[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

> > [Krimel]
> > I think the "level" is the collection of all the code
> > regardless of whether or not it even works all that really matter for
> > it to belong to the "level" is that it can be accessed.
> > 
> [Mary Replies] 
> You are in good company then.  This is what most people think.
> 
> [Krimel]
> I would like to think so and I may have missed something, I certainly hope
> so, but I don't recall anyone here saying that or even commenting one way or
> another on it the several times I have.

I have to confess that I'd never thought about it.  I'd just 
naturally assumed something like what Krimel said.  What's 
the other option?  Like, a massive, catastrophic event where 
everybody, all of a sudden one day, wakes up and human 
nature has changed (to steal a trope from Virginia Woolf)?

I'm reading a book right now that is beating the tar out of 
the notion that our worldviews--particularly worldviews 
named by philosophers--are integrated and coherent wholes.  
I tend to think that's right.  Otherwise, why else would there 
be so much conflict?

> [Krimel]
> Originally I liked what Pirsig said about evolution for example but closer
> reading showed it to be really flawed. Better programmers in that area
> should have been well known to Pirsig and include Dawkin, Gould and Wilson
> to mention a few. But Dawkins especially when it comes to extending
> evolutionary thinking outside of biology.

I don't disagree with holding up Dawkins and Gould, but I 
suspect that Pirsig is distinctly at odds with their line of 
thinking.  Roughly, because they are all mechanism and no 
telos.  (I wrote a horrible paper on this when I was much 
younger, and it gets a lot wrong, but I think it was right in 
setting Pirsig opposed to Dawkins.  It's the moq.org essay 
about the Yellow Brick Road.)  In fact, E. O. Wilson gets double 
negative points for trying to assimilate culture to biology (as I 
simplistically understand it).  They aren't "better programmers" 
so much as antithetical ones on the distinct issue of evolution.  
You and I may like them better, but there's no easy superseding 
of one understanding for a better one along the same lines, so 
much as a sharp break (with a confrontation and argument).

I think Daniel Dennett has extrapolated the best way for 
combining Darwinism with philosophy and culture, taking Dawkins' 
"memes" and giving it technicolor and suggesting--hey, how 
about this--levels for helping us to understand the relationship 
between cells and the mind.  And while I don't think it's hard to 
put Pirsig and Dennett together, I think it does entail a little 
tinkering with Pirsig because of his reading Purpose back into Evolution.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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