Folks-
Thanks to everyone who has posted...you have me thinking again.
I am new to the LS, although I lurked on the MD for many months before
first posting there. I sent a short bio to that list very recently so I
will not duplicate it here. Ask if you would like to know.
THE QUESTION
Does the MoQ support Socrates when he says, "A man who has learned about
right will be righteous?"
My answer here is: No.
Will anyone knowingly do wrong if he or she knows it's wrong?
My answer here is: Yes (although knows implies acting on the intellectual
level).
Or in MoQ terms: Will a person (or a society, or a molecule) knowingly
choose a low Quality action over a high Quality action?
My answer here is: Yes (although knowingly implies acting on the
intellectual level and would seem to rule out a society or molecule). Also,
I like this phrasing of the question the best.
MY POSITION
First, David, I really enjoyed your post. If the saying was mistranslated,
that is unfortunate. For the rest of this post though, I will go by the
phrase as quoted in the question. For clarity's sake, I take the saying to
mean "A man who knows right from wrong will always choose right actions."
On 6/8/99 at 2:19 AM -0600, David Buchanan wrote:
> People really don't do wrong voluntarily, we do it out of ignorance. As
> they say in the East, ignorance is the cause of all suffering. And no
> one can escape the charge because we are finite beings. We are all
> ignorant, its just a matter of degree. Of course, some folks get to act
> on their ignorance with greater force than others.
At the risk of acting on my ignorance again, I am going to disagree with
this position that "people really don't do wrong voluntarily." I will use
the counterexample of Pirsig and vegetarianism as described in Lila and not
offer much proof other than that.
[I am not a vegetarian and I wonder if most of you are or are not. The
answer doesn't matter to my proof, I am just curious.]
The quotes relevant to vegetarianism are on p. 184 (ch 13) of Lila in the
teal paperback:
"A popular moral issue that parallels the germ-patient issue is
vegetarianism. Is it immoral, as the Hindus and Buddhists claim, to eat the
flesh of animals? Our current morality would say it's immoral only if
you're a Hindu or Buddhist. Otherwise it's okay, since morality is nothing
more than a social convention.
An evolutionary morality, on the other hand, would say it's scientifically
immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution,
that is, more Dynamic, than are grains and fruits and vegetables. But the
moral force of this injunction is not so great because the level of
evolution are closer together than the doctor's patient and the germ. It
would add, also, that this moral principle holds only where there is an
abundance of grains and fruits and vegetables. It would be immoral for
Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be
killing human beings in favor of the lower organism."
Pirsig is not a vegetarian in Lila. He eats steak while on the boat. He
knows that eating meat is usually less moral, yet he chooses to eat meat
anyway. In my opinion, he even stretches to say that the "moral force of
this injunction is not so great" to help justify that moral lapse out of
guilt. I have made the same immoral choice.
So, I believe that man can choose a lower Quality over a higher one. As Rob
pointed out, anyone who "goes with the crowd" over his better judgement
falls into this category. He has chosen a social SPoV over either an
intellectual SPoV or Dynamic Quality.
Of course, you can argue that vegetarianism is not always a conscious
choice (not that I believe consciousness matters to free will in the MoQ
see below). I argue though, that by evaluating the situation while writing
Lila, Pirsig did make such a conscious choice, even if that choice was to
let the SPoV win and to stop thinking about it. It also shows a good static
trap...he is resistant to change on this front.
FREE WILL IN THE MOQ
This leads, as Rich, Roger, and others noted, into some questions about
free will and what it means to choose one course of action over another.
While this might be ranging some from the main topic, it is interesting
ground that seems to come up often.
These issues seem relevant because if you accept the Socrates statement,
you seem to be denying free will in some form. This contradicts the moral
basis of the MoQ. Why would morality even exist if man could never
knowingly choose something of lesser quality? What would be the point? This
statement attributed to Socrates seems like another attack on Quality from
a proponent of Truth.
On 6/5/99 at 12:40 PM -0400, RISKYBIZ9@aol.com (Roger) wrote:
> The second fundamental concern with Pirsig's definition of Free Will is
> that it hinges upon "the extent that one follows". Who or what exactly
> wills or chooses to follow DQ? Can you choose to follow/not follow it?
> Or do you follow/not follow it deterministically? Introducing DQ does
> not settle the Free Will controversy, it just adds a new step in the
> process.
> Free will is an SOM term that Pirsig should have thrown out as a
> fiction along with the independent self.
I think the sentence before the one quoted is important to this discussion
of free will since there is an implied parallel. I will quote the whole
paragraph (p. 180, (ch 12) in the teal paperback of Lila, bracketed
material is mine):
"In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma [free will versus determinism]
doesn't come up. To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static
patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one
follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one's behavior is free."
First, if you rewrite the last sentence in the quote to make a better
parallel with the one before it, you get:
"To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of
quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one's behavior is not
controlled by static patterns of quality it is with choice."
I am almost positive that this is a simple truism. Freedom, this ability to
choose, can be easily equated with Dynamic Quality in terms of the MoQ.
After all, if you are not able to make a choice, then you must replicate
some extremely static pattern.
If you accept that and you make a simple substitution, you end up with:
"To the extent that one's behavior is controlled by static patterns of
quality it is without dynamic quality. But to the extent that one's
behavior is not controlled by static patterns of quality, it is with
dynamic quality."
When there are only two things, DQ and SQ, this certainly becomes a truism.
Furthermore, I would argue that Pirsig's mistake in this whole section (I
only quoted one paragraph) is that he continues to talk of free will versus
determinism only in terms of man when the terms can be broadened within the
MoQ to apply to any static pattern of value. He should have made that
broadening clear there. If accepted, "one" can be anything including a
society or a molecule. That is why the issue, the dilemma, dissolves.
Let me try to back up that claim. As I understand it, the MoQ cannot exist
without choice. When the MoQ restates causation (A causes B) as preference
(B values precondition A), we must allow for the fact that A can lead to
multiple outcomes, the most likely of which is B, and that B can decide
which preconditions are better.
How does one outcome occur over the others? Well, in SOM terms (we are
suspended in language after all), we could say that we allow for A to
choose between B and any available alternatives. We do not like saying that
a grape makes choices, but at the inorganic level it can be true. I will
not go into Pirsig's arguments for this or quantum theory here. If we
accept this fundamental principle (the reworking of causation in the MoQ)
than anything, any SPoV, has the ability to make choices.
This would make more sense if we were not caught up in SOM all of the time.
My point here is that "choice" does not imply sentience in terms of the MoQ
and it should not imply subject/object either, at least not any more than
"B values precondition A." That B values one thing over another implies
that B can make choices. Any other definition of choice is pure SOM.
Free will can be redefined as either the ability to not be determined or
the ability to choose, which is limited to man in SOM (if anything).
However, free will cannot be limited to the intellectual level and man in
the MoQ. We should no longer look at free will as the "doctrine that man
makes choices independent of the atoms of his body." Instead, we should say
that free will is an analog to, a measure of, Dynamic-ness. Free
will/determinism is a continuum with intermediate values rather than a
simple yes/no choice. The more dynamic the level of a static pattern, the
more free will it shows. Dynamic Quality shows pure free will.
Under this interpretation, if I stifle a yawn during a logic class, that
could be considered showing free will since it is a social act (stifling)
controlling a biological one (yawning). If I make the conscious decision
not to stifle the yawn, ignoring the standard static social patterns of
politeness in order to convey some message to the professor, that response
is more dynamic and therefore shows more free will. Some would say it was
willful even. If I am not able to stifle this yawn even though I would like
to, that shows less free will as biology is winning over social and
intellectual.
Interestingly, this means the amount of free will shown by the act of
yawning (not stifling) depends on the static layers involved in the choice.
The intellectual decision not to stifle the yawn shows much more free will
than the biological inability to stifle the yawn, yet they yield the same
result. Oh, that is a handy change to make when talking about free will in
terms of the MoQ: static patterns do not have or possess free will, they
show free will to the degree they are dynamic.
This makes sense. A man operating on all four static levels shows more free
will than a grape only operating on one or two static levels at a time. A
holdover idea from SOM would be to believe that that as long as man is
thinking he possesses free will. Also, a grape could never possess free
will in SOM terms. The MoQ perspective would be that the grape is showing
some aspects of free will simply by being alive and, for that matter, so is
the man. The difference is that the man can show more aspects of free will
on more levels. SOM artificially hordes free will for humanity, MoQ does
not while still realizing that a man has more free will than a grape.
To sum this section up, I think that free will and determinism exist, but
that they are simply yet another way of saying "more dynamic" and "less
dynamic." In SOM, free will is just a way of saying that something "has the
ability to choose" and it can only apply to subjects and man. In the MoQ,
everything has this ability to choose to different degrees and on
different, sometimes multiple, levels. This also means then that the more
moral that an action is, the more that action shows free will as opposed to
determinism, dynamic quality as opposed to static quality, and "higher"
SPoVs as opposed to "lower" SPoVs.
Finally, not only is a man who has learned about right not necessarily
righteous, but the same applies to molecules and societies and everything
else. Nothing always chooses the best known outcome or there would not be a
"choice" involved at all. Choice is fundamental to morality and, in my
opinion, choice is fundamental to the MoQ.
So, how wrong am I? How am I wrong?
Thanks again for all of the earlier posts on this subject.
Cheers,
Mark
ps
Magnus, thanks again for your help this morning.
________________________________________________________________________
Mark Brooks <mark@epiphanous.org> <http://www.epiphanous.org/>
How do you know who wrote this? <http://www.epiphanous.org/mark/pgp/>
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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