[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> Social behavior and collective action is a biological strategy. It arises
> from and serves biological success.
> 
[Dave]
While what you say is true I think that RMP is right that we need,
particularly at the metaphysical level, to make slices that are of the
greatest value to people's understanding of reality. Slicing social at
humans perpetuates the Christian myth that humans are divorced from animals.
But limiting the slice to mammals, for purely pragmatic reasons, allows us
to compare and contrast our social behavior to our closest evolutionary
relatives. It also allows the emergence of the intellect to be moved back in
time which I think is also valuable.

[Krimel]
I think the problem is that you see "repairing" the MoQ as a matter of
fixing levels. I think the answer is more fundamental. The levels are just a
test drive of the MoQ. They are a way of deriving meaning in certain
contexts in a certain way. They are "rules of thumb" or heuristics. They are
not laws or metaphysical primitives. Moving the boundary lines around is
just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

It is find to talk about levels but I think that discussion is only helpful
to the extent that it applies to something significant in some particular
instance. Some other set of levels might apply in some other set of
circumstances. As I have said before we construct levels on the fly to
understand what is happening in the here and now.

Good as Pirsig's picture in a gallery image is, maybe it needs a bit of
tweaking too. It isn't just a matter of which pictures in the gallery strike
our fancy. It is also a matter of where we chose to stand in the gallery,
how near or how far from this painting or that, whether we look at the
pictures in portrait or landscape mode or upside down. Point of View (POV)
is every bit as important as Pattern of Value (POV).