Hi John,
I just have a quick remark about the following.
>"This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was
>creating something better than any biological organism could by itself
>achieve."(Ch 16)
>
>I see this as very poor metaphysics, and suggest you contrast it with
>Wilber's Shambhala interview, Part 2, (which somebody {Wim?}gave a link to
a
>few days ago) which discriminates between individual and social holons,
>artifacts, and heaps. (Briefly) As a social holon, a city does not have
>subjective consciousness, but at best it has an intersubjective matrix of
>consciousness. The social holon does not transcend and include individual
>holons, but transcends and includes the previous levels of social holons.
>Society is not a bigger organism, not a Leviathan. A social holon is a
group
>of individual holons plus artifacts. Both fascism and communism rest on a
>confusion of individual and social holons. So says Wilber. It is just this
>confusion we find in Pirsig.
While I agree that Pirsig didn't make such a good job of defining the social
level of his metaphysics, he didn't make the mistake of confusing social
values with an agregate of individual organisms. As you'll remember, each
level is made of patterns of values, but those values are NOT the same.
Inorganic values are different from biological, social or intellectual
values. These are four very distinct worlds, only linked at each stage of
development by a thin thread of "machine code". DNA for I/B, nervous system
for B/S, Language for S/Int (last two are proposed by me). In every case,
the machine code is capable of creating, preserving and passing on data,
every time at a higher level (cellular organisation, behaviours, concepts).
The Giant is not an agregate of organisms, but an agregate of complex
behaviours, run on (but not composed of) organisms, to continue the
hardware/software analogy.
I agree that Pirsig is so vague about what constitutes a society that he
probably compounds buildings, organisations, technologies, mythologies and
laws into the whole mess of what he defines (or rather, vaguely hints at) as
"social patterns of values". But he does not say that they are the sum of
the organisms that compose them. Only that the preservation of social
patterns is morally superior to the selfish desires of the organisms that
support (and not "compose") them. I agree with him on that point (always
with the caveat of preserving the lower
level, of course).
Pirsig is in no way a fascist (although we could surely find one or two
people in this forum would could defend fascist positions with the MOQ), but
his books, like any others, can lend themselves to all kind of
interpretation, misquotation and outright abuse. After all, we're all
interpreting him.
Denis
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