Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Sat, 27 Jun 1998 19:19:26 +0100
Fri, 19 Jun 1998 12:50:39 +0300
Jonathan B. Marder
wrote:
> ..snip... snip
> This "all- pervading EVALUATING dynamism" is most important. Pirsig's
> metaphysics tries to be universal. The rules guiding the behaviour of
> molecules and the "moral" rules guiding humans are fundamentally the
> same, but operating at opposite ends of the scale of complexity.
Dear Jonathan and sq.
I agree, our differences are minor, one who can produce such a
quality insight as the one above can't be all wrong ;-) As I
understand it your observer/observed is Dynamic Quality
perception itself (my all-pervading...etc) while my o/o is
the Intellectual level. Yet, as I say in my message to Ken Clark, I
think the DQ term is better left as it is. QUALITY IS REALITY!
It's as simple as that.
....snip
> Pirsig is very woolly on this. Bo, I read some of your article "The
> Quality Event" and found the place you state "Life is surely violating
> the laws of thermodynamics and each and every natural law there is..."
> There's absolutely no way any serious scientist can go along with that.
> Life DOES NOT violate the laws of thermodynamics. To interpret the
> creation of order as violations is incorrect. You don't need life for
> spontaneous appearance of order e.g. consider crystals. A fuller
> treatment of this involves complexity theory and it is significant that
> Pirsig hit on the complexity idea to complement his Quality idea.
Diana has been lax on the rules lately and allowed us to wander a
little. Very short re, the thermodynamics vs life argument. Each
value level is a violation of its predecessor so Life is necessarily
spiting Matter. After all this is the reason for the endless Creation
contra Evolution controversy. Darwinism sounds reliable, but as P
says: if life has to "survive" it is implied that it goes against
chance, and how can anything that works against probability
for millions of years "survive", or get started in the first place? .
Jonathan, I see that a serious scientist cannot go along with
a sentence like the one you cite - not in that form. Science claims
that it is studying a valueless world in an objective manner - and
that seems true as long as one scratches the surface, but the MOQ
goes deeper and unfolds another picture. All right, there are plenty
of crank theories and the MOQ may sound like another, but what is so
horrible about postulating another "universal constant" (physics is
full of them) if it produces a credible world view?
Hope we will have an ability to discuss this in depth some time.
Bo
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