To all, and in reply to Roger.
Roger,
A short rap on my nuckles for failing to reply earlier to your post. I have
been thinking it over in a background way because, you know, something about
what you say seems wrong to me - or atleast, if it's right, it isn't right
for the reasons you make available.
ROGER WROTE:
> Last but not least, I agree with Elephant when he says that the issue is
> answerable within the MOQ's "work as a whole." My concern is simply that Mr
> Robert M. Pirsig didn't really answer it in the passage where he says he
> answers it -- at least not clearly.
>
> To me, FREE WILL has always been an inherent oxymoron of subject object
> metaphysics. If we start with a distinct subject, it must be either
> disconnected from the envirionment -- which is absurd -- or influenced by its
> environment -- which leads to determinism. The SOM self leads to the free
> will / determinism controversy.
ELEPHANT:
I don't follow your disconnected/influenced dichotomy. I would have thought
that there arer all kinds of connections that one thing can have with
another *other than* the connection of being influenced by it. No? How
about: contiguity, compressence, codetermination, etc etc. Do you see?
What might give your disconnected/influenced dichotomy some force, would be
if it were assumed that subjects and objects were both physical realities.
In that case, one might say, to be is to be influenced. In other words, no
physical object can escape cause and effect. The entire universe is
inter-related so that (in an example of the recently deceased Douglas Adams
derived from a picture of Leibniz's) it ought in principle to be possible to
deduce the economic and social history of Uzbekistan from, say, the
arrangement of molecules in a slice of Battenberg cake. So if we assume
that 'subject' and 'object' both refer to physical realities, it stands to
reason that they are either connected and influencing (indeed determining)
each other, or entirely disconnected.
But ofcourse the assertion that 'subject' and 'object' refer to physical
realities is a *false* one (as RMP helps us to understand). Neither
'subject' *nor* 'object' could ever refer to a Physical particular, because
there are no such. It is rather nearer the truth to put things the other
way around and to say that 'physical realities' refers to *grammatical*
enties, i.e. objects (which are patterns of value). Physically, all there
is is continuous value, not disctrete objects or subjects. That being the
case, I cannot, Roger, make sense of your influenced/disconnected dichotomy.
Do please help me out.
All the best,
E
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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