[MD] Intellectual and Social

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Krimel]
Seriously, can you believe this shit?

[Arlo]
Well, with Platt its just another opportunity to mischaracterize 
theories that aren't to his theistic bent, and that's just a 
carry-over of the tired old talk-radio rhetorical tactics he deploys. 
This one is a good example of the Mighty Wurlitzer, and I personally 
don't think it even phases him that it demonstrates complete 
ignorance on his part. His "motis operandi" is to demonize the 
academy, demonize "intellect", and along the way twist the MOQ into a 
theistic philosophy (at worst or an apologist's support of theism (at best).

What bother's Platt about "emergence", as is evident in his 
sophomoricly glib "oops", is the lack of "intent" or "planning", the 
lack of a supra-agent who's deliberations are what gives his life 
both meaning and superiority. Quality becomes a sort of hyper-mind, 
or supra-mind, who willfully orchestrates the cosmos towards a 
certain end, an end where "man" plays the penultimate role. E.g., 
billions of years ago when subatomic particles first formed "carbon", 
the hand that controlled them to do so was connected to a mind, a 
plan, who's goal was to create "man". Like Calvin said to Hobbes, 
"all of history has occurred with the goal of producing 'me'" (or 
something like that).

What saddens me is that we were just through this twice in last few 
months, and yet there is "oops" being squawked again, as willfully 
ignornant and deliberately disinformative as always.

What I continue to not fathom is how the same people who hold up 
Dynamic Quality as if it were some Incan God totally destroy the very 
"freedom" Pirsig imbues the cosmos with via this concept by turning 
it into an orchestrating hand. At the very least, they turn the 
cosmos into a mechanistic, ordered stage upon which only "man" has 
freedom to act. But even this move is short-sighted, as it makes 
their own existences wholly dependent on the very "chance" they are 
trying to drive out of the cosmos. Chance = freedom. Freedom depends 
on chance. A scripted universe, an ordered universe, is one where 
there is no freedom. If it was always "part of the plan" to produce 
man, than the myriad of subatomic and biological interactions that 
led over millennia to "man" were "destined", unavoidable, and hence 
these patterns could never have "responded to DQ". Like a rock that I 
pick up and move from one desk to another, the rock simply is a 
puppet of my will. And so the cosmos becomes supermarionation for the 
Will of Quality.

With John, I don't know, he admits to being ignorant about theories 
of emergence, but this does not seemingly stop him from (at the very 
least) supporting Platt's sophomoric mischaracterization. I've tried 
to explain before that "creation" occurs as a "response to Quality", 
it is not puppeteered nor orchestrated by some supra-agent. Creation 
occurs as the result of interwoven, interrelated patterns each 
responding to Quality within their own agenic bounds. Atoms had no 
"intent" to create amoebas, nor were atoms "coerced" into doing what 
they did by a Qualigod who was willfully staging the cosmos for 
"man". We look back after-the-fact and see what appears to be 
certainty, but this is because what we do NOT see are the inexistence 
potential other outcomes. This illusion may make us feel all warm and 
fuzzy, but that's about it.