John, Roger, Gregg and Everyone:
John has been quite a good sport as we each take our jabs at his essay.
And you gotta admire his stamina. He's like an intellectual Steven
Segal, taking on everyone in the room without anger or drama. Pretty
Zen. I wonder if John has a pony-tail or practices the martial arts?
Just kidding.
Instead of scrutinizing the nuts and bolts of John's ideas, this time I
just want to offer some sympathy for the "organic" way of seeing things.
Generally speaking, I think its much more useful than mechanistic views.
John is certainly not alone in stressing the importance of "life" or the
first to see the biological as central or primary. In fact, there were
organically oriented scientists from the earliest stages of the
Scientific Revolution all the way up to today. And the MOQ's
evolutionary aspects show respect to the idea as well. In some sense,
the entire MOQ universe is "alive".
I thought about this from an even broader perspective too. Did you
happen to notice my post on metaphors? There were a bunch of quotes from
a review of ZAMM that had been re-published in "The Guidebook". It was
sent as part the "Art in the MOQ" discussion, but the quotes would make
just as much sense here. The reviewer was saying something l lot like
what Pirsig said; that even our scientific understandings are just
metaphors. As such, there is no contradiction in saying reality is like
an organism, a mind, a machine, is many and is one. We can imagine it
any number of ways.
Personally, I like to imagine the cosmos as consciousness or as a living
organism the best. It contradicts the the picture that dominates; dumb
dead matter. I tend toward Romanticism simply because the Classical view
needs no defenders and is already too dominant. I dislike the mechanical
view, not because it is wrong, but because it ugly, hollow and
inadequate. For some reason, it even seems evil to describe life and
people in mechanistic terms. It has a way of killing the soul of the
described.
DMB
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