[MD] The Greeks?

[Krimel]

[Matt]
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)?

[Krimel]
Right, I think that, woke up one morning with a bi-cameral mind, stuff comes
from Jaynes. It's been a while but I don't think his evidence was anything
but suggestive and he was long on what and short on how. I think it makes
perfect sense to say that living in one culture promotes exercising the mind
in a way that is distinctively different that living in another. That could
result in all kinds of differences in the cultural products and narrative
styles that he relies on for evidence. I think Pirsig mangles this a bit in
his own way and Bo just flat out mainlines it with the resulting symptoms of
constipation.

[Matt]
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?e 

[Krimel]
Interesting I tend to see philosophical worldview obeying some kind of
Laffer curve with the intellectual trickle down taking decades to drip
through.

[Matt]
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.  

[Krimel]
I see loosing the telos as a very good thing. I often wish Pirsig had
thought of that. I am with you for the most part here but I really don't
think of either as mechanistic in any kind of Newtonian classical sense.
Talking in terms of ecologies, systems and dynamic interaction may sound
mechanistic to someone like dmb but perhaps you mean something else.

[Matt]
In fact, E. O. Wilson gets double negative points for trying to assimilate
culture to biology (as I simplistically understand it).  
 
[Krimel]
Especially in that sense, I see Wilson as much more like Pirsig than the
other two. He emphasized culture as a biological strategy that grows "out
of" biological systems. But then the idea of levels as discrete and in
competition with each other has always seemed bogus to me. I think one level
grows out of another when the lower level provides enough static quality for
a new level of DQ to operate. In fact in this sense I would say SQ is a much
higher level of betterness or whatever than DQ.

[Matt]
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).

[Krimel]
Perhaps, one could certainly say Pirsig is a better novelist. But any of the
other three has been more prolific, more thorough and taken more seriously
by philosophers. Cubism versus surrealism maybe. But better is better
depending on what kind of painting you are looking for today.

[Matt]
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.

[Krimel]
Right, telos again. Bad mojo. But you are right, taking a "stance,"
preferring a style of art or even Tomasello's "points of view" all harmonize
if whistled together just right. BTW, whenever people type POV here I always
think "Point of View" first. Amazingly, it often kind of works with what
they are saying and takes a while to correct.