[MD] Chance v. Dynamic Quality

[Ham Priday]

Krimel, DMB, Joe and All --



In the thread titled "Question?", Krimel asks DMB:

> Who says the "probability distribution" cannot be a philosophical term?
>
> I am saying that "probability distribution" is a better
> philosophical term. Like James' percepts and pure experience
> it is continuous. It is empirically verifiable AND it is
> mathematically specifiable. What you are trying to extend
> "all the way down" appears to be volition, the exercise of free will.
> At least that's what "preference" implies to me. I cannot think of
> anything in science that would suggest that inorganic matter has
> choice. ... If you mean that preference does not mean "choice"
> at the inorganic level then it cannot imply "choice" at the biological
> level either. If no "choice" is implied at either level, are you saying
> that "preference" is just another word for "probability distribution"?

Would you agree that preference is another word for "probability 
distribution", if probability is affected by preference?  I ask this because 
it should be obvious that "undirected chance" could have been neither the 
cause of the universe nor the process of its creation.  Why is this obvious? 
The time required for the proper probability distribution to occur, for one 
thing.

Scientists estimate the age of the universe at about 14 billion years.  If 
we had a computer that could rearrange the 500 amino acids of a protein 
molecule at the rate of a billion combinations a second, we would stand 
essentially no chance of hitting the correct combination within that time 
span.  Or, consider
the human eye.  In a 1985 article in Byte magazine, John Stevens compared 
the signal processing ability of the cells in the retina with that of the 
most sophisticated computer designed by man, the Cray supercomputer:

"While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear that 
the human retina's real-time performance goes unchallenged.  To simulate 10 
milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the 
retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear 
differential equations 100 times, and would take at least several minutes of 
processing time on a Cray supercomputer.  Keeping in mind that there are 10 
million or more such cells interacting with each other in complex ways, it 
would take a minimum of 100 years of Cray time to simulate what takes place 
in your eye many times every second."

If a supercomputer is the product of intelligent design, how much more 
obviously is the eye a product of intelligent design?  Mathematician Fred 
Hoyle said, "The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this 
way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard 
might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein."

If blind chance does not explain "intelligent design", why dismiss 
"preference"?  Pirsig certainly didn't.  His equivalency postulate 
"Experience = Quality = Reality" effectively makes Value not only subjective 
(i.e, the basis of human experience) but the essence of Reality.  If 
"experience is the cutting edge of reality", is it any wonder that the 
universe is experienced as "ordered" and "goal-oriented" as if by 
"intelligent design"?  Are these qualities not what intelligent human beings 
value in existence?

What I'm suggesting is that it's absurd to think of atoms and molecules 
making "preferential choices" when it is man himself who defines the 
universe.  We've got it backwards when we conceptualize experience as a 
passive response to objective phenomena.  Man's experience is the 
"actualizer" of differentiated existence.  Experience "creates" man's 
reality as a self-sustaining system imbued with those qualities which have 
value to him.  Among those qualities are purpose, symmetry, goodness or 
morality, and intelligent design.  These are the very qualities he looks for 
in nature and its evolution, and that he has has codifed as laws and 
principles of logic, mathematics, physics, genetics, architecture, music and 
the arts.

Perhaps this is what Joe was getting at by coining the word "mentation":

> How can Dq, the undefined, participate in mentation?
> IMO Mentation proposes an order in existence of evolution
> and an order in manifestation of a morality based on evolution
> in which DQ does participate.

In any case, although this is the ontogeny I've been trying to get across 
here for some time, I don't think it contradicts Pirsig's Quality thesis or 
the teleology implicit in his "moving to betterness" principle.  What it 
does challenge is the notion that Quality (Value) operates externally to, 
and independently of, human sensibility.

For what it's worth.

--Ham