[MD] LC Comments

[Magnus Berg]

Good morning

> Dan:
> First, I didn't say the levels aren't real. But I can see how someone
> could take it that way. Like John said, to take the levels as being
> something concrete and "out there" is something like confusing the map
> with the territory. The MOQ is a metaphysics that descibes reality. It
> is not reality itself. A great deal of confusion will result if this
> isn't understood. It seems common-sensical to me but it also seems
> like wev'e been going over this for years and years.

Of course the MoQ isn't reality itself, it's an intellectual pattern 
that describes reality in much the same way a physical formula does.

However, in the same way a physical formula does its best to reflect how 
physics will behave given certain preconditions, so will also the MoQ do 
its best to reflect how reality will behave.

So, just as it is silly to assume that there *isn't* a sun that is 
shining over us every day, that it's somehow just a grand illusion, it's 
equally silly to assume that the levels doesn't have any real 
correspondence in reality.

> The levels are real in the same sense the President of the United
> States is real. If a team of doctors examined President Obama from the
> top of his head to the bottoms of his feet, they'd find nothing that
> told them this particular man was President as opposed to any other
> man. The President is a social pattern of value that is applied to
> various biological patterns at various times in history.

As I said to DMB yesterday, doctors examine biological patterns, and as 
such social patterns are simply over their heads. Just as it's 
impossible to determine if an animal is alive by weighing it. Or in 
MoQese, it's impossible to value its biological patterns by valuing its 
inorganic patterns.

To me, you're just showing (with the president example) that the levels 
are just as real as I think they are.

>> Magnus:
>> When I hear that patterns of higher levels must be *supported* by lower
>> levels, I take that as meaning a direct dependency, not a circumstantial.
>> That a computer's intellectual patterns are supported by a person *using*
>> the computer, or having built it, is circumstantial, not direct. A direct
>> dependency is for example that a living cell's biological patterns are
>> supported by the inorganic molecules inside that cell. If the molecules are
>> dissolved somehow, physically or chemically, the inorganic patterns are gone
>> and then the biological patterns goes with it and the cell dies.
>
> Dan:
> Well, I guess if you don't want the higher levels supported by the
> lower levels, then we're really not talking about the MOQ, are we?

I didn't say that. Of course they must be, that's the starting point. 
But since the computer is an example that seems to jump a level or two, 
we must fix the problem. And that's what I've done with tweaking the levels.

	Magnus