[MD] Reductionism

[Matt Kundert]

DMB said:
Better and worse are just two sides of the same coin. It's DQ that gets you off the hot stove. One could say it was worse on the stove or one could say it was better off the stove. Either way, it means the same thing. Likewise, survival of the best and extinction of the worst both operate on exactly the same principle.

Matt:
While it is certainly true that better and worse are two sides of the same coin, I find it difficult to think one is using a single, unified sense of the term denoted by "DQ" if one wants to say both 1) "DQ is reality and therefore both betterness and worseness" and 2) "DQ is the best."  To say that all Pirsig was saying about evolution was that the best survive and the worst die, it seems to me, is to fall into the same meaninglessness Pirsig accused Dawinianian tautologists who say survivors survive.

The only sense in which combining 1 and 2 would seem to make interesting philosophical sense (such that we're not just making tautologies, which is only interesting in the sense that Darwinians are _specifically_ suggesting the tautology to _specifically_ kill off the notion that there is anything cosmologically interesting about evolution), I would think, is if they were construed in a Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" sense ("DQ is best, which is to say, reality (DQ) is at the best possible state at any given moment, and could not be better, until, of course, it is better"), which is not how anybody I'm aware of has ever interpreted Pirsig.

Matt

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