[MD] Concentric circles

[david buchanan]

In the "Quantum computing" thread, Case said:
The metaphor of concentric circles to encapsulate the "levels" implies that 
the outer circles include everything in the inner circles. The concentric 
circles are like Venn diagrams in set theory. In the instance the MoQ you 
would have to have the intellectual level at the center and the inorganic 
level on the outside for the metaphor to work.

dmb says:
I don't know about Venn diagrams, but I think there is a good reason why 
we'd put the inorganic at the center or at the bottom of a hierarchy like 
this. It expresses the evolutionary relationship between the levels as one 
of dependence. If we took out the biological level, for example, the 
inorganic would remain intact, but the social and intellectual levels would 
be destroyed. They necessarily exist on top of and in addition to that level 
and so they go out the window too. (Think about global warming from that 
perspective!)

This image is not supposed to imply that everything below a level is 
"encapsulated" by it. In fact we can see that atoms and other inorganic 
patterns are far more abundant than the patterns of life. So we get smaller 
and smaller sets of structures at the same time that we get greater and 
greater degrees of complexity. Think of the way physicists are a subset of 
language users, for example.

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