[MD] For Peter

[Platt Holden]

> 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!

Maybe if you read the entire chapter you will have a different take. But, 
like I said, you may not agree with his account. Obviously you don't. Do 
you think Krimel's  "spontaneously arising configurations of order" is more 
"sophisticated?" 
 
> 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.

Any relation of Arlo's theory and the MOQ is solely a figment of his 
imagination. He does have a tendency to float lead balloons as 
explanations. 
Best regards,
Platt