Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Sat, 18 Oct 1997 06:08:35 +0100
> Gene Kofman wrote:
>
> > Bodvar wrote:
> > > A Magnus Berg aware of his loneliness would soon loose his
> > > mind (literally), or he would join an animal society. Remember the
> > > wolf-boy incident?
>
> > Not necessarily. Magnus could still retain social patterns and intellectual
> > on top of them. I think, we all chatter inside our heads, constantly
> > explaining what we already know. That would be the only case when such
> > chatter served some more or less clear purpose. But, that's another thread
> > too. In addition, that lone survivor's mind will protect itself by
> > relentlessly believing in existence of other survivors and, by doing that,
> > it'll keep the Society from extinction.
To make it more strong, let's imagine Magnus alone
in a lost spacecraft, it needn't be a small capsule, but as big as
you wish and with enough supplies to last him for his life,
but without contact and with no hope of return. How long do you
think he would be "rational"?
------------------------------------------------------
Over to my weekly "article". The LS discussion goes like wildfire and
I am far too slow for such exchange; before I have cranked up my
mental "accelerator" the result is obsolete. I just have to pick out
the things that are most crucial for the MOQ and treat it in my own
style.
In the Artificial Intelligence/Turing Test question Anders Nielsen
came to my rescue so I think that one is settled. What Anders call
"task-specific" fits nicely in with what I call "intelligence", i.e.,
what keeps an organism alive in its normal environment. This
must be kept separate from the Intellect(-ual Level) which builds on
the Social Level.
Then Anders goes on to ask if the MOQ is valid for extraterrestrial
life as well. He believes in its main tenet - the
Dynamic/Static quality - but has doubts about the four static levels,
they being too fuzzy and human specific for his liking. Diana however
defends the static levels. Even if the aliens may be biologically
different from earthly life and also have different social relations
as well as an "alien" Intellect, the Inorganic Level is at least
common throughout the universe.
Agreed! I once said that a theory that doesn't account for AI isn't
worth much, this goes for aliens too. A theory of everything does by
definition profess to cover all eventualities. But it is an important
aspect to our situation: Never before in history has a person sat
himself down to construct a metaphysics (until Pirsig everybody
believed that Mp. was what unfathomable German philosophy concerned
itself with). The Mind/Matter division was the way the world had been
assembled from eternity on.
The Quality's aim is to wholesalely replace the Subject/Object
Metaphysics and does thereby claim universal validity, anything less
is impossible. It stands or falls, there is no middle way. This is
exactly the trouble I have with "extension" or "improveme s" to the
MOQ, Once the basics are laid down, all efforts to improve
it only worsens its trouble - if it is infested with weaknesses from
the start. I have yet to find weak spots with it, and feel no need
for modifications.
Anders went on to say that he did not put much value to the four
levels, because they were far too fuzzy and human specific.
Fuzzy perhaps, but it has been found that fuzziness works
better than clarity (logic), so why is the fuzziness so
detrimental regarding the four levels? (Remember my space dimensions'
simile? Who knows where height ends and breadth begin or depth takes
ov ? Fuzzy all the way, but still discrete, and universally valid.)
No, I believe - like Diana - that the static part of the MOQ is just
as valid for Proxima Centauri as it is on Earth. Not only the
Inorganic level, but the whole sequence is. Already by calling it
"extraterrestrial life" we have introduced the Biological Level, and
their Intellectual perception of reality will necessarily be based
upon THEIR society. It will most likely not match the human one, but
still be Static Patterns of Intellect. Of course, the MOQ is a HUMAN
intellectual construct, but what escapes that condition?
What haunts us is the Mind of SOM; It keeps surfacing repeatedly
because it has not been understood that it is eradicated from the
MOQ, NOT REPLACED BY DYNAMIC QUALITY. For instance does Anders say
that only sentient beings can perceive Dynamic Quality, not societies
and certainly not atomic matter. (Bravo Magnus, you spotted that this
brings us right back to the mind/matter platypi jungle) Could Anders
please tell what distinguishes a sentient being from an insentient
one? Diana has discovered contradictions with Pirsig: Only the living
have a sense of value which seemingly contradicts the emergence of
the Organic level (how can Life emerge from Matter which has no sense
of value?).
The "perception of DQ" or "sense of value" sounds suspiciously like
good old consciousness. Quality's first axiom is that there is noting
but VALUE. Matter isn't material atoms perceiving DQ, or sensing
Inorganic Value, it is Stable Inorganic Value itself. A MORALITY! So
is the rest of the quality sequence. There is nothing BUT value, but
there are four moralities! The living organisms sense biological
value. The Social organisms sense Social Values and the Intellectual
organism (up to now only terrestrial human beings) sense Intellectual
Value.
According to Pirsig, to perceive Dynamic Quality is a religious
experience - easily mistaken for madness, but instrumental for making
the transition to a new metaphysical platform; a horrifying
experience and nothing worth pursuing). I don't find the talk of
Dynamic Quality very useful. Our experience is in the Static part of
the scale, the dynamism is nothing we should mess with unnecessarily.
Admittedly, each value step is more dynamic, freer, better than the
previous one - the top notch volatile enough to react to DQ - but
static nonetheless.
Thanks for reading.
Bodvar.
-- post message - mailto:skwok@spark.net.hk unsubscribe/queries - mailto:diana@asiantravel.com homepage - http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/4670
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:42:05 CEST