AN EXPLANATION OF THE GENEALOGY PROGRAM, BUT NO PROGRESS ON IT.
At 7:04 PM +0000 11/17/98, Walter Balestra wrote:
>About your (great!) chronological summary I only want to adress something
>you're probably well aware of. You place the levels (Anorganic, Biology,
>Social and Intellectual) in the chronological summary, according to there
>being 'a single point in time and a single location in space when and where
>the emergent behavior that characterizes each level first appears'. For the
>morality-discussion that can follow using this map, I think it's important
>to mention that the chronological time-line is a 2D axis, whereas to be
>more precize the forming of static patterns (including the levels) has to
>be put in a 3D map. For example: the biological level of humans was formed
>way after the social level of the first dinosaurs. Right now I don't see
>why a specific determination of the very first time a level arised, can
>help the morality-discussion. Maybe you can fill me in on this one.
I want to tie the levels to a specific moment in the evolution of the
universe because I feel that doing so will allow us to find, empirically, a
definition of each of the levels that would make framing and answering
moral questions easier. It seems to me that much of the difficulty we've
had in this month's discussion and in our thinking on the levels in general
has been the result of not having a precise definition of the essential
characteristics of the levels. This leads to endless bickering on whether a
given phenomenon is in one level or another, or is really in many levels,
or whether the levels are fuzzy or sharp, etcetera. It seems as though
we're all running off of various very generalized understandings of the
levels and our imprecise conception of them prevents us from coming to
agreement on answers to our moral questions. My hope is that we can,
instead of drawing from a few quotes or a few examples in *Lila* or from a
general understanding of the words "Inorganic", "Biological", "Social,"
"Intellectual", find our definition of the levels *empirically* in the new
behavior we find emerging at the moment of a given level's birth.
I don't claim to have found those new, clearer definitions, but that was
the program I was trying to get across in my previous post. I felt that
since the levels are the primary arbiter of moral judgments in Pirsig's
system, bringing them into clearer resolution by examining the emergent
behavior itself might help us with our questions of morality in this
month's topic. Does that approach make sense?
As an example, take my stab at identifying the emergent behavior of
society. As a given, we have the previous emergent level of organization,
biology. The fundamental concept in biology might be self-replicating
genotype/phenotype. What new thing happens at the social level? Hmmm. Well,
if we look closely, we these organisms interacting with their environment,
which is both the Inorganic realm and the rest of the organisms around
them, or the Biological realm. As we trace the evolution of biology along,
we might see that for a long time organisms didn't take much notice of
other organisms--they treated them the same as their Inorganic environment.
At some point, however, new behavior emerges and we see organisms
interacting with other organisms in quite complex ways. We can't fully
capture the system by talking just about the behavior of one organism
anymore. We have to lay out the different roles and relationships the types
of organisms have. We suddenly have some worker ants and some soldier ants
and a queen, too. These organisms, all of the same genetic strain, suddenly
have different roles and our explanation of them needs to be brought up a
level to explain what we see. So if that's social behavior, what's unique
about it? Well, we could perhaps characterize the emergent behavior as
differentiated roles/interactions ensuring the survival of the group. If we
do take that as a definition, then we can use it to determine whether a
specific phenomenon we want to make a moral judgment about is really on the
social level or not.
Now I don't know if what I've chosen as a definition of emergent social
behavior is a good one, but it seems that with this method we could hope to
find out by examining our evolutionary history closely and perhaps avoiding
endless semantic arguments by referring to the "matter of fact"
evolutionary relationship that these emergent levels have to one another.
In principle at least, that's what we could do and that's what motivated my
post. Whether this method would actually prove useful in practice remains
to be seen.
>The reason for not using a 2D map lies in what I call the importance of
>>3D-thinking, which I find difficult to explain. 3D-thinking is what MoQ
>is all about, 2D-thinking is what SOM is all about.
>In 3D-thinking 1 + 1 = 3. When one uses 3D-thinking, it's not possible to
>forget that all is formed out of lower static value patterns ? that we are
>part of an evolution from value to higher
>order value, from the good to the better.
I'm think I have an inkling of what you mean by 3D thinking, though I'd
argue your claim that 1+1=3. I recognize that a timeline is a 1-dimensional
tool and the matrix format in which I presented it still only 2D. It's
quite difficult to do 3D in a text post, though! In your example of the
fact that social dinosaurs existed before biological humans, you'd like to
see the fact that society continued to ride on top of biology even when the
dinosaurs went extinct? That is, evolution had, far prior to the dinosaurs,
produced the social level in organisms. Social behavior was latched in the
genome and continued as genetic lines diverged, eventually selecting
species with larger brain sizes capable of hosting complex societies and
finally intellect. Am I getting your meaning or do you mean something
entirely different by 3D thinking?
Cheers,
Keith
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