Hey Magnus, Magnus said: Extending the social level down to cells (or even a bit further) has at least two benefits. First, you can much better explain why things like anthills, beehives and cells work as they do without having to resort to some fluffy biological level that seems to rule everything from cells to apes. Most people think it's strange to extend the social level as I do, but I just think it's much worse to extend the biological level, because that's the only alternative. You said it yourself above "when fitting in non-human animals, the more being limited to just four seems pernicious." It seems Pirsig left a giant hole between his biological level and his social, and this hole are by default and without much thought filled by the biological level, when it's much more logical to fill it with the social.
Matt: I agree with ants and bees, but I hesitate on cells. I begin to lose hold on what the hell biological is supposed to be, let alone if you extend it even further. Then again, my knowledge of biology isn't that great. To my mind, the only way to effectively do justice to both biological evolution and cultural evolution is to toss this four level idea. Just call the major changes as you see them and sucks to trying to make Pirsig's work. After all, Pirsig came up with them for empirical reasons, though the four is a nice fit, as Plato saw, too, in his divided line. I drew up these five some time ago: Inorganic level - non-replicating persistence Biological level - replicating persistence Social level - non-linguistic semiotic behavior Intellectual level - linguistic semiotic behavior Eudaimonic level - autonomous behavior I was trying to emphasize how the levels build on each other. Rocks just are. Cells replicate. Some cells form what we call "multicellular organisms," and some of these just sit around persisting and replicating (e.g., trees), but others become mobile, and in their mobility as multicellular organisms begin to "communicate". Eventually, one particular strand of these communicative organisms came up with a method of communication that was so intricate that it began giving birth to artifacts that didn't necessarily have anything to do with replicative persistence--we call this "culture." One of these cultures of multicellular organisms, one day, dreamed up a goal of letting every particular organism persist in a manner of their own choosing, so long as that manner didn't threaten the choices of anybody else (which includes the manner in which we have the goal of letting people have choice). We call this "democracy." I used the Greek "eudaimonia," which means roughly "human flourishing," became Sam Norton had taken the word up as a slogan, and I had become quite partial to it. There are three big breaks that I wanted to emphasize--physical evolution (which basically just means the spatiotemporal movement of stuff out from the Big Bang), biological evolution, and cultural evolution. Within biological evolution, we basically include the communicative/social relations of animals, but the fact that we can see how language was just a sophisticated extension of what animals were already doing allows us to emphasize how these are not strict "levels," like Plato's divided line, but a continuum of increasing complexity. I've always thought that Pirsig never emphasized the invention of language as he should of, which is basically the difference between his old social (which like you includes animals, though not cells) and intellectual. Now, however, I've come to think that another distinction should be made, one that better grasps what he, and most others, wanted to refer to and emphasize in the distinction between social and intellectual. I've been reading far too much Walter Ong and Eric Havelock lately, and I've come to think that the invention of _writing_ is what produced Plato, what produced what Pirsig calls the intellectual level, which in the Letter to Paul Turner he says is basically "abstract thinking." Ong and Havelock argue quite convincingly that abstract thinking was just not possible before the invention of writing because of the particular requirements and restrictions of memory and sound--once a word is said out loud, it is gone, and after two or three minutes of talking, it is hard to remember what you said at the beginning of that chain of reasoning. In other words, long chains of abstract reasoning _couldn't_ happen in preliterate societies, and it wouldn't even occur to them to do it because it would seem to them off the cuff to be a waste of time. At any rate, I really do think that fidelity to Pirsig's levels should be tossed for those that want to develop his philosophy further. The very idea of development means exploiting your predecessor's thoughts, keeping the parts that work, calling it "the spirit of his philosophy," and ignoring the parts that don't as mere details, "at the expense of the letter." Matt _________________________________________________________________ Get Free (PRODUCT) RED™ Emoticons, Winks and Display Pics http://joinred.spaces.live.com?ocid=TXT_HMTG_prodredemoticons_052008 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
