[MD] Dynamic within static.

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Platt, possibly Steve.

18 Dec.you wrote 

(after I had expressed various doubts about the dynamic intervention 
with the static levels, and possibly getting the wrong impression that 
you shared these)  

> Somehow "greater complexity" smacks of a nonexplanation like science's
> magical "emergence." Besides, it omits the role of DQ which, as you
> know, is the central actor in Pirsig's evolutionary morality. 

Really Platt. Don't you see greater complexity with a mammal 
organism than an amoeba? Yes it omits DQ's role (I thought that was 
what you too omitted from various events/change witin the static 
range?) I just wonder what SQ's role is if everything is DQ? 

> The evolutionary advantage of human society was language, or more
> specifically, the invention and use of symbols to represent patterns
> of experience. This advancement freed humans form the animalistic
> prison of the here and now, enabling them to carry experiences from
> the past into the future. Thus, biological death was overcome in the
> passing of knowledge from one generation to the next, allowing faster
> progress towards evolutionary betterness.

Not that fast! IMO the ability to carry experience from the past into the 
future AKA intelligence) began at the biological level as RAMemory 
and the manipulation of this "...if I do this, such will happen" (without 
language, without any notion of future/past or this being abstract) but 
never mind, this requires another essay.

> When did DQ play the pivotal role? Through the first brujo type
> individual who pointed to an edible plant and said, "Baboo." From then
> humanity took off with one DQ-inspired revelation after another,
> building on those that occurred before, eventually becoming the
> institutions we know today. 

The Brujo story is about how the "static" Zuñi society was altered - 
dynamically according to Pirsig - my tentative objection is if every 
increment within the social level is due to a dynamic intervention, how 
did the Q-evolution ever escape the social level  .... or ever escape the  
inorganic level for that matter? Life would merely be ever more 
dynamic inorganic patterns. No? 

I'm not insisting, just want to examine this aspect.

Bo