[MD] The MOQ's First Principle

[ian glendinning]

Arlo, I still see it a little different in 1 & 2 from 3 & 4,

Yes, there are shades of grey, about what is physical and biological
(living, I prefer). But the difference between amoeba and dolphin is
not doubts about their physicality or living-ness, it's about their
developed-ness towards intelligent processing capablities that support
socio-cultural-intellect.

Morally a dolphin is equal to an amoeba, in terms of being physical and alive.
Morally a dolphin is superior to an amoeba in social and intellectual terms.
(Though, yes I know Pirsig reserved the latter two terms for humans,
unnecessarily in my view.)

ie i simply make a subjective statement, that we expend a lot more
energy debating the social / intellectual morality of things than we
do debating whether things are basically physical or biologically
alive. (But I'm not one for hard and fast definitions anwhere, as you
know.)

Ian

On 12/5/06, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Ian]
> I actually believe we have a whole series of "onion-skins" making up the
> whole socio-cultural-intellectual levels.
>
> [Arlo]
> I agree, but also think we have a whole series of onion-skins making up the
> inorganic and biological too. I mean the biological level jumps from an
> amoeba to a dolphin. Inorganic encompasses quarks to quartz.
>
> And, I think, if we consider the emergentist nature of the MOQ, where
> collective activity of individuals give rise to the emergence of higher
> level patterns, this also occurs in gradations within the levels. Muscles
> and organs arise from the collective activity of individual cells. Human
> bodies arise from the collective activity of muscles and organs. Etc. So
> although we see evolutionary leaps creating four broad levels, within level
> evolution occurs as well. Or, perhaps better stated, evolution is a
> continuum eventually reaching a point of complexity on one level from which
> an entirely new level is able to emerge (social patterns could not emerge
> from biological patterns until those biological patterns reached a certain
> point of complexity).
>
> So while the four MOQ levels provide broad classification categories, we
> should not surmise that everything within any particular level is
> evolutionarily (or morally) equal.
>
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