[Matt] I have to confess that I'd never thought about it. I'd just naturally assumed something like what Krimel said. What's the other option? Like, a massive, catastrophic event where everybody, all of a sudden one day, wakes up and human nature has changed (to steal a trope from Virginia Woolf)?
[Krimel] Right, I think that, woke up one morning with a bi-cameral mind, stuff comes from Jaynes. It's been a while but I don't think his evidence was anything but suggestive and he was long on what and short on how. I think it makes perfect sense to say that living in one culture promotes exercising the mind in a way that is distinctively different that living in another. That could result in all kinds of differences in the cultural products and narrative styles that he relies on for evidence. I think Pirsig mangles this a bit in his own way and Bo just flat out mainlines it with the resulting symptoms of constipation. [Matt] I'm reading a book right now that is beating the tar out of the notion that our worldviews--particularly worldviews named by philosophers--are integrated and coherent wholes. I tend to think that's right. Otherwise, why else would there be so much conflict?e [Krimel] Interesting I tend to see philosophical worldview obeying some kind of Laffer curve with the intellectual trickle down taking decades to drip through. [Matt] I don't disagree with holding up Dawkins and Gould, but I suspect that Pirsig is distinctly at odds with their line of thinking. Roughly, because they are all mechanism and no telos. [Krimel] I see loosing the telos as a very good thing. I often wish Pirsig had thought of that. I am with you for the most part here but I really don't think of either as mechanistic in any kind of Newtonian classical sense. Talking in terms of ecologies, systems and dynamic interaction may sound mechanistic to someone like dmb but perhaps you mean something else. [Matt] In fact, E. O. Wilson gets double negative points for trying to assimilate culture to biology (as I simplistically understand it). [Krimel] Especially in that sense, I see Wilson as much more like Pirsig than the other two. He emphasized culture as a biological strategy that grows "out of" biological systems. But then the idea of levels as discrete and in competition with each other has always seemed bogus to me. I think one level grows out of another when the lower level provides enough static quality for a new level of DQ to operate. In fact in this sense I would say SQ is a much higher level of betterness or whatever than DQ. [Matt] They aren't "better programmers" so much as antithetical ones on the distinct issue of evolution. You and I may like them better, but there's no easy superseding of one understanding for a better one along the same lines, so much as a sharp break (with a confrontation and argument). [Krimel] Perhaps, one could certainly say Pirsig is a better novelist. But any of the other three has been more prolific, more thorough and taken more seriously by philosophers. Cubism versus surrealism maybe. But better is better depending on what kind of painting you are looking for today. [Matt] I think Daniel Dennett has extrapolated the best way for combining Darwinism with philosophy and culture, taking Dawkins' "memes" and giving it technicolor and suggesting--hey, how about this--levels for helping us to understand the relationship between cells and the mind. And while I don't think it's hard to put Pirsig and Dennett together, I think it does entail a little tinkering with Pirsig because of his reading Purpose back into Evolution. [Krimel] Right, telos again. Bad mojo. But you are right, taking a "stance," preferring a style of art or even Tomasello's "points of view" all harmonize if whistled together just right. BTW, whenever people type POV here I always think "Point of View" first. Amazingly, it often kind of works with what they are saying and takes a while to correct. 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/md/archives.html
