Good morning
Dan:
First, I didn't say the levels aren't real. But I can see how someone
could take it that way. Like John said, to take the levels as being
something concrete and "out there" is something like confusing the map
with the territory. The MOQ is a metaphysics that descibes reality. It
is not reality itself. A great deal of confusion will result if this
isn't understood. It seems common-sensical to me but it also seems
like wev'e been going over this for years and years.
Of course the MoQ isn't reality itself, it's an intellectual pattern
that describes reality in much the same way a physical formula does.
However, in the same way a physical formula does its best to reflect how
physics will behave given certain preconditions, so will also the MoQ do
its best to reflect how reality will behave.
So, just as it is silly to assume that there *isn't* a sun that is
shining over us every day, that it's somehow just a grand illusion, it's
equally silly to assume that the levels doesn't have any real
correspondence in reality.
The levels are real in the same sense the President of the United
States is real. If a team of doctors examined President Obama from the
top of his head to the bottoms of his feet, they'd find nothing that
told them this particular man was President as opposed to any other
man. The President is a social pattern of value that is applied to
various biological patterns at various times in history.
As I said to DMB yesterday, doctors examine biological patterns, and as
such social patterns are simply over their heads. Just as it's
impossible to determine if an animal is alive by weighing it. Or in
MoQese, it's impossible to value its biological patterns by valuing its
inorganic patterns.
To me, you're just showing (with the president example) that the levels
are just as real as I think they are.
Magnus:
When I hear that patterns of higher levels must be *supported* by lower
levels, I take that as meaning a direct dependency, not a circumstantial.
That a computer's intellectual patterns are supported by a person *using*
the computer, or having built it, is circumstantial, not direct. A direct
dependency is for example that a living cell's biological patterns are
supported by the inorganic molecules inside that cell. If the molecules are
dissolved somehow, physically or chemically, the inorganic patterns are gone
and then the biological patterns goes with it and the cell dies.
Dan:
Well, I guess if you don't want the higher levels supported by the
lower levels, then we're really not talking about the MOQ, are we?
I didn't say that. Of course they must be, that's the starting point.
But since the computer is an example that seems to jump a level or two,
we must fix the problem. And that's what I've done with tweaking the levels.
Magnus
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