Hi All,
Pirsig: "One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. ...A similar analysis could be made with other physical laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it seemed to Phædrus that if one gathered together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of evolution could be inferred. If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reason atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever." Steve: I think the problem that people see in the above is that they take Pirsig to mean that life literally defies or breaks physical laws whereas I think he should be read to only mean that life opposes certain tendencies that we infer from physical laws and the behavior of nonliving things without actually breaking any laws. Note that the Hawking description of life agrees the MOQ... Hawking: "It is a matter of common experience, that things get more disordered and chaotic with time. This observation can be elevated to the status of a law, the so-called Second Law of Thermodynamics. This says that the total amount of disorder, or entropy, in the universe, always increases with time. However, the Law refers only to the total amount of disorder. The order in one body can increase, provided that the amount of disorder in its surroundings increases by a greater amount. This is what happens in a living being. One can define Life to be an ordered system that can sustain itself against the tendency to disorder, and can reproduce itself." Steve: Likewise there is a tendency for things to fall to the ground. Any nonliving thing will do so, while certain animals actually manage to fly. Noting this fact, Pirsig says, "One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity." The "almost" should make it extremely clear that Pirsig is not suggesting a technical definition of life here. But life notably does oppose certain tendencies while, of course, following physical laws in doing so. It needs to invent things like wings or airplanes to outwit natural laws and circumvent such tendencies as the inclination for objects to fall to the ground. Krimel will read "outwit" and "invent" and be very annoyed because someone could read these terms and think of an intelligence guiding evolution. But for those of us who already understand the unguided nature of evolution, why not be astounded by some of the clever solutions that evolution has yielded and use such terms to express our awe? Best, Steve Best, Steve 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/
