Hi Glenn
On 29 Mar 2002 at 1:23, Glenn Bradford wrote:
> 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.
This sounds more like a relationship imposed on the MoQ which doesn't actually exist. If
you think in S/O 'compositional' terms then you do run into a problem as you have
found. If you start from a Quality perspective the problem doesn't arise.
> >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?
Obviously it does. In a SOM sense "composed of" refers to the components which make
up the whole. This is a reductionist approach which when taken to extremes produces
ideas such as the brain and the mind are identical.
> 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.
Or a model that is guided by a "patterns of value" relationship provides even greater
beauty with it's Qualitative flavour of betterness.
As far as I'm aware there is no rule which states that what emerges from an evolutionary
model must be composed of items at an earlier evolutionary level. I suppose that you
could do this by induction but I was under the impression that induction was no longer
the dominant scientific model!
> >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.
The above has little to do with what I said and as I didn't say it you can assume it's not
what I meant. This is commonly known as a strawman - it's also known as erroneous or
just plain wrong.
> 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.
Where does he do this then?
> 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.
This sounds very much like the argument from incredulity. If you make incorrect
assumptions or read into the MoQ what is not there and then become confused then
that's your problem, don't blame Pirsig or the MoQ. Intellectual patterns of Value are not
composed of Social Patterns of Value which in turn are not composed of Biological
patterns of value etc. There is a hierarchical relationship which is not the same thing.
Birds are not composed of dinosaurs even though (apparently) birds evolved from
dinosaurs.
> 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.
Or, in fact, at all.
The Intellectual level only feels like "the platypus of the moral taxonomy" because you
have started from the wrong position and failed to see it.
Horse
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:09 BST