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 replied: 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. dmb says: Well, first of all, you might want to separate the empirical claims from the historical, evolutionary claims. The sense of better and worse is something that occurs in the moment of experience while the survivors are the "best" products of that primary sense of value. In other words, this primary sense of value works to guide evolution while the best state is the goal toward which we are guided. The notion that this primary empirical reality has both a positive and a negative dimension, includes liking and disliking, is analogous to temperature. The sense that tells us it's cold outside is the same one that tells us it's hot outside. In that sense, hot and cold aren't really opposite so much as comparative and have meaning relative to each other. Also, hot and cold can both be negative or positive depending on the situation and either way we use this sense to improve our situation, to move toward betterness. I think the sense of value is just like that. Or, to say the same thing again, better is a direction while best is a state and the former leads to the latter. I think the meaninglessness of "survival or the survivors", which is what traditional Darwinism reduces to, evaporates in Pirsig's formulation because evolution is guided and directed from within and by the evolving creatures themselves. Instead of being a statement of fact, as in "the survivors are the ones that didn't go extinct", you have a claim that gives the whole process a certain direction. Better isn't something one can define in advance or predict with any kind precise detail but you can more or less tell which way is upstream and which is downstream. I think that in this sense, "betterness" is undefined while "best" is definable state. And in that sense, the empirical claims refer to DQ while the evolutionary claims refer to static quality. > _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Keep your life in sync. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_BR_life_in_synch_062009 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/
