Magnus, Arlo, Andy, Ian and Whoever; I think there is an important issue Magnus is missing at least with respect to fractal boundaries. One of the major points Mandelbrot was making is that dimensions themselves are not discrete. "Fractal" is actually a made up word contracted from fractional dimensionality. I think it was Mandelbrot who used an example of this similar to your cube example. He said imagine a point that when you zoom in on it turns out to be the end of a strand of yarn which twists into a circle and then balls up into a sphere. The object under observation is not zero, one two or three dimensional is has a fractional dimensional value.
Also, in your example, in order to shift position, in order to see the square as a cube, you have to be able to pan over to a vantage point where the difference is detectable. Thus in order to perceive things in three dimensions you have to exist in four. But from an ontological standpoint the only sense we have that actually gives us direct experience of three dimensions is touch. Constructing 3D from sight is always a perceptual process as the information is always presented to us on the 2D surface of our retinas. Arlo makes an interesting comparison between fuzzy sets and fractal boundaries which probably doesn't hold up mathematically but is a good analogy. All of this goes to show what I consider to be the futility of Pirsig's ideas about levels. It is all well and good as an outline but the claim that the levels are discrete or that they are somehow not entirely arbitrary strikes me as wrongheaded. Even his selection of level and where he draws their boundaries is questionable. I have not been following this discussion as closely as I might but it seems that this boundary confusion has arisen in the issue of life in machines. Pirsig's inorganic level kind of makes sense but in constructing the second level as "biological" he flubs it. Organic chemistry is carbon chemistry so the molecular structure of biological processes gets relegated to the inorganic level even though it is organic by definition. Perhaps Pirsig sought to skate around this discrepancy by using the term biological but the border between inorganic and organic is much sharper that the fuzzy border between inorganic and biological. If there is a bit of absurdity in even the drawing of boundaries between levels, it gets amplified in the absurd notion that the levels are in conflict with one another. If there is such a conflict the lower level will always "win". The existence of higher levels depends entirely on the static qualities of the lower level. DQ in the inorganic level will wipe out all quality at the biological level and so forth. Of course this takes us into the larger issue that DQ is NOT always good, better or best. Quite often it is disastrous. Perhaps if one really wanted to construct a metaphysics of morality then the "first cut" ought to be between "good" and "bad". That is certainly the way we construct the world automatically ontologically. Nice discussion though. Case tells me he is think of revising one of his pithy sayings to: Pan and zoom in, Pan and zoom out, Refocus. Krimel 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
