Horse and co.,
>> GLENN:
>> Yeah, it bothered me that the compositional theme didn't follow through.
>> Intellectuals weren't composed of societies.
>
>HORSE:
>Where's the problem?
It starts as a problem on aesthetic grounds. I, and apparently others,
noticed a compositional relationship between the lower levels that
didn't follow through to the intellectual level. This compositional
relationship could have made the choices for *all* the levels seem quite
natural. By this criteria they would have been properly "distanced" from
each other to get that "independent" sense that Pirsig wanted to capture.
>Value patterns emerge from lower level patterns but are not composed of them
>in the SOM sense.
Does "composed of" mean something different in the MOQ sense?
Emergence is of course what we've come to expect from an evolutionary model,
but it's no help in determining where to place your levels in it,
whereas a model guided by a compositional relationship would. Its beauty is
its mathematical flavour: choose the lowest level and then, by induction,
the levels above it are chosen automatically. You judge where you should
stop, and get an idea where you'd be going.
>HORSE:
>They are more often that not in opposition to or conflict with each other.
>This is the same for each level.
So what.
If by this you mean that the guiding theme for the choice of levels is that
some kind of conflict or opposition must exist between them, it does
not help, because many intra-level conflicts exist as well, so conflict
between one level and another is not special. In other words, since patterns
throughout the entire spectrum of reality are in conflict, you could throw
darts to decide where to draw the levels, and you would still be guaranteed
to find patterns at different levels in conflict.
Pirsig seems to have chosen the levels as if they were axioms and then
noticed the opposition between them as an afterthought, and then wrongly
believed they affirmed his choices.
By whatever criteria Pirsig chose the intellectual level,
it appears to have not been safely "distanced" from the social level,
because people here are forever confusing the two and arguing and
tossing blame at each other when the blame lies elsewhere.
Maybe not following through with the compositional theme is why the
intellectual level feels like the platypus of the moral taxonomy.
How does that old Meatloaf song go? "Now don't be sad, cause 3 out of 4 ain't
bad." Maybe that's not how it goes exactly.
Glen
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