From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Fri May 09 2003 - 20:19:59 BST
Hi Johnny, Matt, all
Johnny said:
> I thought this post was quite right on, but I need more explanation from you
> because your section on Free Will seems to me to be backward with regard to
> what is "within" and "primary".
Steve:
Experience is what is "within" and "primary."
Free Will is the issue of whether our actions are dictated by external
causes or willed from within. The fact that both make sense as explanations
of behavior while being mutually exclusive is an example of a Platypus in
SOM. Objectively we don't have free will, yet we know we have free will
before we know anything else.
Johnny:
>I seem to have had a different life
> history, because it seems to me that the view from "outside", the "SOM"
> view, is the view that sees oneself as a subject with agency, and is the
> secondary view.
A view that "sees oneself" sounds external to me, too. But the view that
sees oneself, sees oneself in relationship with everything else, not as an
independent agent (subject). To see oneself is to objectify oneself. From
the objective perspective of SOM, nature follows causal laws, I am a part of
nature, therefore I follow causal laws. It is by seeing oneself as an
object that one has no free will.
Johnny:
>The primary experience is determined by life histories and
> the whole universe of quality. Sure, you did what you did because it was
> your choice, but the question is how did you arrive at your choice? Though
> impossible to nail down specifically, doesn't the MoQ say that you arrived
> at your choice because of the primacy of the quality experience, AKA
> morality?
Steve:
Yes. But to say that you do what you value doing is close to saying you
have free will. (You don't have free will to not value what you value, that
would be to not experience what you experience which is impossible since you
*are* Experience.) You could say that you are merely forced to do what you
value doing, but that is a secondary or external perspective.
> I guess I have a more fundamental question about what you mean by within -
> do you mean within Steve, or within Quality?
Steve:
Within Steve, I guess, or perhaps both depending on what you mean. The
distinction is experiencing versus describing your or someone's experience.
Looking at a brain and describing structures and chemical reactions is
external. The view from inside a brain (which is the mind) is internal and
primary.
Internal/external
Intention, motivation, meaning, value/patterns, causes and tendencies
Mind/brain
Experience/pattern of value
To move from Reality = Experience = Value to analyzing experiences in terms
of patterns of value requires the intellectual pattern called the MOQ and
imagining a dimension perpendicular to Experience from which to view
experiences. Reality = Experience = Value is "primary" (though experience
is "just subjective" in SOM terms). Inferences about patterns of value are
secondary and are themselves values.
Matt said:
>Where I disagree with Steve is that he thinks Lila was fruitful in trying to do
metaphysics i.e. trying to detach Quality from experience, trying to have a
"context without a point of view." I think it is retrogressive, pulling a good
post-modern insight back into a modern vocabulary.
Steve:
I see the sq/dq split and the levels of the MOQ as a model for reflecting on
experience. It is a useful model of reality not to be mistaken as a "true"
metaphysics that says this is what reality really is. The MOQ presents the
dynamic/static division only as a division of reality that is more useful
than the subject/object division, not as *the* correct division.
I think you could say it is transparent to itself. It is an ironic
metaphysics in that it recognizes other ways of dividing experience as valid
(Pirsig does not make the "bad postmodernist" mistake of concluding that
"all perspectives are valid" is the same as saying "all perspectives are
equal." He thinks that the MOQ is better than SOM). It is only a true
metaphysics (in the sense of the most basic assumptions we make about
reality) in equating Quality, Experience, and Reality which is the part that
you don't have a problem with as I understand it.
Thanks,
Steve
>>> Free Will
>>>
>>> Are we with our sense of free will like water believing that it wills
>>> itself to go down stream? If we could ask it, it would probably say that
>>> it prefers to do that. Sitting in a pond it thinks, I could bubble and
>>> flow and evaporate or rain down or even snow if I wanted to, but right now
>>> I'm content to just be at peace.
>>>
>>> So free will is just an illusion? No. Free will is part of the view from
>>> within. Determinism is what things look like from outside. But the
>>> internal view is primary, the external one is the one that is derivative,
>>> thus the MOQ supports free will while SOM is stuck in determinism.
>>> Why does the ball fall to the ground when I let it go? The only way to
>>> know is to ask the ball. Motivation is always internal to awareness. We
>>> see what happens to dropped objects and infer a causal law. But this
>>> determinism is the *external* description, not the view from within. Only
>>> the ball as subject knows why it did what it did. "Whys" only apply to
>>> internals not externals.
>>> From the outside we perceive A causes B. From B's point of view, B values
>>> precondition A.
>>> I've always hated when someone thinks that they know why I did what I did.
>>> Why? Now I know. Because they were objectifying me. They were denying my
>>> agency. I did what I did because I chose to do it--as the sun chooses to
>>> rise each day and as the earth chooses to revolve around the sun.
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