Magnus said: ...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. [Krimel] I think the big problem may just be in the name of the social level. Societies or banding together in groups to enhance survival is a biological strategy for reproductive success. What Pirsig is really talking about at this level is more like 'culture' which is uniquely human and the term better conveys the idea he is aiming at. I suspect, though, that after spending about a fourth of the ink in Lila trashing anthropology he just couldn't bring himself to use that term. 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/
