[MD] Bo's right! For all the wrong reasons? (Part2)

[skutvik at online.no]

Again Hi Dave T. All.

1 Aug. 

> Continued from Part 1
 
> Continuing to explore what "the problem" might be if we use Pirsig's
> ordering method and ask, "What comes first?" He answers, " Dynamic
> quality,...,creates this world in which we live,"

The MOQ says  that Reality is Quality and that it consists of a dynamic 
and a static component. Unpatterned and patterned Quality as Marsha 
puts it. What came first is no issue, just as uninteresting as what was 
before the BB.  

> But if you ask, "How?,"What it's source?" Etc? The mystics and myths
> of religion and science speak volumes but never arrive at an answer all
> can agree on. There was nothing then there was something is about the
> best we get. But we must agree that this is a pretty discrete and
> radical change....

The MOQ does not really concern itself with "how" (for instance how 
the inorganic level emerged) and would make a fool of its itself if it 
professed to have an answer except the standard one. The inorganic 
level's emergence is no more - or no less - probable than the other 
following levels'  emergence. From intellect's (science's) point of view 
they all equally improbable.       

> ... Nothing then (than?) the expanding and evolving inorganic level. If
> we stay away from all the religious implications of DQ (which of course
> Pirsig does not) so far so good.

The MOQ is no intellectual pattern (scientific theory) If its 4th. level's  
science resides, finds out how the physical universe came to be, the 
MOQ isn't really interested.      
 
> But as we move to the next level, biological, we immediately run into
> a problem. Where does organic chemistry lie? Certainly it can't by
> definition be inorganic. But if the line dividing the biological from
> the inorganic is life there are clearly organic compounds that are not
> biological. Methane for instance is found across the universe but life
> has only been found here. Oh that cross-dresser carbon! Diamond
> follows the inorganic rules, snot does not. Houston we have at least
> one problem. Pirsig claims that the MoQ covers everything and the
> levels are discrete. Where does organic chemistry lie within it? Do we
> side with Magnus and add a level? If so what does it do to the whole
> system? If carbon straddles the line between inorganic and biological
> what about level discreteness? The moral order? Is carbon as snot more
> moral than carbon as a diamond? I don't know but it is at least a real
> problem.

That goes for the inorganic-biological transition as well. In LILA Pirsig 
points to the sheer impossibility of life emerging from matter, 
regardless of millions of years the chances does not improve, but it 
happened, and for goodness sake, adding levels is just an effort to the 
make the MOQ an intellectual theory with solutions for problems 
CREATED BY INTELLECT (SOM)!!!!!! . MOQ's force is that of making 
intellect-as-SOM a sub-set of its own MORAL system.    

> Moving on up the biological level we quickly encounter the problem
> that was identified very early on in these discussions. Social
> qualities, patterns, on the biological level. Pirsig quickly cleared
> this up indicating that he was talking about qualities of human
> societies. 

That's correct, the human organism is DQ's "stepping stone" to the 
social plane, or biology's "carbon" if preferred.  

> So the talk turned to what were those qualities that distinguished
> animal societies from human societies. Language was a good first guess.
> My most recent guess is design. Most usually associated with objects
> ranging from stone tools to skyscrapers the process is also used in
> seeking social changes of all kinds.  It is an abstract mental process.
> Design theorist J Christopher Jones says that at its simplest design is
> "to initiate change in man-made things" be they "capital goods, laws,
> buildings, opinions, public services, processes, etc" in short almost
> everything people are involved with. It requires a basic concept of
> time, past, present, and future. Jones continues, "Designers...are
> forever bound to treat as real that which exists only in the imagined
> future and have to specify (find or create) ways in which the foreseen
> thing can be made to exist. The first human to start fire without
> saving embers was designing. So was the first to attach a stone point
> to a shaft. So was Cinderella's evil stepmother.

No objection, design surely followed, but the MOQ is a moral system 
and the social development was a step out of biology's value to a 
moral that regarded the former as bad. No great revelation, but the 
value aspect must not slip out of sight behind search for this and that 
phenomenon as THE SOCIAL carrier.     

> But whether it was language, design, or a host of other candidates,
> "What is the essential quality necessary to make the jump from animal
> social to human social level?"
 
Agree.

> I think it can be said with confidence that at the biological level it
> has something to do with the evolution of human brain. 

Agree, even more, the big neocortex brain brought the biological 
intelligence to a point when the social development could be reached.   

> Since intelligence, like social qualities, seems to span from deep
> within the biological level all the way up to the intellectual it does
> not seem to be a good choice of terms. Needs to be something that
> separates, transcends, intelligence.


You look for something that characterizes social value? I agree that 
intelligence in itself isn't social, it is biology and remains biology, like 
carbon is inorganic although it "makes up" biology. The characteristic 
is the "common cause" morality that the biological organism must 
subordinate itself to, that's all..      

> Mind would be a reasonable term if it were not so deeply tied to
> Descartes and SOM. The term with all the qualities necessary to jump
> from animal social to human social is INTELLECT. 

But here we part company, DQ needed no more than a complex 
biological pattern as "stepping stone" and it was the human stage 
intelligence that spawned the social level. Period!  To introduce the  
next intellectual level at this stage destroys the MOQ completely.   

> The emergence of the human social level was/is dependant on the
> emergence of the INTELLECT. Pirsig at best got the two upper layers
> bassakwards. If the emergence of the biological level emerged with the
> first faint glimmer of life how is it that, even though Pirsig admits
> that the intellect emerged long before the intellectual level, that the
> emergence of the intellect however dim does not signal the arrival of
> the intellectual level? 

Pirsig may give openings for this nonsense by his own murky mix of 
intelligence and intellect. For instance his strange deliberations about 
the Egyptians in the Paul Turner letter:

    Another subtler confusion exists between the word, "intellect," 
    that can mean thought about anything and the word, 
    "intellectual," where abstract thought itself is of primary 
    importance. Thus, though it may be assumed that the 
    Egyptians who preceded the Greeks had intellect, it can be 
    doubted that theirs was an intellectual culture.  

"having intellect yet not being an intellectual culture." This is as if life 
would appear before the biological level and/or societies before the 
social. And the obfuscators love all this this and points to bee-hives 
and ant-hills as "social" and Stone Age mankind as intellectuals. Pirsig 
simply meant that the Egyptians were as intelligent as anyone else.    

> With this realization I finally made the decision that Bo was and is
> right the MoQ is screwed up. Just not as he thought. It is probably
> screwed up beyond reason or repair. And that is without getting into
> the mystical access to DQ or trying to figure out where dreams may lie.

This is a weird way of seeing things, and please keep me miles away 
from this.absurd conclusion. The MOQ isn't screwed up, the only 
screwed-up part is the said lack of an intelligence/intellect distinction, 
that you exploit Dave. Some other point to fuzzy social/biological 
border, but the MORAL codes between the levels are anything but 
fuzzy and that's MOQ's only business.          

> Aren't you sorry that you wasted your time? I'm not. My intellect
> needed the exercise.

Please, allow the MOQ more time with your (biological)  
INTELLIGENCE, your intellect is over-exercised, it's like a grotesque 
bodybuilder ;-).    

Bodvar