DMB said:
Better and worse are just two sides of the same coin. It's DQ that gets you off
the hot stove. One could say it was worse on the stove or one could say it was
better off the stove. Either way, it means the same thing. Likewise, survival
of the best and extinction of the worst both operate on exactly the same
principle.
Matt:
While it is certainly true that better and worse are two sides of the same
coin, I find it difficult to think one is using a single, unified sense of the
term denoted by "DQ" if one wants to say both 1) "DQ is reality and therefore
both betterness and worseness" and 2) "DQ is the best." To say that all Pirsig
was saying about evolution was that the best survive and the worst die, it
seems to me, is to fall into the same meaninglessness Pirsig accused
Dawinianian tautologists who say survivors survive.
The only sense in which combining 1 and 2 would seem to make interesting
philosophical sense (such that we're not just making tautologies, which is only
interesting in the sense that Darwinians are _specifically_ suggesting the
tautology to _specifically_ kill off the notion that there is anything
cosmologically interesting about evolution), I would think, is if they were
construed in a Leibnizian "best of all possible worlds" sense ("DQ is best,
which is to say, reality (DQ) is at the best possible state at any given
moment, and could not be better, until, of course, it is better"), which is not
how anybody I'm aware of has ever interpreted Pirsig.
Matt
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