Hi Squad,
In my last post I out forward my view that the MOQ answer to the question of
Nature/Nurture and Free Will/Determinsm (hereafter refered to as N/N/FW/D)
would be 'Mu'. I didn't really explain myself properly and I'd like to try
and give a better, clearer explanation.
The reason why I find these quesrions so interesting is that they seem to me
to be so deeply enmeshed with SOM itself. If I think about N/N then the
question basically is, 'Was I born and am I presdestined to be a certain way
(subjective) or am I a result of external influences (objective) and the
same with FW/D. I'm trying to think of a good analogy....
If we took an apple out of a beautiful orchard and asked ourselves, 'Why
does this apple have quality? Was it predestined to be this way, or it a
result of the beautiful orchard it grew in?' The question becomes a little
more transparent - it's neither really, but because fail to see that the
apple and it's orchard (and ourselves and our environment) aren't separate
really, they're the same thing!'. What I'm trying to say is that a person
and his environment grow towards quality or fall away from quality together.
We are not separate from our environment so the two debates are esssentially
meaningless!
Our own behavior (which is pure quality) is presumed to be caused from
either ourselves or our environment but it's not so. What's happening is
that the quality event (our own bahavior) causes awareness of subject and
object which is then mistakenly thought to be the cause of quality itself.
MOQ gives a 'Mu' answer to these two debates because MOQ is non-dualist and
the concept of N/N and FW/D is firmly in the arena of static intellectual
quality, specifically good old dualistic SOM. It's not right or wrong to
debate these things as long as you know that that's the arena you're
fighting inside.
It is however wrong to debate these things using Pirsig's levels because
then you're just turning MOQ into SOM by thinking that the levels are
actually 'real' entities in themselves, the same way SOM presumes that the
separation between subject and object is 'real'.
Thanks,
Phil.
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