From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Thu Sep 11 2003 - 09:05:40 BST
Hi Matthew, Paul and All Apostles ;-)
(PS for Sam)
9 Sep. Matt wrote (to Paul) about this statement from me:
Bo:
>>>According to the MOQ all levels start(ed) as a pattern of the
parent level.
Paul:
>> Is this what Pirsig said? Does he really mean that a pattern of
values in one level "moves up" to a new level?
> Matt:
> I think I agree with you when you bring up point (c), "It doesn't fit
> with the statement that levels are not continuous." Pirsig says
> explicitly that the levels are discrete and I would take that to mean
> that the leap from level to level is just that: a leap, not a muddled
> shuffle.
A child is an autonomous individual even if it is from a set of parents?
But will - even if living to be a hundred - remain their child. Also, it
may enter a career that is different from - even damaging to - the
family tradition? Isn't this a valid analogue?
> Side note: that was me doing biography. As explicit as Pirsig is, I
> have also been pretty explicit in criticizing Pirsig's idea of the
> levels as being discrete. Its probably pretty safe to say that
> pragmatists think everything is a muddled shuffle.
This about the levels having their origin as a pattern of the parent I
took for granted, but it must be noted that "at home" it is a true family
member, it's only that the upper level has usurped it's qualities for a
higher purpose. Thus any point of departure will never be determined.
(First this quote from Lila chapter 12):
"This classification of patterns is not very original, but the
Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is
unusual. It says they are not continuous. They are discrete. They
have very little to do with one another. Although each higher level is
built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the
contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the
lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own
purposes".
This may at first glance seem to contradict the "origin with the parent"
but the discreteness is as indicated in the child example above.
(Lila Chapter 12)
"Similarly the biological patterns of life and the molecular patterns of
organic chemistry have a "machine language" interface called DNA
but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms
possess or guide life. A primary occupation of every level of evolution
seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution. But as the
higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on purposes of its
own".
I am lay here, but believe that DNA has something to do with sexual
reproduction and that there was a time of a simpler mechanism (still is
on the germ level). Anyway, there must have been an immense time
span when no-one could tell a complex chemical molecule from an
organism, and carbon is described as the inorganic pattern that DQ
used for its ride to biology. How it ..."offered freedom to the lower
levels of evolution" ...? A certain mobility perhaps.
(Lila Chapter 12)
"Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived. The
intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a
myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit.
Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective
world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself
upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see
the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science might
never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn't
so."
Here Pirsig does not suggest what could have been the social pattern
that DQ used for its ride to intellect, but I believe that language is
widely accepted.
Sincerely
Bo
PS for Sam
You had found the very same quote as I
> "Similarly the biological patterns of life and the molecular patterns
> of organic chemistry have a "machine language" interface called DNA
> but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms
> possess or guide life. A primary occupation of every level of
> evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution.
> But as the higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on
> purposes of its own."
> But I'll continue thinking about this.
In my comment I said I couldn't tell whether DNA is the life formula, or
if there were/are still simpler forms of proliferating ... there must be if
plants are "living", but this is not the issue. The inorganic pattern that
"went off on a purpose of its own" is the carbon atom. At the inorganic
level it is a chemical substance, but at the biological level it is
essential for life.
PPS for Paul:
I think that the idea of progress within each level being complication
rather than improvement (improvement is between the levels) has
some bearing on this issue.
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