[MD] For Peter

[Krimel]

[Ham]
Could you point me to Krimel's statement that includes "spontaneously 
arising configurations of order"?  I'd like to review that before offering 
any further comments.

[Krimel]
I think it was in this rather long and I thought universally ignored post. I
was writing it in an airport and it needs editing and was ironically, given
its length cut short when I inadvertently hit send. In could use some
editing but since it went unnoticed even by Dave, I saw no need to either
edit or extend it. I am reposting it only because you asked.
___________________________________________________________________

dmb,
With regard to the suckiness of philosophy I think irrelevance is perhaps a
better word. But it is really a matter of "philosophers" abandoning the
discipline. Instead they move on to other field. Primarily science but also
political science, economics, and the like. Witness the number of
philosophers on academic faculties. Large universities have small
departments but in smaller colleges philosophy is in the humanities or
religion departments. With the possible exception of ethics classes
philosophy is not generally a required course. 

As to our disagreements on assumptions I don't think there really is any
disagreement on the first point. You say experience is your first assumption
I say thinking is mine. I am happy to adopt your term. There is a possible
problem with my reformulation of "I experience, therefore I am." Because I'm
sure you will object to the "I". By that I mean this particular locus of
experience. You may also be correct to the extent that for me at least this
is not an assumption. As Descartes rightly claims this is a matter than none
can reasonably doubt. Whatever "I" am; whatever "experience" is; it happens
here and now. It is in my view the only toehold I have on certainty.

Unfortunately it is a slender and slippery toehold. It says nothing about
the nature or source of the experience. It leaves open the question idealism
and realism. As Descartes says it could be the product of clever demons or a
dream and as it is all I have to go on and anything I have to say about its
nature and source will of necessity be an assumption.

I think you are mistaken and a bit dogmatic to claim that experience IS
reality. I will concede that experience is my reality but I think any thing
beyond that requires further assumptions that can not be asserted without
some level of doubt. Anything further is an assumption since it can not be
verified except by reference to experience itself.

With respect to my next to assumptions you start making all kinds of
assertions about them that do not necessarily flow from the assumptions
themselves. To say that I think saying "there is an external world" is only
to say that I reject solipsism. My experience is not the all that exists. It
says nothing at all about what does. This applies also to my assumption of
other minds. 

Metaphorically I think this is a bit like the bubble in the head of a beer
image I mentioned to Ron earlier. As a single bubble "I" arise from and
exist as part and in relation to foam around me. I am holon to use a term I
suspect you have sympathy with. A whole made of parts and part of a whole,
in relation to other holons. For me this highlights the self similar fractal
nature of both existence and experience.

I believe that the next few assumptions I listed are in no way at odds with
the MoQ. I think that nature is orderly that it is "patterned." Pirsig's use
of the term "patterns" has been explored a bit in these discussions but I
don't think its importance can be over stated. A pattern is first and
foremost a relationship. It implies a distinction. It implies stability.
When Pirsig says that the first metaphysical cut is between the static and
the dynamic I agree. In order for there to be a pattern or for a holon to
exist there must be a distinction between parts and wholes. Those relations
must have a degree of stasis and the possibility of change. 

Stasis or SQ means persistence in time. It allows predictability. It is a
reduction of uncertainty. Change means a disruption of stasis or change in
relations. Pure change or a purely dynamic state implies increased
uncertainly. Among the things we learned in the last half of the last
century was that within a completely unstable or chaotic system, even I
would say, a system or set of relations as large as the universe; stability
arises spontaneously. I would say that what Pirsig calls DQ is this
spontaneous arising of order. In complexity theory it is called a strange
attractor. I will not insult your much vaunted command of the scientific
literature by describing these except to say that strange attractors display
constrained infinite variability. They are static in the sense that they are
limited to certain parameters. They persist in time in virtue of their
relationship to the surrounding unpatterned chaos or to their relation to
other strange attractors or persistant static patterns.

Evolution as a general principle is about how these static patterns or
strange attractor arise spontaneously and persist across time in
relationship to one another. One might say the evolution is "pulled" toward
these strange attractors or spontaneously arising configurations of order.
But as you are well acquainted with Prigogine I am a bit taken aback that
you have not commented on the significance of this yourself. 

Since the MoQ consistently refers to static patterns and levels of static
patterns I do not see the problem with attempting to understand in a bit
more depth just what they are and where they come from. Neither do I see how
the assumption that nature is patterned or orderly implies SOM or is
inconsistent in the slightest with the MoQ. There is nothing in this that
implies subjects or objects or even makes reference to patterns of "what".
The principles hold whether we are talking about patterns that are extended
in space and time or whether they are patterns of thought extended perhaps
only in time. In an abstract sense they do not even require an observer.
They are merely relationships of figure (SQ) and ground (DQ) or
relationships among distinctions, perhaps. Metaphysically all this is
patterned SQ and unpatterned DQ as distinctions in undefined and other wise
unknowable Quality.

Pirsig call these relationships Values so you might conceive of a
distinction as a relationship between different Values of Quality. I have
never liked these terms even dating back to my first reading of ZMM. I am
forced to continually translate them into more sensible terms; Value in its
sense of quantity or relative dissimilarity and Quality of course as Tao. 

My fifth assumption is that "we can know nature". The problem here is not
about SOM or anything of the kind. The problem is, what does it mean to
"know". How does one pattern "know" another? It is only through this knowing
that the qualitative aspect of Quality arises.

Again we can look to the MoQ for some guidance as it begins with
establishing its hierarchy of levels. The MoQ claims that inorganic patterns
are at the lowest level. I really don't see were the MoQ has much to add or
subtract from the work of physicists and chemists in this regards. I would
argue that again argue that both the MoQ and science level the fundamental
reality status of inorganic patterns up in the air. Science holds them as
tentative statements about relationships. The MoQ merely comments on them as
static qualities. But the MoQ adds that it is the persistence of their
stasis that is critical. Inorganic patterns, whether they are described as
fields or forces or ideas are so fixed in their relations as to be regarded
as lawlike. Even scientists call some of these patterns constants, the speed
of light, the force of gravitational attraction and the like.

For the MoQ it is this constancy, predictability and dependability of these
patterns that gives them their status on the inorganic level. As a result of
these highly stabile relationships emerges the biological level. Biological
patterns while stable are static quality of a different order. They are
relationships that depend entirely on the underlying stability of the
inorganic level. But their stability or persistence in time is a product of
replication. The chief feature of the biological level is that patterns are
encoded configurations of inorganic patterns. That code is stable or static
to the extent that it is replicable from one iteration to the next. But it
has the added feature of being dynamically responsive to changes in the
inorganic relations that give rise to them. As the environment changes, both
the specific composition of the organic pattern and the relation of other
biological patterns, the encoding of biological patterns is plastic enough
to allow variation. But you are well read in the works of Dawkins, Gould and
Wilson so I won't go on with this other than to say that what the MoQ has
not quarrel with them other than to note the difference in terminology and
the underlying openness as to the "fundamental nature" of the patterns in
question.

The critical points at the biological level are that biological patterns are
susceptible to greater variation and greater kinds of variation than are
found at the inorganic level. Change in the orbital patterns of the earth
around the sun, cooling of the earth's core, the impact of space junk,
fluctuation of the energy output of solar radiation can upset biological
patterns. At the inorganic scale change is perceptible on a scale of
billions of years. On the biological level change occurs in millions of
years. 

Unlike inorganic patterns biological patterns participant in their own
persistence. The actively or dynamically engage the patterns in their
environment in ways that inorganic patterns do not. They can exhibit
tropisms where they are attracted towards something, light, heat, chemicals
or towards on another, food or sex. These attractions are values of a
different order than the quantitative values of the inorganic level. They
are much more probabilistic and sensitive to more subtle influences than
exist on the inorganic level. An organism might be attracted to a food
source but repealed by a predator thus the out come of its actions might be
less predictable than same a piece of irons attraction to a magnet or and
apple's attraction to the ground.

The process of evolution to date has been favorable to biological patterns
that can adapt or change to respond to increasing complexity and increasing
subtlety of influence. Human's, which of course is what this is all about,
can respond and adapt conditions everywhere on the planet. What is our most
outstanding capacity in this regard is an elaboration of a strategy the
works for almost all biological patterns. This is the ability to allow past
experience to influence present behavior.\

Krimel