From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 01 2005 - 12:58:33 GMT
[Arlo previously]
Tell me Platt, where was the Intellectual level 4 billion years ago?
Sitting around waiting for the inorganic to "flower", then the biological,
then the social, so that it could finally apply to something?
[Platt]
You got it.
[Arlo]
Well, go figure. Was "calculus" sitting there too? Or just the general MOQ
levels?
[Arlo previously]
This reply makes no sense. You said, in an anti-emergence criticism, that
your disagreement was that you believed "it was all there from the
beginning". What "it" was all there?
[Platt]
Experience, i.e. Quality.
[Arlo]
Was my "experience" of writing this email "there from the beginning"?
[Platt]
Experience = Dynamic Quality. Your experience is DQ and yes it was there
there from the beginning, as was the DQ for Mr. Harley or whoever
assembled the first Harley motorcycle.
[Arlo]
Tell me, if it was all there from the beginning, why did it bother to create
inorganic, and then biological, and then social, and then intellectual levels?
[Arlo previously]
As I've been saying from day one, the MOQ shows that the emergence of
"higher order organisms" (next level up) derives from collective activity
on the previous level. Then, what we consider "individuals" on that newly
emerged level, in collective activity, give rise to an even "higher order
organism". This is explained very clearly in Lila.
[Platt]
Nonsense. Pirsig explained that in the MOQ all "organisms" exist only in
the material world, all societies (and ideas) exist only in the mental
world.
[Arlo]
Pirsig himself uses the word "organism" to describe emergent social patterns.
"Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes
just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism
is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower
organism can accomplish alone."
He says the relationship between the emergent intellctual level and the lower
social level is analogous to the social-biological relationship. I agree with
Pirsig, it makes sense to think of these newly emerged patterns as organisms.
[Arlo]
But the socially constructed software that is "Platt" is at a higher level than
the cell collective that underlies it.
[Platt]
And you continue to blow up that lead balloon.
[Arlo]
As Pirsig says, "The language of mental intelligence has nothing to say to the
cells directly. They don't understand it. The language of the cells has nothing
to say to the mind directly. It doesn't speak that language either. They are
completely separate patterns. At this moment, asleep, "Lila" doesn't exist any
more than a program exists when a computer is switched off. The intelligence of
her cells had switched Lila off for the night, exactly the way a hardware
switch turns off a computer program. The language we've inherited confuses
this. We say "my" body and "your" body and "his" body and "her" body, but it
isn't that way. That's like a FORTRAN program saying, "this is my computer." "1
his body on the left," and "This body on the right." That's the way to say it.
This Cartesian "Me," this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our
eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of
the world, is just completely ridiculous. This self-appointed little editor of
reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines
it. This Cartesian "Me" is a software reality, not a hardware reality. This
body on the left and this body on the right are running variations of the same
program, the same "Me," which doesn't belong to either of them. The "Me's" are
simply a program format."
Tell me, from where does the software program that is "Platt" originate? Was it
hanging around since the beginning waiting to "flower" too?
[Arlo]
Just as the MOQ, or calculus, or gravity is at a higher level on the MOQ
than "Platt".
[Platt]
Nonsense. Nothing is higher than the experience of you, me, and the man
over there behind the tree. Quality has us all, everyone -- past, present
and future..
[Arlo]
Ah, yes, the Randian nonsense. Quality, indeed, has us all, and we play a part
in the ongoing evolution of "life", but here you go again with the opining
red-blood cell speech. Pirsig rightly places your exalted "individual" on the
social level, saying, "The strongest moral argument against capital punishment
is that it weakens a society's Dynamic capability-its capability for change and
evolution."
There is a lot said in that. Namely that "individuals" constitute the red-blood
cells (or perhaps more apt, the DNA) for the organism that is society. Killing
individuals weakens society the same way killing DNA weakens the biological
level.
Arlo
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