From: Jim Ledbury (jim.ledbury@dsl.pipex.com)
Date: Wed Mar 24 2004 - 22:32:48 GMT
Hi Platt & all
thanks for the reply.
Platt Holden wrote:
>Hi Jim,
>
>First, a warm welcome to the group.
>
>
Thank you!
<Platt>
>Platt Holden wrote:
>
>
>>>What I'm driving at is that according to the MOQ, only living beings can
>>>respond to DQ.
>>>
>>>
>
>Jim responded:
>
>
>>So according to MoQ there was no response to DQ before biological cells
>>existed? (assuming you count cells as "living beings"). I'm fairly sure
>>that Pirsig actually says that the biological level evolved to allow a more
>>dynamic response to DQ than the physical level. So what we have is each
>>static level responding in their own way to DQ just as they have since the
>>dawn of time (or rather more accurately since the dawn of that particular
>>level), it's just that each static level is a better, more dynamic response
>>to DQ than the one from which it has evolved. At least that's my reading.
>>
>>
>
>Pirsig says, "And beyond that is an even more compelling reason; societies
>and thoughts and principles themselves are no more than static patterns.
>These patterns cannot by themselves perceive or adjust to Dynamic Quality.
>Only a living being can do that." (Lila-13).
>
>
>In Chapter 11 Pirsig describes how life began: "What the Dynamic force had to
>invent in order to move up the molecular level and stay there was a carbon
>molecule that would preserve its limited Dynamic freedom from inorganic
>laws and at the same time resist deterioration back to simple compounds of
>carbon again. A study of nature shows the Dynamic force was not able to do
>this but got around the problem by inventing two molecules: a static
>molecule able to resist abrasion, heat, chemical attack and the like; and
>a Dynamic one, able to preserve the subatomic indeterminacy at a molecular
>level and "try everything" in the ways of chemical combination."
>
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
Thanks for the quotes: I was relying on memory (book in storage in
another city problem :-) ).
However, I can also remember Pirsig when talking abut the Giant, the
City, (I may be mistaken but is there a reference to a dreamed octopus?
- it's just after he sees his publisher in New York) he makes the
analogy of the city as a living organism far greater than the sum of its
parts, and humans being to it what blood cells are to human beings,
implying that he could clearly conceive of dynamic force operating at a
social level where individual living beings were mystified to its
operation. I think what we're left is is a rhetorical dilemma as
Pirsig is clearly not setting out a dry-as-dust theoretically
impregnable argument.
Certainly the interaction of social and intellectual static qualities
with dynamic quality is mediated only by human beings. (There is a
degree to which some other animal species are social amongst themselves
and even interact with humans that way though I can't see any others
being intellectual irrespective of how much problem solving intelligence
a few species demonstrate. It is arguable whether artificial
intelligence will ever be considered 'intellectual'. The possibility of
extraterrestrial intellectuals I will discount for the purposes of this
discussion as I don't think they affect us. ) This what I think he
means by "only a living being can do that": it's a de facto situation
referring to those levels which he's given a rhetorical slant, not a
statement of a theoretical absolute.
Again Pirsig also talks about atoms being static patterns of moral value
and the quality felt at the atomic level being a cousin of the quality
felt by human beings (I'm afraid that you will have to find the location
and I apologise for the inexactness of quote). There is also a section,
I believe at the end of Lila when he's getting groceries after escaping
from the incident with Lila's 'friend' in New York, where he muses about
chemicals becoming chemistry professors and vice versa. Sure we have
static molecules being created by DQ. I'm not saying the molecules are
DQ. I'm saying that these molecules are still involved in the actions
of DQ at the biochemical, cellular level.
We also have the problem here that Pirsig is (dare I say) not completely
correct in his identification of 'dynamic' and 'static' molecules when
talking about static and dynamic forces operating at the cellular level
- it doesn't matter with regard to MoQ (that is unless you're trying to
convince a literal-minded cellular biologist about MoQ): he's only using
it for purposes of illustration. It so happens that DNA is as dynamic
as a motorcycle workshop manual. It represents a form static quality
and is the set of instructions to the cell of what proteins to
construct, where and when. I would say that the dynamic aspect of the
cell is the chain of chemical reactions which reacts to circumstances
and 'reads' the DNA molecule-manual.
<Platt>
>So, there was no "response to DQ" at the inorganic level to create life
>but instead an invention by DQ of DNA, the life molecule which was then
>able to respond.
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
Ok, difference in use of language here. I mean the interplay between DQ
and SQ at the inorganic level - and I'm not convinced that you'll agree
with that use of language either (no criticism intended). The static
artefects (molecules and so forth) are the molecules used in life. As
far as I am aware, there is no molecule that is dynamic (I suppose the
media would inevitably call it the "god molecule" if such a molecule was
hypothesised), just increasingly transient ones. The dynamic aspect of
this level is the chemical reactions.
<Platt>
>As far as I know, this leap from non-life to life was a
>singular event, like the Big Bang and consciousness emerging from bundle
>of nerve tissue.
>
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
I think current thinking in paleobiology with regard to abiogenesis
(_not_ the rats & insects crawling out of mud idea, but rather the
generation of biological chemistry from non-biological precursors) is
that it happened over many thousands of years, each link in the
interconnecting chain of reactions being pieced together and subject to
competing mechanisms, until you eventually get something like a cell
with a DNA program (viruses are also supposed to come out of this
mechanism). The problem with this of course is that it's pretty much
impossible to demonstrate, and various people have doubted the
likelihood of this chain of events. The idea of panspermia is an
alternative (where 'life' evolved elsewhere to be brought to Earth in
cometary bombardment), as are various ideas of creation by an external
agency. You could be right in that it was a one-off event, although
this does not reflect current thinking. One thing worth noting though
is that in July of this year the Cassini probe will send a lander to
land on the planet Saturn's moon Titan which is the one other body in
the solar system with a dense-but-not-too-dense atmosphere, loads of
carbon based compounds and it seems liquid on the surface (although with
a temperature of 94 Kelvin, it isn't water), which should be very
informative with regard to early Earth processes, assuming the lander
survives.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say "consciousness emerging from
bundle of nerve tissue". Current thinking (backed up by reproducible
research I hasten to add) tends to indicate that "common sense" ideas
involving consciousness are misleading and that consciousness is very
much a set of post-hoc adjustments to try and maintain an illusion of
self. But you might mean something completely different... ...and I
need to read up on a lot of that stuff anyway.
<Platt>
>If life is still being created at the inorganic level, you would think
>there would be a lot of biologists observing the phenomenon. a scenario if
>it's occurring I'm unaware of.
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
I'm not surprised it's not observed! The simple fact is that that life
comes prepackaged in a cell which only takes a few seconds (could be
minutes or hours or even days - depends on what we're talking about) to
do its stuff rather than the presumably (tens of?) thousands of years it
took to get to that peculiar balance of chemical interactions necessary
to support reproducible life. Hmm - thinks "not a lot of opportunity
for Nobel prizes there then". Additionally, anything that looks like
primitive Earth probably represents a feast to a lot of life so gets
used up before we can observe anything which looks like non-life turning
into life. Quite simply life out-evolves and out-runs non-life (which
is pretty much what MoQ says - a more dynamic response to quality) by a
vast order of magnitude and we don't have much to go on in tracing the
first tentative reactions by which non-life got to be life. However,
the Urey-Miller experiment and variants show how easy it is to derive
many molecules common in biological chemistry (including the molecules
found in DNA) from very basic beginnings (nitrogen, methane, carbon
dioxide, water - all molecules commonly found in space), and many
studies have been made into possible proto-life reaction paths - i.e.
the sort of reactions that do occur naturally which could have lead to
the chemical processes known to occur in cells. There is also the
comparatively recent discovery of extremophile bacteria which use energy
from volcanic vents to live (rather than sunlight or breaking down built
up material) which have been posited as a possible route to modern
cellular life. This is why the Cassini probe is so important
scientifically. It gives us the chance to look at a world in deep freeze.
>(Reminds me of Winston Churchill's response
>when he was criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition: "That is
>the sort of arrant nonsense up with which I will not put.")
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
What a load of nonsense was engendered when people tried to apply the
rules of Classical Latin grammar to 18th & 19th century English. :-D
<Platt>
>There's no evolution at the inorganic level that I know of other than what
>humans have created in the way of new compounds and such.
>Physics wouldn't be possible if the inorganic level didn't consist of
>static patterns that repeated themselves predictably in perpetuity.
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
Dynamic human social and intellectual thought as we know it would not
be possible without the ability to record and convey quality impressions
as words.
Whether the static patterns of physics actually change or not is a moot
point. We are embedded in them and we might not be able to detect such
changes since we define all physical measurements in terms of these -
such considerations are discussed at length by Einstein in his
descriptions of general relativity and are of theoretical interest now,
although not generally in mainstream physics - hypothesising about
physical changes that by definition you cannot measure (easily) is not
much use in engineering. Independently of such considerations, at the
level of atomic particles I would say that we do have static and dynamic
components: the static components are the aspects which we recognised as
conserved via conservation laws, hence the continued 'sameness' of the
laws of physics. The dynamic component is a continual exploration of
the particle's environment through its interactions which is known to
physicists via the various quantum wave equations.
As far as evolution at the inorganic level, as I've said previously, it
happens so slowly. As an analogy I find it helpful to think of
technological change 1980-2000 vs technological change 1900-1980 vs all
technological change before that. Comparing life to non-life is like
comparing 21st century technological humans to an animal yet to invent
fire or speech. Also I find Diderot's "D'Alembert's Dream" to provide
great insight of the inorganic/organic interface from an age before
everything was so conveniently intellectually packaged:
http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/diderot/conversation.htm .
>
>I look forward to being corrected.
>
<Jim Ledbury Wed 24.Mar.2004>
:-)
I prefer to look on it as 'being informed', and I look forward to being
informed in the future. Besides, I was informed of the Pirsig quotes
that _don't_ conform to my interpretation :-) .
Regards
Jim
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