[MD] What Bo Doesn't Get

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Krimel <Krimel at krimel.com> wrote:
>> [Steve]
>> The intellectual level of evolution is the collection of all intellectual
>> patterns of value.
>>
>> [Krimel]
>> Exactly!
>
> [Dan:]
> Not exactly. Evolution isn't a level, is it? Evolution is what drives
> the levels. Evolutionary history is what the levels have in common.
>
> Now, what Steve might mean is, the evolution of the intellectual level
> is a collection of all intellectual patterns of value. But doesn't
> that go without saying?
>
> [Krimel]
> Evolution doesn't drive anything. It is a description of how patterns adapt
> in response to change, flux, uncertainty; in other words dynamic quality.
> Evolution is a reflexive process where the output of one cycle becomes the
> input for the next.

Dan:
Dynamic Quality isn't change and uncertainty. Evolution is the process
of natural selection.

"Evolution is recklessly opportunistic: it favors any variation that
provides a competitive advantage over other members of an organism's
own population or over individuals of different species. For billions
of years this process has automatically fueled what we call
evolutionary progress. No program controlled or directed this
progression. It was the result of spur of the moment decisions of
natural selection." (Mayr, quoted in LILA)

"Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is
value that cannot be contained by static patterns. What the
substance-centered evolutionists were showing with their absence of
final "mechanisms" or "programs" was not an air-tight case for the
biological goallessness of life. What they were unintentionally
showing was a superb example of how values create reality.

"...survival­of-the-fittest" is one of those catch-phrases like
"mutants" or "misfits" that sounds best when you don't ask precisely
what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to
"survival of the survivors," which doesn't say anything. "Survival of
the fittest" is meaningful only when "fittest" is equated with "best,"
which is to say, "Quality." And the Darwinians don't mean just any old
quality, they mean undefined Quality! As Mayr's article makes clear,
they are absolutely certain there is no way to define what that
"fittest" is.

"Good! The "undefined fittest" they are defending is identical to
Dynamic Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work. There
is no quarrel whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the
Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the
Metaphysics of Quality and the "teleological" theories which insist
that life has some purpose. What the Metaphysics of Quality has done
is unite these opposed doctrines within a larger metaphysical
structure that accommodates both of them without contradiction."
(LILA)

Dan:
Undefined fittest is identical to Dynamic Quality. Not change, not
uncertainty, not chaos, not any sort of concept at all. Do you see?

>
> But, if you remove the reference to evolution entirely from the statement,
> perhaps it does go without saying that the intellectual level is the
> collection of all intellectual patterns. A pattern is that which has
> extension in time. It is the encoding of experience into concepts. In that
> sense all patterns are intellectual.

Dan:
In that context, yes. But evolution doesn't have levels.

>
> That would be my point anyway. You would think it goes without saying but it
> is hard to detect from Bo's ongoing mangling of history.

True, that.

Thanks Krimel, and good to have you back,

Dan