John and all,
I've been tinkering around with the same thinking for a while. In all
three of my essays in the Forum, I offer the cookey-cutter solution to the
free will/determinism problem that Pirsig offers. Glenn Bradford sharpened
my growing dismay with this answer when he commented on my third
capitulation in a private e-mail, "Far from disolving this age-old dilemma,
all this does is rephrase the problem in MOQ terms: now we must ask when
our behavior is controlled by static patterns and when we are free to
follow Dynamic Quality." This got me to thinking. I responded in
something to the effect that, "Well, the question is changed simply because
the question is now 'When are we free and when aren't we?" How can we tell
when we are being Dynamic and when we are being static? That's one of the
toughest questions the MoQ faces. As far as I can tell, its fairly easy to
describe and redescribe an event in either terms which poses a problem for
the ethics of the MoQ.
What moved me beyond this point was a class that touched on Kant's ethics
and some thinking I had been doing on consciousness in the MoQ. First,
consciousness. Once again, Glenn sharpened my thinking (in that same
e-mail): "It is true that saying "B values pre-condition A" is equivalent,
insofar as the data reveals, to "A causes B". The question really boils
down to how compelling this alternative is when you are talking about atoms
and such. Having preferences require some semblance of consciousness, and
from what we know about unquestioned examples of consciousness, you need
brains. Atoms don't have brains." He's absolutely right. Except that I
don't think brains are required for consciousness. We simply infer that
from the one source of consciousness we are "proof positive" of: our own.
But inferences aren't very persuasive with only one piece of evidence (this
is essentially a Sartrean treatment of consciousness).
What happens in the MoQ is that the locus of consciousness is placed in
every particular thing that can be identified as valuing something else.
Which means that atoms are conscious (insofar as they value one thing over
another). What this also means is that this locus of consciousness is also
the locus of free will. It makes a choice between A and B. So, free will
and consciousness are located at the very root of Quality. Without them,
Quality wouldn't make sense.
I mentioned Kant earlier in relation to this treatment of the MoQ. Kant
posited free will for the purposes of morality. Kant argued that without
free will there could be no ethical or moral judgements. So he posited it
in the realm of noumena, the undefined "real world" that sits opposite the
realm of phenomena. What I read Pirsig as doing in his spelling out of
Quality is a hyper-Kantian positing of free will for the purposes of
morality. Instead of placing consciousness and free will in humans, Pirsig
places them in the very fabric of reality. Quality is undefined. It is
the "real world." It is also where the values for ethics and morality
exist. Once again, this narrative has Pirsig following Kant's path.
Matt
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