Hugo Fjelsted Alroe (alroe@vip.cybercity.dk)
Thu, 25 Sep 1997 18:16:36 +0100
I need to take issue with something I have written (below), even though it
was ramblings.
>5 - Going of the track:
>'The next level' has been surfacing on the list now and again. Though we may
>not be able to say anything with any certainty on this, we may play with the
>structure and guess that the ideal mind uses the ideas or intellectual
>relations in order to maintain some higher stable state. And further that
>this happens in the way the organism selects and dispenses with physical
>stuff, the way culture selects and dispenses with organisms and the way that
>intellect selects and dispenses with cultures; that is by way of selecting
>and dispensing with intellects. To me this looks like the 'grand vision' of
>science and spirituality, at least Peirce has such a grand vision and Popper
>to some degree - in science, where the community of inquirers is somehow
>tending towards Truth in the same sense that the natural evolution seems to
>been tending towards the Society of Gaia, and the intellectual history seems
>to have tended towards 'a society of intellectual freedom' - all evidently
>with major detours and no guarantees.
>
>- Whoops, seems like my mind went off there :-) I better stop before it gets
>any worse.
I am not really intending that evolution is heading somewhere specific, like
the wellknown idea of us being somehow the goal of evolution. When we
analyze and discuss the levels, we inevitably focus on the static patterns,
and hence we might forget for a while that they arose through dynamic
quality, by way of the possible. This is the trap or fallacy of what has
been called 'the anthropic principle', meaning that in order to get where we
are now, the evolutionary history (in toto, univers and all) necessarily
progressed along a certain path. We enter the trap if you say that this
necessity of the past was a necessity of the present then, because this
implies a deterministic universe, so, unless one is a determined
determinist, we do not want to do this.
What I am saying is, that the way our world becomes, is in a dance between
dynamics and stability, where we can identify certain forms of initial
stable states and new levels of stable states resting on the first and so
on; and I agree with Pirsig that the upper levels are in many ways less
stable and more fleeting and dynamic.
We are trying to better understand this world of ours, from where we stand,
and identify the stable patterns in it, but this should not blind us to the
possibility of other stable patterns. 'Our world' is also a set of blinders
which makes it difficult for us to imagine other worlds. I think what I
wrote above could be taken as such a blindness.
Hugo
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