Magnus Berg (MagnusB@DataVis.se)
Sun, 7 Jun 1998 17:26:02 +0100
Hi Ken and squad
you wrote:
> If it is indeed the case that Quality is responsible for the
> existence
> of the inorganic static level and is also responsible for the
> biological
> static level, the bulk of which occurred before sentience appeared,
> then
> it seems to me that we must differentiate between non-sentient Quality
> and sentient Quality.
>
I don't think sentience has anything to do with any particular static
level. You can't say that sentience appeared in the development of the
biological level. I bet that if you looked at a video of the earth a 100
times faster than normal, you'd think that it was sentient too. It takes
water from the oceans and pour it on the land so that life can grow
there. It would look like the earth, or Gaia, has a purpose in doing so.
Any constellation of only static patterns, completely void of dynamic
influence, is what I call non sentient. I.e. it has no free will and is
predictable in every way. It is the dynamic influence, the DQ, that
makes static patterns seem sentient, not the particular level as such.
However, since higher levels are more dynamic than lower, it's natural
that
higher levels seem more sentient than lower. This is a gradual scale
though,
as you wrote, "non-sentient quality began in a deterministic way and
later
became effectively non-deterministic due to the operation of complexity
and
Chaos theory.".
What I'm a little unsure about is the difference between non-determinism
and sentience. I mean, sentience feels very real, perhaps the most real
aspect of every persons life. It doesn't feel like mere non-determinism
at all. On the other hand, I guess it could look like non-determinism
from the outside. I'm rambling here because I'm not sure, but until
anything better comes along, I'm attributing sentience to DQ, much like
Platt does in "Say Hello to Now".
Magnus
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:43:21 CEST