[MD] Social Intellectual

[Magnus Berg]

Craig and DMB

On 2010-07-28 04:35, david buchanan wrote:
> Craig said: IMHO Pirsig is speaking metaphorically here&  still holds
> the MoQ view that higher levels emerge from lower.  A description&
> structuring of reality is something that humans do. But experience
> thru interaction is something patterns at all levels do, even before
> there were humans.

Spot on.

> dmb says:
>
> Yes, again, that's what common sense tells you but the MOQ challenges
> that common view. The idea that matter came before ideas is a really
> good idea but it's still just an idea. In fact, "matter" is a
> concept. This idea is so good that it fits right into the static
> levels, which describe reality as a evolutionary process. But this is
> not to be taken as a re-assertion of objectivity or the metaphysics
> of substance, not to be taken too literally.

But Craig avoided just that, the objectivity of all levels, by asserting 
that "experience thru interaction is something patterns at all levels 
do". I.e. inorganic interactions like when the earth spun around the sun 
before humans, or any other life for that matter, was around to see it.

Humans are *not* required to experience something. The word experience, 
as used in the MoQ, can be used to describe two rocks that crashes into 
each other.

> Don't forget how the whole thing starts; with ghost stories, ghosts
> like gravity. I think it's still the first day of the journey in the
> first book when he explains how ridiculous it is to think that
> gravity existed before human beings, especially before a particular
> human named Newton.

Haven't I explained that enough times. In ZMM where he wrote that, he 
didn't have the levels to be able to tell "gravity" apart from "the 
theory of gravity". So, gravity, the inorganic pattern, has existed 
since the big bang, but "the theory of gravity", the intellectual 
pattern, was invented by Newton. Problem solved, no ghosts here.

	Magnus