[MD] Concentric circles

[Case]

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!)

[Case]
Platt suggested concentric circles as a way of looking at the 'levels' as
opposed to my suggestion of branches. I was commenting on problems raised by
this view. I don't think it works regardless of whether inorganic or
intellect is in the bull's-eye.

[dmb]
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.

[Case]
It is the evolutionary, biological, probabilistic view that leads me to the
whole branches thing. A universal form arising in nature at all 'levels' in
multiple dimensions, it conveys growth, interdependence and the interplay of
static and dynamic quality. An analysis of branching as a dissipative
structure, self similar across scale is in my view the essence of the MoQ.