[MD] The Greeks?

[skutvik at online.no]

John the ...

14 June:

Bo to Ron,
> > The 2nd. is the Biological level and its sworn enemy is the
> > inorganic (Physical) level. I don't know how to set all this
> > nonsense right.

John: 
> Nor do I Bo, but I'll try.  As enemy, do you think a flower  shuns the
> sun?  The roots shun the minerals? The first level is not the sworn
> enemy of the second.  The inorganic composes the playthings of the
> organic.  The toys, not the enemy. Let's see if it extends further. 

An important and revealing tenet of the MOQ is the inter-level struggle, 
the upper level "regarding" the lower level (it's value) as evil and the 
lower regarding the upper as destruction of values-as-such.

    It's out of this struggle between conflicting static patterns that 
    the concepts of good and evil arise. Thus, the evil of disease 
    which the doctor is absolutely morally committed to stop is not 
    an evil at all within the germ's lower static pattern of morality. 
    The germ is making a moral effort to stave off its own 
    destruction by lower-level inorganic forces of evil. (LILA)  

> Certainly social levels use and toy with biological beings for their
> own patterned purposes. 

Right, social value regards biology as "at its disposal". The Islamists 
regard their biolocal lives as something to be sacrificed for the THE 
CAUSE. It's not necessarily toying with other being's lives (that too 
definitely) but THEIR social layer that overrides THEIR biological layer 
... to protect the Muslim World from Western (intellectual) influence .    

> And objectivism reifies and toys with social patterns in its way as
> Marx shows most clearly. 

Right again, in the West where intellect rules it overrides our social 
layer ..... usually, but if the bell tolls and intellect can't handle the 
situation our social latch kicks in. The "reify" bit I'm not sure what 
means.  

> I think from this we can conclude that it's far more appropriate and
> accurate then to say on every level of being, the higher toys with and
> is creative of the lower.  Thus the top-down approach is superior to
> the idea that inorganic clumps randomly form life, that life just
> happens to create social patterns and out of social patterns,
> objective ideas magically appear out of a bunch of random words thrown
> around by social patterns.

You are barking up some wrong tree in some faraway forest. The 
MOQ does not oppose anything of this, it simply postulates a DQ/SQ 
reality where DQ constantly tries to overcome SQ. It neither supports 
chance (Darwinism) nor creationism regarding the 2nd. level out of the 
1st. or any other level's emergence. Only that some ambiguous 
pattern of the parent level became the building block of the offspring. 
Regrettably Pirsig only went to some detail about carbon as life's 
"brick".    

> The rest of your dialogue with Ron, I will leave in his capable hands.

Ron capable? 

Bodvar