From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 17:56:00 BST
Hi Bo
> Matt:
> I think I agree with you when you bring up point (c), "It doesn't fit
> with the statement that levels are not continuous." Pirsig says
> explicitly that the levels are discrete and I would take that to mean
> that the leap from level to level is just that: a leap, not a muddled
> shuffle.
Bo:
A child is an autonomous individual even if it is from a set of parents?
But will - even if living to be a hundred - remain their child. Also,
it
may enter a career that is different from - even damaging to - the
family tradition? Isn't this a valid analogue?
Paul:
I don't think so. When you start to think in terms of patterns, there is
nothing essential and unchanging outside of the pattern to which the
pattern clings to. A biological pattern does not "leave home" and become
a social pattern of value. A social pattern of values is created, and
that's it.
Bo:
This about the levels having their origin as a pattern of the parent I
took for granted, but it must be noted that "at home" it is a true
family
member, it's only that the upper level has usurped it's qualities for a
higher purpose. Thus any point of departure will never be determined.
Paul:
The levels are defined by the patterns, a level is the collection of
patterns. So it is not that "a level" does something to a pattern, like
usurping. I think it is more that DQ changes a pattern into a new
pattern.
Bo:
I am lay here, but believe that DNA has something to do with sexual
reproduction and that there was a time of a simpler mechanism (still is
on the germ level). Anyway, there must have been an immense time
span when no-one could tell a complex chemical molecule from an
organism, and carbon is described as the inorganic pattern that DQ
used for its ride to biology.
Paul:
Carbon is a name given to an inorganic pattern of values. DNA is the
name given to a biological pattern of values. They are completely
discrete in the MOQ. As Pirsig says - a carbon atom does not possess or
guide life.
Bo cited:
(Lila Chapter 12)
"Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.
The
intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing
itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a
myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit.
Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective
world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself
upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see
the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science might
never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn't
so."
Here Pirsig does not suggest what could have been the social pattern
that DQ used for its ride to intellect, but I believe that language is
widely accepted.
Paul:
Widely accepted, indeed. My question, though, is this - is it the wrong
way to look at evolution to look for one pattern that exists in two
levels? I think it is. I think the confusion may be because we have
names for things which refer to a collection of patterns existing at
different levels. Language being one of them. A human being is another.
Bo:
I think that the idea of progress within each level being complication
rather than improvement (improvement is between the levels) has
some bearing on this issue.
Paul:
This is another assumption to pin down - improvement is between the
levels - I can't see where you have got this from.
Cheers
Paul
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