivism a typical kind of response to modern society (things were simpler when I was young...). Buddhism, in those twin ideas, seems to put that in-history response at the metaphysical level, which makes _history itself_, the creation of time, the thing that debases reality itself. (This, in form, is very similar to the Judeo-Christian narrative arc of Eden/Fall/Redemption.) That doesn't seem to me like a good way to describe the movement of history. I prefer to think of Dynamic Quality at the higher levels as more sophisticated kinds of freedom made possible by the lower, simpler levels, and it's difficult for me to sustain the idea that these higher freedoms can be described as simple absences, rather than complex absences created by simple presences. (E.g., the presence of the social level makes the freedom/absences of the intellectual level possible.) I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what I tend to think. Dan said: What this is pointing to is that there is no ends of explanation that we can know, nor are they sewed together by the MOQ. The MOQ is a better way of understanding and organizing reality, but it recognizes its own limitations. Matt: I think you misunderstood how Ron deployed that idea, and how I played off it. As I understood it, Ron wasn't saying there was _an end to explanation_ (i.e., a point at which the explanatory process will shut down), but rather talking about how the MoQ as a metaphysical system ties together all the smaller systems of explanation offered by the special disciplines (physics, biology, sociology, philosophy of mind, of language, etc.). Sewing together the ends of explanation was Ron's gloss on what you just commended: a better way of understanding and organizing reality. The reason why Ron's idiom works well here is that it not only houses Pirsig's suggestion that the MoQ doesn't necessarily replace any individual sciences or disciplines, but is rather the framework that situates all of them--it also suggests the idea that explanatory sequences are things that have a beginning and an end: a set of premises, that then inquiry works through, and then finally emit in a conclusion. It's the whole sequence that is the explanation (just as scientific explanations are not what they are in just their conclusion, but also in the entire process of coming to that conclusion), and the MoQ gathers together the threads at the conclusions and braids them together. Dan said: It appears to me that one of the narratives that is dysfunctional is the notion of having the ability to choose what we do and who we are. We make up stories and then we come to believe those stories are true. In fact, though, they are constructs, built up out of social and intellectual quality patterns. Matt: I'm not sure I see your line of inference here. The first sentence sounds like thing Steve's been pressing, what I also pressed when I talked about Nagel briefly: the amount of free will we have in our lives seems to disappear the closer we look at situations. Were the second two sentences just glosses on how, because our truths are embedded in stories that are constructed out of the cloth that makes us up, we can change this dysfunctional narrative? What is curious, and suggests to me the complexity of the issue over freedom, will, control, and responsibility, is how the fact of us being constructed out of our social/intellectual patterns conditions the idea that we can change the story we tell about ourselves that we have the ability to choose how we make up what we do and who we are. Where did the social/intellectual patterns come from, other than an us, Pirsig's social We? In other words, who we are is a function of the the
Re: [MD] Free Will
Hi Matt, Essence seems to have more baggage than existence. Hence the need for a DQ/SQ metaphysics embracing levels in existence. Joe On 6/20/11 4:50 PM, Matt Kundert pirsigafflict...@hotmail.com wrote: Joe said: In trying to arrive at the primitive concept, I suggest that existence has more explicative possibilities for evolution than value. Value has the baggage of identity, hence is subject to intellectual logic. In emotional parlance value is a defined non starter. Existence on the other hand is open to everything knowable, even evolution. DQ comes in the flavors of evolution in existence. Matt: On the other hand, what could have more baggage as a primitive in metaphysical systems than existence in the philosophical tradition beginning with the pre-Socratic Greeks? 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 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
Re: [MD] Free Will
Hi Matt, good to have you back in the mix. Don't have full editing facilities right now, but two points Plus c'est la meme chose - seeing things better looking back is indeed a myth. It has looked like that since 4000BC (Horace) And your (Nagel) point - the closer we look (analyze) the less actual freedom (DQ) we have. Agreed. At the risk of winding dmb up, I find it ironic that the more we have academic arguments about MOQ the further away we are taken from MOQ. Closer to that old church of reason. (Craig, I owe you a response.) Ian ( What's so funny 'bout . ) Sent from my iPhone On 21 Jun 2011, at 20:00, Matt Kundert pirsigafflict...@hotmail.com wrote: Hey Dan, I'm not sure whether you meant it as such or not, but I read everything in the first two sections of your response as in agreement with what I was saying. The below picks up after that: Dan said: If all patterns are evolving toward Dynamic freedom, or the absence of patterns, then aren't intellectual quality patterns also evolving towards freedom? And isn't that what mu is all about? the not of what is? Are we not all swimming in karmic delusion? filling ourselves with the evolutionary garbage of history? Matt: I have trouble equating Dynamic Quality or freedom with the absence of patterns for the Pirsigian reason of the concomitant distinction between and ambiguity between DQ and chaos/degeneracy. I have non-Pirsigian qualms about the ideas of karmic delusion and evolutionary garbage of history because they strike me as primitivistic responses to the present keyed at a metaphysical level. Primitivism (a concept best developed by A.O. Lovejoy) is the kind of response one has when one thinks that there was a Golden Age in the past that the present has debased in some manner. Usually its the transformation of the simple into the sophisticated, which makes primitivism a typical kind of response to modern society (things were simpler when I was young...). Buddhism, in those twin ideas, seems to put that in-history response at the metaphysical level, which makes _history itself_, the creation of time, the thing that debases reality itself. (This, in form, is very similar to the Judeo-Christian narrative arc of Eden/Fall/Redemption.) That doesn't seem to me like a good way to describe the movement of history. I prefer to think of Dynamic Quality at the higher levels as more sophisticated kinds of freedom made possible by the lower, simpler levels, and it's difficult for me to sustain the idea that these higher freedoms can be described as simple absences, rather than complex absences created by simple presences. (E.g., the presence of the social level makes the freedom/absences of the intellectual level possible.) I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's what I tend to think. Dan said: What this is pointing to is that there is no ends of explanation that we can know, nor are they sewed together by the MOQ. The MOQ is a better way of understanding and organizing reality, but it recognizes its own limitations. Matt: I think you misunderstood how Ron deployed that idea, and how I played off it. As I understood it, Ron wasn't saying there was _an end to explanation_ (i.e., a point at which the explanatory process will shut down), but rather talking about how the MoQ as a metaphysical system ties together all the smaller systems of explanation offered by the special disciplines (physics, biology, sociology, philosophy of mind, of language, etc.). Sewing together the ends of explanation was Ron's gloss on what you just commended: a better way of understanding and organizing reality. The reason why Ron's idiom works well here is that it not only houses Pirsig's suggestion that the MoQ doesn't necessarily replace any individual sciences or disciplines, but is rather the framework that situates all of them--it also suggests the idea that explanatory sequences are things that have a beginning and an end: a set of premises, that then inquiry works through, and then finally emit in a conclusion. It's the whole sequence that is the explanation (just as scientific explanations are not what they are in just their conclusion, but also in the entire process of coming to that conclusion), and the MoQ gathers together the threads at the conclusions and braids them together. Dan said: It appears to me that one of the narratives that is dysfunctional is the notion of having the ability to choose what we do and who we are. We make up stories and then we come to believe those stories are true. In fact, though, they are constructs, built up out of social and intellectual quality patterns. Matt: I'm not sure I see your line of inference here. The first sentence sounds like thing Steve's been pressing, what I also pressed when I talked about Nagel briefly: the amount of free will we have
Re: [MD] Free Will
The complete interview is accessible at http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/pulling-our-own-strings. http://reason.com/archives/2003/05/01/pulling-our-own-strings. Good antidote to the view that thoughts just come to us. Craig 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
Re: [MD] Free Will Program
START program. A: Do you feel compelled to push the right-hand button? IF Yes, GOTO C. B: Do you feel compelled to push the left-hand button? IF Yes, GOTO D. C: Do you feel compelled to Stop? IF Yes, GOTO B. PUSH the left-hand button. GOTO E. D: Do you feel compelled to Stop? IF Yes, GOTO A. PUSH the right-hand button. GOTO E. E: STOP Program. Craig 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
Re: [MD] Free Will Program
NOPE! I got the MOJO! Mark On Jun 21, 2011, at 5:14 PM, craig...@comcast.net wrote: START program. A: Do you feel compelled to push the right-hand button? IF Yes, GOTO C. B: Do you feel compelled to push the left-hand button? IF Yes, GOTO D. C: Do you feel compelled to Stop? IF Yes, GOTO B. PUSH the left-hand button. GOTO E. D: Do you feel compelled to Stop? IF Yes, GOTO A. PUSH the right-hand button. GOTO E. E: STOP Program. Craig 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 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
