David, Thank you very much for the thoughtful post. I found it educating. Interestingly, I was set to bring Gaia into the discussion. It is not a big leap to imagine the world as a self-sustaining organism, if only by definition. It is perhaps a larger leap to ascribe the notion of intelligence to planet earth. I can do this purely on semantic grounds when I try to describe what intelligence is. It is surely not the human form of intelligence, but it has all the characteristics (except perhaps those devoted to group behavior, but who knows). Ascribing Pirsigian levels to Gaia brings forth the difficulty in drawing definite circles around these levels since they all seem to overlap. So, confusion is part and parcel of trying to define these things, and obviously leads to many opinions. However, the use of levels is important, if only to try to impart a personal understanding or awareness that one has come to. I try to look beyond the precise definition of the levels and try to understand what it is that they are trying to communicate. Thanks again Mark
On Feb 16, 2010, at 9:50:45 AM, "David Thomas" <[email protected]> wrote: An even more troubling is Lovelock¹s Gaia Hypothesis that is looking more and more likely to be true in some form or other. It suggests weather and atmosphere are hybrid class of phenomena that are dependant on some of the inorganic laws and some of biological laws. Kind of bridging the gap making the discreteness claim harder to defend. Is weather primarily inorganic or biological? A little of both and what level do you assign it to? Does weather have ³life²? Not in any of our common understandings of what ³life² is. (One uncommon one, Christopher Alexander¹s, treats ³life² just as RMP does quality, but that would just confuse the issue at hand even more.) 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/
