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. -------------------------------------------------------- [Krimel inserts:] First Dave, you have it backwards. DQ is not what gets you off the stove. That would be SQ. Our response to pain; damage to our tissue; is reflexive. Our responce is similar in many respects to the response of any vertebrate. Sitting on a stove produces an instant dynamic change in the state of the organism. If you throw a frog in boiling water it will jump out. I would claim that the very ubiquity of this pattern of response makes it by definition, Static. It is a pattern that is ubiquitous because is has a positive influence the odds of survival. I think "better" and "worse" can best be understood as statements of probability. I think that is how they are understood in evolutionary circles anyway. Such a sense of odds can only be obtained by reference to past events. It is a loop, a recursion; the past's impact on the present. Even simple organisms can make relatively sophisticated responses that improve their odds. Biology is nothing if not recursive. Evolution is the tangible outcome of those recursions. That sense of Value, that assessment of the odds may be made unconsciously but it cannot be confined to some imagined "instant" untainted by the past or future, as Dave describes "pure experience." ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. [Krimel] The sense of "better or worse" can only arise from a comparison of the present with similar experiences from the past. It cannot arise solely from "the moment of experience". [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Along any dynamic continuum we make estimates of probability. We have an inner sense of what's "better or worse". It's a synthesis of multimodal sense data, recollections and guesses as to what's coming next. That sense isn't "pure" anything but guesswork. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I think where Pirsig and evolutionists converge is that "survivors" are always the winners of the last round of iteration. I think Pirsig just adopts a more naively hopeful stance than I think shooting craps warrants. But yeah, it actually does all reduce to probability. Or as I prefer to think of it, it all emerges from the rolling of the dice. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] In fact we are always basing our wagers on what used to work. That was Hume's bitch against causality. Our models of the future are constructed of remembered models of the past. Usually this works great. For most of history and all of prehistory there hasn't been much difference between them. The past has, for the most part, always been a good guide to the future. So much so that one might be lulled into a sense of perpetual "betterness". But we can no longer assume that the tools of the past will work as a model for the future. In fact it's a safe bet they won't. I think a retreat into reflex behavior works really well for a hot stove. But what does it tell you about watching too much TV or eating too many carbohydrates or juggling balls of plutonium? [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I think if you look at it all probabilistically, you don't need many fancy terms or Dave's patented "Aw Gi Decoder Ring;" everything makes sense in exactly the way you always make sense of things; it's a "best guess." 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/
