[Steve] Randomness is a useful concept for making decisions but a poor choice for a metaphysical description. If we just take randomness as an epistemological notion, then saying that something is random is a way of saying that you don't know what will happen, but you do know the relative frequency of its occurence. As a teacher of statistics, I know that there is a lot of mileage to get from this concept of randomness and also that nothing is lost if we just stick to the epistemological view of randomness as a term that applies to specific perspectives and what can be known from a given perspective rather than as a metaphysical notion describing what sorts of things possess the property that they cannot ever be known even from a perspectiveless God's-Eye-View.
[Krimel] As someone well versed in statistic you should know better than this. In the random world of coin tossing it is entirely possible to toss 1 trillion heads in a row. But if you were on the 500 billionth toss the outcome of the next toss might seem to be certain or appear have some cause. I have argued repeatedly that the MoQ is or at least should be exactly what Pirsig said it might be like: a Metaphysics of Randomness. DQ is chance (randomish patterns of head or tails. SQ is statistical anomalies like 1 trillion heads. Both result from random outcomes. [Steve] It is better to drop such metaphysical claims about the intrinsic nature of preferences (free choice?, random?, deterministic?...) and simply say that we aren't in an epistemological context to know the whole story of the evolution of the entire universe to be able to describe the origin of our particular patterns of preferences with great specificity, but the MOQ gives us a useful "big picture" to describe the evolution of value patterns on a broad scale. [Krimel] I say it is better to embrace randomness and our responses to it, as integral to epistemology and metaphysics. Evolution is entirely about how static patterns emerge and persist in a random universe. Until the MoQ wises up on this score, the "big picture" it offers will remain a shadow of what might have been if Pirsig hadn't chicken out on his Metaphysics of Randomness. 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/
