Hi Mark, Sent this yesterday. See it didn't make it. Trying again...
Hi Mary, In my post to Dan, I was trying to guess where Dan was coming from. As such, my questions were leading. I loved your post below and will discuss it. [Mary] Thank you! I think I took a few shortcuts to meaning and it's bothering me. You have given me the opportunity to edit myself - groping toward clarity a bit. > [Mark speaking to Dan] Evolution dictates that what is > currently present is the result of the interactions between the > outside environment, and the individual species. > > [Mary] > From a cause and effect perspective, I suppose, but there is a > question being begged here. Do you see what it is? [Mark] Is this kind of like the question "I am thinking of a number between 1 and 10, do you know what it is?" I was presenting current evolutionary theory, which really has not changed much since Darwin said evolution of species occurs through natural selection. I can think of many questions being begged, but those who subscribe to evolutionary theory seem to accept it as truth. For me it is somewhat teleological, incomplete, and makes too many assumptions. [Mary] What I would like to clarify is this question of evolutionary 'origins', I think. Your discussion of evolution, and the way most textbooks and people perceive it is self-serving. It is based on a hindsight understanding instead of an understanding that takes into account WTF it might have actually been in the first place. I am going to challenge you to question every assumption made about evolution. It's a pity high school textbooks don't take this approach, but I think you'll see that in a Judeo-Christian culture they can't. But, it wouldn't be so hard to undo in people's minds later if they weren't so sloppy about their original assumptions. This is not your fault or anything, in fact, textbooks make this mistake. I don't believe it is done for nefarious purpose, but simply because they conflate the concept with preconceived anthropomorphic/religious notions that they absolutely refuse to question. No, that's not right either. What it really is is that our culture has imposed so many unquestioned assumptions that most people aren't even aware they are making them. Kind of makes me feel tired sometimes. It is these unspoken premises that warp evolution into a religio/ego justification that is unwarranted and totally unnecessary unless your goal is to uphold the cultural status quo. Yeah, I get it that I'm not making any sense yet, so be a little patient with me. I really do have a point. People are not wrong exactly, but mislead by omission. This gives a lot of people the wrong idea about what evolution is. It grants them the leeway to turn it into something it is not and use that to justify a whole raft of preconceived beliefs that wouldn't last under 2 minutes of scrutiny if they were honest. > > [Mark] > With regard to MoQ, we would then take the levels to be an individual > species as an analogy. Is this a correct interpretation of your > presumption? > > [Mary] > No, and if you do not see why I say so, feel free to ask. I cannot go > into all of this in one post. [Mark] Is it because biological evolutionary theory cannot be used in MoQ? Just a guess. I give up. Why? [Mary] Let's take dinosaurs for example. We are not dinosaurs, so talking about them should not be particularly threatening to anyone's cultural preconceived notions. Anyway, when most textbooks or people talk about dinosaurs, they marvel and dissect just how it is that biological evolution was able to culminate in such amazing creatures. There is much talk of their evolving to fit ecological niches and much marveling at how uncannily perfectly they do so. To me, this is the least interesting thing about evolution. Do you have a feel for how long a billion years is? Neither do I. I don't know how many generations of evolving life a billion years represents either, but I know it is a lot. You're the biologist, so you can tell me, but I don't think there are very many species at all that have survived unchanged for all the generations that comprise a billion years. Maybe you can count them on one hand? To me, that is far, far more amazing than all the millions of different species that have arisen and passed away or are here now in that same length of time. My point is that something - and here's the kicker - we know not what - is instigating all that enormous genetic change. Why? Where does this mechanism come from? By what principles can we define it? Is it just accumulated mistakes in replication? Perhaps. I'm good with that, because over the enormity of time, little bitty accumulated mistakes in genetic replication, when subjected to environmental pressures of one kind or another are all it would take to result in dinosaurs or people. Maybe it's as completely devoid of direction as that. But to me, being able to understand this mechanism (if indeed it even is a 'mechanism') is far more interesting than the results. The evolution we see and study is nothing more than the deterministic outcome of any given roll of the genetic dice. Big yawn. Yet, all the textbooks want to marvel at the result when they should really be marveling at whatever instigated this whole chain of events in the first place. Whatever this mechanism is that spouts random variation is enormously important to the existence of the Universe. It's the exact same mechanism from which all scientific hypothesis or good ideas spring. What I mean by that is that the origin of a unique, never thunk, Idea in the mind of any individual is just as marvelous and mysterious as random genetic mutation. That an idea or a mutation 'latches' in the Universe or gets pursued as a 'good' idea is just mechanistic static fallout. The real action is in trying to construct a theory or explanation for where that stuff ever came from in the first place. Pirsig says the origin of originality is Dynamic Quality. He does not say it is God, or intelligent, or has purpose, or anything else. Well, actually he does, but if you think about it, you can see that he was really gilding the lily. It's not necessary. Dynamic Quality does not have to have a direction or 'betterness' or anything at all. He is completely right when he says it is undefined. Maybe it is all those directed things, but we will never know. What we can do is respect it as something greater than our own static patterns. Pirsig does this, then throws a sop to the hindsight marvelers with all this 'betterness' talk. He's not wrong, of course. Betterness, true. But only in hindsight and what he really means by 'betterness' is only what is better in the instant when DQ latched into SQ. The rest of the story you should already be familiar with. Betterness in the static levels is nothing more than the expression of what is perceived as the better choice among all possible ones given the accumulated mass of all 'better' choices that have latched before. If different choices had latched before, then it's unlikely that what is presented in the present moment would be the same betterness. I'm trying to think of a decent example and not coming up with a good one, but let's say you are a kid and you just ate 10 vanilla ice cream cones this week. Don't you figure if you were offered a chocolate cone now you'd see it as 'better' than another vanilla one? Does that make the vanilla one bad? Of course not, but the accumulated weight of all preceding static quality has now skewed your perception of 'betterness', hasn't it. Enough betterness for one go, Mary 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
