[craig] 1) The laws of physics are the same since Newton as they were when the galaxies were being formed (though they might have been different in the fraction of a second after the Big Bang).
[Special Thanks to Dan!] Annotation #97: Within the MOQ, the IDEA that static patterns of value start with the inorganic level is considered a good IDEA. But the MOQ itself doesn't start before sentience. The MOQ, like science, starts with human experience. Remember the early talk in ZMM about Newton's Law of Gravity? Scientific laws without people to write them are a scientific impossibility. (Robert Pirsig) [Krimel] It seem to me that Pirsig, like James, is saying that concepts are derived from perception. Without sentience there are no concepts. But this leave open what I take to be Craig's point. I take "laws of physics" to mean a set of relationships. These relationships may be conceptualized into ideas in any number of ways. In a strict sense "laws of physics" sounds like a set of concepts and it is; just as whatever I say right now is, and what anyone, who responds to this, says; will be. What we do here is conceptualize conceptualization. It is a recursion. That's what puts the "Meta" in the MoQ. I take Craig and possibly Pirsig to be saying, that there are relationships, processes, distinctions that exist independently of any conceptual patterns of them. To renew an example I have used before, the planet Jupiter is currently understood in terms of celestial mechanics and astrophysics and spectral analysis. Ancient peoples described it as a character in their stories about themselves and their place in cosmos. I would suggest that common themes among these stories have some remarkable similarities and they correspond to scientific understanding. First consider the function of such tales. Nearly all cultures have names for the cycles of the moon and the procession of the stars and the wandering of the planets. They celebrate these relationships in tales of mighty deeds or wily animals. More often than not these mythological tales relate directly to the effects of the season that accompany heavenly objects as heralds of seasonal change. For example considered that Dussenbury's Rocky Boy were close relatives of the Lakota whose hopes and dreams died in 1890 during the Moon of Popping Trees. The celestial mythos was not meant to be read metaphorically. It reduced uncertainty about changes in the weather and added meaning to the relationship between the heavens and the Earth. It is significant that chief among the Gods more often than not was The Sun God, from the Egyptian Ra to Apollo to Mythras or the blood thirsty Aztec Huitzilopochtli. It is perhaps more than coincidental that in English Sun and Son are homonyms. Light is illumination and enlightenment and seeing the light, the victory of light over the forces of darkness. In the mythology of science, the sun is the source of energy that fuels all living things. Even more fundamentally, nearly every known civilization and religion of any sophistication begins its mythology with a tale of how Order triumphs over Chaos. In China both the Tao te Ching and the more ancient I Ching are the culmination of centuries of attempts to directly measure chance and chaos. First through the reading of chance in the cracks in heated tortoise shells and later through the casting of yarrow stalks and coins. In Taoist art, emperors often sought after stonesl chance formations of granite that exemplified the dynamic but harmonious interaction of yin and yang in patterns of white and black stone or the swirling of shades in jade. The conceptual correspondence between modern and ancient traditions suggests that both aim toward understanding of certain empirical perceptual relationships that hold regardless of how they are conceived. This is of course a claim similar to the Perennial philosophy without the New Age spin. It also suggests that the relationships described mythologically, continue independent of their conceptual framework. I think the problem for some, lies in the recursion. That sounds like Pirsig's point to me. Talking about these relations even as relations involves conceptualization. The MoQ is a conceptualization about conceptualizing. But at the same time it is important to recognize that concepts even those about other concepts are derived from the perception of a sentient. As perception is derived from sensation and sensation is derived from the transduction of physical energy in to bio-electro-chemical patterns. Scientific laws and mythological tales are both conceptualizations of perception. What separates them is the degree to which they reduce uncertainty about the relations they aim to describe. But conception depends on perception. In the end they can be hard to separate and their mutual dependence is almost entirely one way. 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/
