[Bruce] In my reference to chaos, it is not concerning a branch of science, but a simple concept of organization breaking down into a disorganized state. www.dictionary.com: 1. a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.
[Krimel] Is this an admission of your own misunderstanding or a defense of Pirsig's? Talking about Chaos, in the context that Pirsig does, is a bit like someone talking about astronomy and insisting that Mars refers to the god of war. [Bruce] It appears to me that there are two systems at work and perhaps that is Dynamic Quality creating Dynamic Chaos or destruction. However, there is "something" that causes things to move from a state of disorder to order that does not alighn with the 2nd law of thermodynmics and that to me is Quality. I see it that anything that is organized into patterns did that out of Dynamic Quality and is Quality itself. If it is not organized it is in a state of chaos. However, what is it that moves things from a state of organization back to chaos? Is that Quality? If so, then it appears that Quality is both Dynamic Quality and Dynamic Chaos... [Krimel] If you take the time to look into this you will find that the study of chaos is linked to dynamic systems. Your ideas on entropy are equally confused. Ordered states are merely much less likely than disordered states. In all transformations of energy something is lost to heat. This is the ultimate winding down of the universe. Order is a special case of just plain old random interactions. If someone and threw 1000 heads in a row, we would be tempted to look for something that is "causing" the coin to come up heads. We would appear to have discovered order in the randomness of tossing coins. But this would not necessarily be the case. This "order" is just a subset of all of the possible outcomes of 1000 coin tosses. It is no more or less probable than any of the other possible outcomes. [Bruce] Perhaps I put to much emphasis on the 2nd law of thermodynmics, but Pirsig does reference this in Lila. Things left alone will break down from an organized state to a state of disorganization. (need to find it) [Krimel] Pirsig's discussion of the second law is as confused as yours. He claims that somehow life causes entropy to run backwards and the levels are in conflict with each other. In fact he explicitly says that sunlight can not be the cause of life and the increase in order that we see in living systems. This is blatantly false. Nothing about evolution or anything else in nature violates the second law. The earth is bathed in solar radiation and the constant inflow of energy produces increases in order, locally. 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/
