[MD] Redressing the MoQ

[markhsmit]

David,
Thank you very much for the thoughtful post.  I found it educating.  Interestingly, I was set
to bring Gaia into the discussion.  It is not a big leap to imagine the world as a self-sustaining
organism, if only by definition.  It is perhaps a larger leap to ascribe the notion of 
intelligence to planet earth.  I can do this purely on semantic grounds when I try to
describe what intelligence is.  It is surely not the human form of intelligence, but it has
all the characteristics (except perhaps those devoted to group behavior, but who knows).
Ascribing Pirsigian levels to Gaia brings forth the difficulty in drawing definite circles around
these levels since they all seem to overlap.  So, confusion is part and parcel of trying to define
these things, and obviously leads to many opinions.  However, the use of levels is 
important, if only to try to impart a personal understanding or awareness that one has
come to.  I try to look beyond the precise definition of the levels and try to understand
what it is that they are trying to communicate.
Thanks again
Mark

On Feb 16, 2010, at 9:50:45 AM, "David Thomas" <combinedefforts at earthlink.net> wrote:
An even more
troubling is Lovelock¹s Gaia Hypothesis that is looking more and more likely
to be true in some form or other. It suggests weather and atmosphere are
hybrid class of phenomena that are dependant on some of the inorganic laws
and some of biological laws. Kind of bridging the gap making the
discreteness claim harder to defend. Is weather primarily inorganic or
biological? A little of both and what level do you assign it to? Does
weather have ³life²? Not in any of our common understandings of what ³life²
is. (One uncommon one, Christopher Alexander¹s, treats ³life² just as RMP
does quality, but that would just confuse the issue at hand even more.)