[MD] The difference between a Monet and a finger painting

[Steven Peterson]

Hi All,



Pirsig:
"One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of
gravity.  One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this
law is a measure of its degree of evolution.  ...A similar analysis
could be made with other physical laws such as the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it seemed to Phædrus that if one gathered
together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe
and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of
evolution could be inferred.  If life is to be explained on the basis of
physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works
around these laws cannot be ignored.  The reason atoms become chemistry
professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of
chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or
any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom.  They only go along
with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that
does not follow any laws whatsoever."

Steve:
I think the problem that people see in the above is that they take
Pirsig to mean that life literally defies or breaks physical laws
whereas I think he should be read to only mean that life opposes
certain tendencies that we infer from physical laws and the behavior
of nonliving things without actually breaking any laws. Note that the
Hawking description of life agrees the MOQ...


Hawking:
"It is a matter of common experience, that things get more disordered
and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status
of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that
the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe, always
increases with time. However, the Law refers only to the total amount
of disorder. The order in one body can increase, provided that the
amount of disorder in its surroundings increases by a greater amount.
This is what happens in a living being. One can define Life to be an
ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to
disorder, and can reproduce itself."

Steve:
Likewise there is a tendency for things to fall to the ground. Any
nonliving thing will do so, while certain animals actually manage to
fly. Noting this fact, Pirsig says,  "One could almost define life as
the organized disobedience of the law of gravity." The "almost" should
make it extremely clear that Pirsig is not suggesting a technical
definition of life here. But life notably does oppose certain
tendencies while, of course, following physical laws in doing so. It
needs to invent things like wings or airplanes to outwit natural laws
and circumvent such tendencies as the inclination for objects to fall
to the ground. Krimel will read "outwit" and "invent" and be very
annoyed because someone could read these terms and think of an
intelligence guiding evolution. But for those of us who already
understand the unguided nature of evolution, why not be astounded by
some of the clever solutions that evolution has yielded and use such
terms to express our awe?

Best,
Steve



Best,
Steve