[MD] Levels Talk

[Magnus Berg]

Hi Matt

> Matt: I agree with ants and bees, but I hesitate on cells.  I begin to lose
> hold on what the hell biological is supposed to be, let alone if you extend
> it even further.  Then again, my knowledge of biology isn't that great.  To
> my mind, the only way to effectively do justice to both biological evolution
> and cultural evolution is to toss this four level idea.

I think exactly the opposite. My version of the social level emphasizes how 
similar biological and cultural evolutions really are. And when you see those 
similarities, you can also use observations from one to predict events in the 
other. That way, the levels can actually be used for something other than just 
argue about what belong to which level.


> I drew up these five some time ago:
> 
> Inorganic level - non-replicating persistence
 > Biological level - replicating persistence
> Social level - non-linguistic semiotic behavior
> Intellectual level - linguistic semiotic behavior
> Eudaimonic level - autonomous behavior

I'm very sorry but I don't see much value in those. For example, replication are 
found in chemistry as well. And I don't see how they implicitly build on 
eachother. It's very specific to our earthly condition. And what's so special 
about human communication that it should require a new level? There are lots of 
smart animals that are capable of learning parts of human language. The idea of 
a level is that it should give rise to something completely new, not something 
old in a more sophisticated form.

> I was trying to emphasize how the levels build on each other.  Rocks just
> are.  Cells replicate.  Some cells form what we call "multicellular
> organisms," and some of these just sit around persisting and replicating
> (e.g., trees), but others become mobile, and in their mobility as
> multicellular organisms begin to "communicate".  Eventually, one particular
> strand of these communicative organisms came up with a method of
> communication that was so intricate that it began giving birth to artifacts
> that didn't necessarily have anything to do with replicative persistence--we
> call this "culture."  One of these cultures of multicellular organisms, one
> day, dreamed up a goal of letting every particular organism persist in a
> manner of their own choosing, so long as that manner didn't threaten the
> choices of anybody else (which includes the manner in which we have the goal
> of letting people have choice).  We call this "democracy."

Too specific to the human condition for my taste.

> I used the Greek "eudaimonia," which means roughly "human flourishing,"
> became Sam Norton had taken the word up as a slogan, and I had become quite
> partial to it.  There are three big breaks that I wanted to
> emphasize--physical evolution (which basically just means the spatiotemporal
> movement of stuff out from the Big Bang), biological evolution, and cultural
> evolution.  Within biological evolution, we basically include the
> communicative/social relations of animals, but the fact that we can see how
> language was just a sophisticated extension of what animals were already
> doing allows us to emphasize how these are not strict "levels," like Plato's
> divided line, but a continuum of increasing complexity.

But Matt, didn't we say that we would try finding the "correct" division of the 
static levels? It seems you're back to some "usable" version now. And it seems 
it's only usable for the division you set out to use in the first place anyway.

Come on now, try to really read what I'm trying to say here. You didn't even 
comment on my specific arguments in my last post.

Let's start with the quality event. Q creates one subject and one object. A 
quality event "happens" in one level, so the resulting subject and object are of 
the same level. I.e. there are four distinct types of quality events, or "types 
of experiences". This gives us a pretty good definition of what a level is:

A static level is one unique way to experience reality.

So, let's start with the inorganic level, that's the only one most people seem 
to agree on. Experience at the inorganic level is perhaps not what most people 
would call "experience", but the MoQ does, and effects of the forces of nature 
can also be said to be inorganic quality events. This is one unique way to 
experience reality, the inorganic way.

Now, to find another unique way to experience reality, we can't just invent 
something that we think sounds good, like replication. Replication is first of 
all not a new way to experience reality, nor are the patterns that are 
replicating themselves. There is nothing inherent in them being self-replicating 
that somehow makes them able to experience some uniquely new type of value.

However, I don't think anyone can deny the utterly unique experience of taste 
and smell. It's simply a whole new kind of reality that opens up for patterns 
that are able to take part in such quality events. If we examine a bit closer 
what taste and smell are in terms of inorganic patterns, we see that they are 
different molecules that, in the taste/smell event, have a good or bad 3D fit. 
The better two molecules fit together, the better is the biological value 
experience. This is my take on a real level border. It's really *real*, there's 
no way you can deny the reality of the inorganic experience, and at the same 
time, you can't deny the reality of the biological experience. Depending on 
whether you put that "object" on your tongue or in an electron microscope, you 
will experience completely different types of patterns, even though it's the 
exact same *thing*. Every level border has its own version of a wave/particle 
duality, and this is the duality of the inorganic/biological border.

Don't you realize the *realness* of such level borders? It's not an ad-hoc 
border that I just made up one day to solve some thought experiment, it's simply 
the real deal.

Regarding writing as a new level, I fail to see the uniqueness of it. It's 
simply a new way to represent an intellectual pattern. The idea being written is 
still the same, merely in a new form.

	Magnus