[MD] A.I.

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
Intentional? What about "betterness? That's intent. Outside agent? Outside of
what?

[Arlo]
Quality is simply "somethings are better than others". What those things are,
their creation and their destruction, owes nothing to any intent or volition to
Quality. 

[Platt]
So what do creative Dynamic forces do if not create? (Qualigod" is a red
herring.)   

[Arlo]
It is not a red-herring, although I can't understand why you are so afraid to
admit it. Well, I guess I can.

"Creation" occurs by the patterns responding to Quality. Quality does not
create, it is a "creative" force because it is the background in which creation
is made possible.

If DQ "creates", then we are mere automatons. No, WE create. WE create IN
RESPONSE to Dynamic Quality. It is the soil which makes the flower possible.

[Platt]
Nice attempt to avoid the issue.

[Arlo]
Me!? That is too funny. Want me to bring up the initial post, about intellect
emerging from the social level, that this was the "missing piece" Pirsig
formulated, and take a look and see how you now twisted the dialogue into some
inane attempt to promote while denying your Qualigod??? Please.

[Platt]
Is DQ a catalyst of pattern creation or not? 

[Arlo]
I have no problem with the word "catalyst". Yes, I think I may like that a lot.
DQ does not "create", but it is the "catalyst" which allows creation to occur.

Yes, I think I agree with that word enthusiastically, Platt.

[Platt]
You mean three home runs. 

[Arlo]
No, I mean three fails. Three statements that had nothing whatsoever to do with
what I had said. 

[Platt]
Agree no planning, but volition, intent for betterness, absolutely. Glad you
agree DQ is essential for value pattern creation.  

[Arlo]
Sure, the soil is essential for a flower to grow, but soil does not "create"
flowers. Just like DQ does not create "intellectual patterns", but is the soil
from which "intellectual patterns" grow from the seeds of "social patterns".

And I do not think Quality has "intent", that's just anthropomorphizing an
indefinable. Might as well give it a name, and say that the entirety of the
cosmos was orchestrated just to produce "you". 

[Platt] 
While you remain trapped in SOM materialism.

[Arlo]
Whatever. This ridiculous charge you SIMians make is made all the more funny by
the fact that you don't even use "SOM" correctly. "SOM materialism"... lol...
go back to school, Platt.

[Platt]
And find me a scientist who doesn't believe intellect results from the activity
of brain synapses.

[Arlo]
Jeez, nearly every single one I read. Start with Tomasello. Or, hey, start with
Neils Bohr, since that's who Pirsig draws from in LILA.

[Platt]
Unmanipulated? How about "directed," as in " . . . the decisions that directed
the progress of evolution are, in fact,  Dynamic Quality (Lila, 11)

[Arlo]
Its metaphorical rhetoric that is horrible when taken literally. If you believe
this, you turn the cosmos into a giant supermarionette show, where we are all
just puppets driven by the direction of Qualigod.

And, jeez, you think Dynamic Quality makes "decisions"? How? Does it have a
mind? Does it think too?

Look, you want to follow your little Qualigod path, be my guest. 

My entire point, to get back to it from all your distractions, is to point out
that this is what Pirsig said about the emergence of intellect from biology.

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out
of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic
nature... There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. ...
Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived." (LILA)

Your reply to Ham bypassed this entirely an attempted only to replace "mind
magically appearing from the brain" with "mind being poofed into existence onto
the brain by DQ". 

Pirsig did not posit a "DQ" that poofed mind onto brains. Mental patterns, as
he points out clearly, originate out of social patterns. And no, Qualigod
didn't "poof" them into existence there either.