Hi Platt Thank you for the correction. You're right. I should have been more precise. Dan
---------------------------------------- > Date: Thu, 28 May 2009 08:01:49 -0400 > From: [email protected] > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [MD] Doing Some Good > > On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 8:55 PM, Dan Glover 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/ _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_052009 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/
