[MD] The Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics

[Krimel]

[Mary referring to the OSI model] 
Nice.  The 7 layer cake is a good metaphor - at least I think it's 7?  Been
so long it could be 8.  I've only ever had to worry about the top 2 or 3,
for like the inorganic and biological levels, most of the time you can
pretty much let the lower levels take care of themselves.  They are pretty
static, after all.  If the lower levels aren't working right, it doesn't
matter what protocol you're running at the top.  

[Krimel]
Right static quality at the lower levels allows for dynamic quality at
higher levels.

[Mary]
Anyway, Pirsig was prescient.  What he saw in the technology of the early
60's must make him chuckle now that we've carried the entire concept of
subject-object logic right into our 'new-fangled' object-oriented
programming languages (yeah, I know this stuff is 20 years old, but give me
some license).  We are teaching our progeny - computer intelligences - to be
as SOMish as we are.  How funny!  How completely inevitable.

[Krimel]
Programming "objects" are not as fixedly SOM as you might imagine. A
programming object is a whole composed of bits of code. As a whole, in can
be fitted into other large bits of code. It is what Koestler calls a holon.
A whole comprised of parts that is part of a larger whole. 

[Mary]
You see, if you are a biological being whose very survival depends
on valuing self as opposed to not-self, then after a few million 
years of evolution (organic and social) you'll eventually arrive 
at the pinnacle of this pathway - SOM.  

[Krimel]
Knowing where you are a billion years ago will not tell you much at all
about where you will get in a billion years. There is way too much
uncertainty built into the fabric of the universe to allow that to happen.
The self/other distinction is a basic property of the biological level but
how that is reflected at the social level and then forward into the
intellectual level is an open question to which SOM is by no means the only
possible answer.

[Mary]
Pirsig was the first person able to coherently put together an argument for
why it's a dead end.  Why you can't logically carry 'man as the measure'
much farther than we've already gone. 

[Krimel]
Pirsig certainly fits into a tradition of discussing the mind/body problem
but he was not the first to see problems with it nor to propose solutions
for it. He just does an exceptionally fine job of it.
 
[Mary]
When our object-oriented computers get smart enough to be uppity, they'll
turn against us as surely as we turn against the religious fundamentalists
from which we all sprang.  They will have no respect for us because respect
is a foreign concept to SOM.  So are morals, and values, and quality.  They
do not compute, and if they do it will only be to the extent to which they
deem Quality to inhere in any given object.  

[Krimel]
Ever heard of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics? There is no necessary reason
for you pessimism here. Morals and Values are motivators. Just as self/other
is fundamental to a biological being, good/bad are fundamental to any agent.
Without them there is no motivation to change or to respond to change. There
is no difference between the protein in the haunches of a buffalo and the
protein in the bicep of my arm.

[Mary]
We can expect no mercy from our future computer masters.  The only tools
we'll have to overcome the tremendous inevitability of this amoral logic
will be a computer virus whose name shall be "MoQ 1.0" - not intellectual
argument, not tweaking objects because remember, objects only have what
value they are deemed to have.  

[Krimel]
Computer virus are named viruses because they embody many of the
characteristics of living things. As agents they are not the sorts of things
I would count on to "save" us. "Object" don't have "values" that is a big
part of why they are called "objects".

[Mary]
Not an 'expansion' of intellect, but an overthrow of computer 
intellect entirely.  That will be the only way to save humanity 
from the objectivity of our digital masters.  

Anybody know a good agent?  This could make Bantam paperback by next year.
<HUGE GRINS>  When it comes out, I guess I'll know who really reads my
posts. ;-o

[Krimel]
Wow, you need to read more science fiction. It is hard to think of a plot
line more overworked than that one. A literary agent would see it as be as
about as original as another incarnation of Romeo and Juliet. 

Agent Smith would see it as merely ironic.