[DMB] Right. Maybe it would help to point out that each level includes all the levels below it or prior to it. In other words, the intellect obviously requires a healthy brain and body but that's not enough because it also requires social level cognition too and so does not derive from biology directly. In the same way, social structures can't be directly derived from inorganic matter but you can't have life without those basic physical elements so that the social level requires both but emerges only after life has evolved enough to sustain it.
[Arlo] Yes, for sure. [Austin] So what makes the inorganic 'go', what it values are this forces of nature. Patterned forces are valued in such a way that enough patterns are produced by dynamic quality that biology can emerge. [Arlo] The key here is that Pirsig identified the 'bonding potential' of carbon atoms as the catalyzing agent from which biological patterns could emerge from the inorganic strata. I think this relationship, Dynamic Quality exploits 'potentiality' that appears on each level from which a higher level can emerge, holds true for the appearance of each of the MOQ's levels. In 'The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition', Tomasello points to just such a catalyzing potentiality within the biological level from which social patterns are seen to emerge. (Note that I am not talking reductionism or determinism here, carbon atoms don't 'cause' biology, nor is all biology reducible to carbon atoms). For Tomasello, 'sociality' emerges when sufficiently complex neural wiring permitted the potential for 'shared attention'. That is, just as inorganic carbon's potential was the catalyst for the emergence of biology, biology's 'shared attention' was the catalyst for the emergence of sociality. I've heard arguments that 'semiotic abstraction', which requires a certain level of symbolic/linguistic complexity, would be a good candidate for a social potentiality that served as the catalyst for the emergence of intellectuality. I.e., it would be from the potentiality of semiotic abstraction that intellectual patterns like 'scientific methodology' and 'reason' would emerge. This would give us a process model something like this: Inorganic [carbon] -> Biological [shared attention] -> Social [semiotic abstraction] -> Intellectual To restate, as Pirsig did with 'carbon', this seeks to find the potential within each level that is exploited by Dynamic forces and from which higher level patterns are able to emerge. 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
