Hullo Andrea, Platt,
Platt: ". I should have asked, "Does the MOQ support design or purpose in
evolution? Or to put it another way, "Is Pirsig a teleologist?" Or, another
way, " Would Pirsig agree with Susan Blackmore that evolution is
'mindless'?"
Thanks for clarifying this Platt. I was assuming you were just playing mind
games with your previous formulation.
Andrea: "I'll admit to be rather confused, and would like to know if someone
has a good MOQ-based answer to this dilemma."
John B responds. No I don't have a good MOQ based answer, but I think there
is the suspicion of one in a fascinating section of Wilber's writing where
he both explains and critiques A. N. Whitehead.
(Having just upset both Bo and Squonk, I want to rub salt in the wound. I
have not read Whitehead in the original, Squonk, and have no plans to, since
his work is reputedly extremely difficult, and my lifespan is limited. I
have read a number of 'explanations' of what he is saying, that have done
little to enlighten me, the best by Jeremy Hayward in "Perceiving Ordinary
Magic". Wilber brought clarity into my confusion, and then offered a clue as
to how Whitehead had fallen short of the even bigger picture that his
struggle to reinterpret reality might lead to. I do not know or care if this
makes Wilber 'original', but it certainly pressed my 'quality' button.)
Wilber's main exegesis on Whitehead is in "Eye to Eye" Ch 6, which
unfortunately I do not have access to at present. There is a brief but
interesting critique in an endnote in "The Eye of Spirit" (p 349)
Pertinant to the topic that Platt has raised is a quote from an endnote to
"Sex, Ecology, Spirituality" which says
"This is why 'emergence' as used in science doesn't really explain anything,
it only describes what in fact happens. The explanation has to lie in
something like Whitehead's ultimate category of creativity, a feature of
reality itself that accounts for emergence and cannot itself be accounted
for ... it is clear that some sort of Eros is involved in the process, or it
could never get going in the first place." (p 529)
I'll also point you to an early post of mine to this forum, under the
heading "MD Evolution, Wilber and Whitehead", of Jun 15 2001.
The relevant bit is as follows, but the earlier argument might also be of
interest.
"Now, while an intellectual input such as this is limited in its potential
for illumination, there is one further aspect of what Wilber offers that is,
I think, quite valuable . This occurs on p167 of Eye to Eye, and I will
quote it at some length. Wilber is discussing what he calls an 'analog law'
, "the idea that every event and principle on a lower level is merely a
reduced version or a reflection downward or a lesser degree of those events
and principles found on higher levels". He suggests that Whitehead took just
this position. "He [Whitehead] took the notion of junior dimensions being
essentially reduced versions of senior ones, and completely turned the
typical approach to reality on its head. He said that if you want to know
the general principles of existence, you must start at the top and use the
highest occasions to illumine the lowest, not the other way around, which of
course is the common reductionist reflex. So he said you could learn more
about the world from biology than you could from physics; and so he
introduced the organismic viewpoint which has revolutionized philosophy. And
he said you could learn more from social psychology than from biology, and
then introduced the notion of things being a society of occasions - the
notion of compound individuality. Naturally, he held that the apex of
exemplary pattern was God, and it was in God, the ultimate compound
individual, that you would ground any laws or patterns found reflected in
reduced versions in the lower dimensions of psychology, then biology, then
physics. The idea, which was brilliant in its statement, was that you first
look to the higher levels for the general principles of existence, and then,
by subtraction, you see how far down the hierarchy they extend. You don't
start at the bottom and try to move up by addition of the lower parts,
because some of the higher parts simply don't show up very well, or at all,
on the lower rungs. Perhaps his favourite examples were creativity and
love - God, for Whitehead, was especially love and creativity. But in the
lower dimensions, the creativity gets reduced, appearing in humans as a
modicum of free will but being almost entirely lost by the time you get to
atomic particles... So Whitehead, by looking to illuminate the lower by the
higher, and not vice versa, could make creativity the general principle, and
then understand determinism as a partial restriction or reduction of primary
creativity. If, on the other hand, you start at the bottom, then you have to
figure out a way to get free will and creativity out of rocks, and it just
won't work."
There is much I would like to say about this, but this post is already long.
Suffice to say, then, that if we were to adopt this approach, then the
meaning of quality is to be found at the highest level, where language is an
inadequate vehicle of communication, and intellect an inappropriate medium
for the search. This ties in with a number of recent strands of discussion
in this forum, including where God fits in, and if there is an emerging
level beyond intellect. And the experts would not be those most skilled in
intellectual debate, but those who have put in the hard yards in a
meditative practice, and tested their insights against other mystic
authorities. The resulting outcomes would appear paradoxical to the merely
intellectual mind, but would reconcile the deep divisions of that level, of
which the static / dynamic is just the latest in a long line. If anyone is
interested in following this idea further in relation to Pirsig, I would
suspect it could be fruitful. "
John B
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