From: Dan Glover (daneglover@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 29 2004 - 17:54:44 BST
Hello everyone
>From: "Horse" <horse@darkstar.uk.net>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>Subject: Re: MD immoral irony?????
>Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 01:24:04 +0100
>
>Hi Dan
>
>Good to hear from you and thanks for taking the time to reply.
Hi Horse
You're welcome, and thank you as well for taking your time to write. It's
always good to hear from you.
>
>
>Isn't DNA (along with genes and chromosones) an intellectual pattern of
>value. At the
>biological level these things do not exist. DNA is a name for a biological
>pattern of value
>just as Carbon is a name for an inorganic pattern of value.
>I suppose terms like Carbon or DNA or Race are part intellectual patterns
>and part
>social patterns of value - we could probably call them cultural patterns
>maybe (just a
>thought).
>I think of the idea of race in the same way that Pirsig illustrates the
>idea of Victorians in
>chapter 21 of Lila:
>"If he were going to be precise in talking about the Victorians he would
>have to be
>careful not to imply he was talking about a specific group of people.
>"Victorian", as he
>used the term, is a pattern of social values that was dominant in a social
>period between
>the American Civil war and World War 1, not a biological pattern."
>
>As I said above I think these and similar terms are part intellectual and
>part social. As
>Pisig says in Lila Chapter 12:
>"As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language".
>Our
>intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived"
>
>and Pirsig also asserts that culture is a combination of social and
>intellectual patterns of
>value.
>
>Does this answer your question? If not I'll try and expand a bit more
>although I'm still
>groping around a bit with some aspects of these ideas.
Yes this does help a great deal, thank you. I missed your point the first
time around. I do agree with you but "something" exists at the genetic
level. We could call that "something" biological patterns of value, sure.
But as RMP says in LILA'S CHILD, "objects" are a great shorthand for the
stable collection of ideas that science has assembled.
Thanks again,
Dan
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