[MD] For Peter

[Ham Priday]

Ron and Platt [Arlo mentioned]--


Ron:
> Personally speaking, I really do not see how knowing
> how life began is useful in any way. Once we have that
> answer (if an answer is even possible) what use could
> it have? How would it apply to our everyday life?
> would it change anything?

My point, exactly.  Myriads of chemical and biological processes constantly 
protect and sustain the human organism.  Would knowing the details of such 
processes, and when they became operational, make us any wiser or more 
enlightened?  Would it matter to us if consciousness in Homo neanderthalens 
was not as "fully formed" as that of Homo habilis?   For scientists who are 
concerned about such data, including the sociological factors, Anthropology 
can provide some answers.  Mankind has managed to survive and flourish quite 
well without such knowledge, but the question before Philosophy which should 
concern man is not HOW consciousness developed in the species but WHAT IT 
IS.

Platt:
> I agree that a metaphysics ought to explain how life began,
> and Pirsig does so in Chapter 11 of LIla. You may not agree
> with his account, but to me it makes a lot more sense than
> the scientific account of "oops."

Do you really think this is an explanation?

"Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic
forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static
inorganic forces at a superatomic level.  They do this by selecting
superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly
balanced that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another."
        --LILA, Chpt 11, pg 167

To me this describes an accident about to happen, without cause or purpose, 
save for chance "tipping the balance" of random atomic forces.  "Oops?" 
Surely, the making of a chemistry professor from carbon atoms (whose reality 
Pirsig himself denies) calls for a more sophisticated scenario than this!

Arlo, who claims to have a "simple, direct" answer to the mystery of 
consciousness based on the MoQ, articulated it to Christopher in this 
fashion:

> To rephrase this along the lines of the questions that Ham and Platt
> are incapable of addressing:
>
> What changed between early primates without consciousness and
> humans with consciousness is... a level of neuro-biological complexity
> brought about by DNA-driven biological evolution that spawned the
> unintended consequence of allowing shared attention and hence the
> emergence of social activity.
>
> The mechanism by which consciousness evolves is.... the collective
> consciousness (the "mythos"), which evolves over time as new
> generations and new individuals assimilate it and add to it and
> modify it. Successive generations of primates assimilated a greater
> and more complex collective consciousness than their forefathers and
> foremothers, and their activity moved it further still.
>
> And to restate, from here the growing complexity of the social level
> (shared symbolic activity) hit a level of complexity where it was
> able to become self-reflective (the experiential descriptor "blue"
> went from being a modifier in shared activity to a "thing in itself",
> "what is blueness?"). The "self" is one such self-referential loop.

And if you buy into Arlo's theory that "DNA-driven spawning of shared 
attention at the social level" became "self-reflective" individual 
consciousness, I can probably sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Regards, and good luck,
Ham