On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Dan Glover <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > > Andre reminds us of what Robert Pirsig says in the On The Road dvd (and I > paraphrase): Doing what's right is static quality. Doing what's Good is > Dynamic Quality. Static quality is continually evolving towards the freedom > of Dynamic Quality, or in other words, towards extinction. I think that > answers Platt's question quite well... why survive? Nothing survives. It is > a short-sighted viewpoint of reality to believe otherwise. The old survives > just long enough to give rise to the new and then fades away. > Hey Dan, I would love to take credit for asking the question why survive? But it would neither be right nor good to do so. The question is Pirsig's from Chapter 11 of Lila: "But why do the fittest survive? Why does any life survive? It's illogical. It's self-contradictory that life should survive. If life is strictly a result of the physical and chemical forces of nature then why is life opposed to these same forces in its struggle to survive? Either life is with physical nature or it's against it. If it's with nature there's nothing to survive. If it's against physical nature then there must be something apart from the physical and chemical forces of nature that is motivating it to be against physical nature. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems "run down" like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only "runs up," converting low-energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep "running up" faster and faster. "Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It's a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can't turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun's heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That's a scientific fact. "The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn't the sun's energy. We just saw what the sun's energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?" Best, Platt 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/
