Hi Jorge
My name is Magnus and I'm mostly in lurk mode nowadays. However, I've thought a
lot about the levels, especially in the beginning of the Lila Squad and at the
time I wrote an essay about them, http://www.moq.org/forum/magnus/magnus.html
I would indeed contend that the borders between the levels are quite discrete
and not fuzzy at all. As Steven pointed out, "things" can (and often are) made
up of many different types of patterns.
Think of the virus Steven mentioned, it can participate in biological quality
events, but it can also participate in inorganic quality events, such as
reflect
light and be pulled down by the earth's gravity. However, when the virus dies,
it can't participate in biological events anymore, but its inorganic
"qualities"
remains exactly the same.
No fuzzy borders, just plain and simple.
Magnus
Goldfarb wrote:
> Thanks very much Steve for your answer to my
> question --Is there anyone that
> contends that "the lines between levels" are not fuzzy
> boundaries? -- I'd like to comment on the paragraphs
> from Pirsig that you quote. I assume that the matter
> in question has been exhaustively debated here and I
> apologize if I am repeating arguments which others may
> have already presented.
>
> Fuzzy boundaries between classes or categories are
> usually considered more cumbersome to deal with, than
> discrete, well defined, clear-cut boundaries. Actually
> the opposite seems to hold, fuzzy boundaries can make
> our life much easier when confronted with the
> subtleties of classification. I think the case of "the
> four levels of static patterns of quality" is a case
> in point, as I expect to show in the following.
>
> I'd like to center my arguments around three
> key-words of that Pirsig quote: 'exhaustive',
> 'discrete' and 'controlling'. As to the first one:
> exhaustive:
>
> "In this plain of understanding static patterns of
> value are divided into four systems: inorganic
> patterns, biological patterns, social
> patterns and intellectual patterns. They are
> exhaustive. That's all there are."
>
> That's quite straightforward. All classifications
> aspire to be exhaustive. If we take a set containing
> as members things we know, or we presume to know, we
> can divide them in any number of sub-sets, so that
> 'all there are' are members of one sub-set or another.
> As Pirsig well says: "This classification of
> patterns is not very original". Exhaustiveness , or
> rather, the presumption of it, is an implicit feature
> of classifying.
>
> The problems in classifications usually come to
> the surface when something new appears, some thing
> that was not contained in the original universal set.
> It is the problem posed for instance by Artificial
> Life to a classification of things into "alive" and
> "not alive". Pirsig must have been well aware of the
> trap posed by unexpected new entities, because he
> deals extensively with the platypus issue. The problem
> was not in the poor bird that choose not to behave
> according to the scientist's intentions but in the
> classification itself.
>
> The precedent makes difficult to understand his
> insistence on the second key-word 'discrete', as when
> he writes:
> " This classification of patterns is not very
> original, but the
> Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them
> that is unusual. It says
> they are not continuous. They are discrete. They
> have very little to do with one another. "
>
> This, to me at least, is puzzling. By assuming that
> the said levels are not continuous, one implies that
> any pattern whichever has to be " this <or> that";
> either biological <or> inorganic, discarding a priori
> the possibility that something may crop up which is
> 'in between' both levels. (The reason for stressing
> the <or> : an innocent looking little word that can
> play havoc with the most sophisticated intellectual
> systems)
>
> Puzzling, because it means falling back into the
> Aristotelian notion of a definition in which something
> is defined as a member of a class 'if and only if ' it
> shares with other members a permanent set of
> properties that can be listed and checked. Pirsig
> deals extensively in Z&AMM on the traps presented by
> the Aristotelian view then, why to reintroduce old
> Aristo through the back door?
>
> A possible answer may lie in this other quote
> from Lila:
>
> "The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle
> pieces that we would like to think all fit together
> somehow, but that in fact never do. There are always
> some pieces like platypi that don't fit and we can
> either ignore these pieces or we can give them silly
> explanations or we can take the whole puzzle apart and
> try other ways of assembling it that will include more
> of them. When one takes the whole ill-shaped,
> misfitting structure of a subject-object explained
> universe apart and puts it back together in a
> value-centered metaphysics, all kinds of orphaned
> puzzle pieces fit beautifully that never fit before."
>
> Is it possible that Pirsig got carried away by
> his enthusiasm and substituted 'fit beautifully' with
> 'fit perfectly'? Beauty and perfection are not quite
> the same. In a perfect system everything fits in its
> proper place; but we humans have long learnt that
> better to leave perfection to the gods and deal
> instead with imperfect intellectual systems that
> better suit our limitations as sentient beings.
>
> All the more puzzling to me because I don't
> quite see why this notion of discrete levels is really
> needed. It constrains the MOQ unnecessarily(in my very
> humble opinion.
>
> Pirsig goes on saying:
> " Although each higher level is built on a
> lower one it
> is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the
> contrary. The higher
> level can often be seen to be in opposition to the
> lower level, dominating
> it, controlling it where possible for its own
> purposes"
>
> In a hierarchical structure a higher level might very
> well be "in opposition to a lower one, dominating and
> controlling it" without the need for clear-cut,
> discrete lines of separation between levels. Think of
> an industrial organization where the managerial level
> may be in opposition to the manual workers level,
> dominating it and controlling it; the fact that in the
> organization we may find a number of persons that are
> not "this <or>that" does not hinder the managers at
> all in pursuing their plans; no one thinks of the
> secretaries of the bosses, the tea-ladies or the
> accountants, as acting against the managerial level
> aims. The fact that their position is not clearly
> defined in Aristotelian terms might make them feel
> uncomfortable whenever there is a strike, but that's
> about all of it.
>
> What if someone finds patterns that share some
> properties with the members of one level and other
> properties with the members of another level? Some
> pattern that is inorganic in some features but
> biological in others? Or, more generally, what if the
> separations between the four levels were fuzzy
> boundaries? Would that be threatening to the MOQ? I'm
> posing this as questions because, given my ignorance
> of MOQ, I don't feel myself qualified to answer them.
>
>
>
>
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