Ron, Thanks for sharing. What's the reference for "Emergency Properties & Processes"? If it's been posted on the list before, I missed it.
I've long thought of the MOQ levels as emergent phenomenon within the evolution of the Kosmos. I thought it would be a fruitful exercise to drill down into the definition of emergence to discover the criteria by which one judges an emergent level to give us greater insight into the relationship between the levels. Pirsig hands down the four levels as givens without much theoretic support. I find the levels useful orienting generalizations, but vague in definition and overly broad to be helpful in making many moral determinations. As a result, I think a definition of emergence would be useful in sharpening boundaries and, perhaps, discovering relevant "sublevels" to aid in moral reasoning. (Pirsig says, at the biological level, it's "more moral" to eat vegetables than a cow because of their relative evolutionary positions. I think there are analogous truths within the social & intellectual levels as well, but I can't immediately see the criteria by which we'd pick these out.) One view of evolutionary emergence in this broad sense is advanced by Valentin Turchin in his Metasystem Transition Theory (MTT), developed in his book, *The Phenomenon of Science* (freely available at <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/POSBOOK.html>), and summarized on the *Principia Cybernetica* Website <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MST.html> Starting within the emergence of biology, Turchin's MTT leads to the following sublevels: * control of position = movement * control of movement = irritability (simple reflex) * control of irritability = (complex) reflex * control of reflex = associating (conditional reflex) * control of associating = human thinking * control of human thinking = culture As can be seen from these examples, Turchin's chief criterion for emergent levels in one of control, as one would expect from a cyberneticist. Each higher level is created by, and, in turn, exercises some degree of control over, the objects at the lower level. This appears consistent with the MOQ, as in chapter 13 of *Lila*, Pirsig describes the relationship of a higher level to a lower one as being "in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes". Turchin's broad-brush evolutionary hierarchy (outlined at <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/HISTEVOL.html>) bears some similarity to the MOQ: "1. PREBIOTIC: the developments taking place before the origin of the life, i.e. the emergence of physico-chemical complexity: the Big Bang, space and time, energy and particles, atoms and the different elements, molecules up to organic polymers, simple dissipative structures. 2. BIOLOGICAL: the origin of life and the further development of the specifically biological aspects of it: DNA, reproduction, autopoiesis, prokaryotes vs. eukaryotes, multicellularity, sexual reproduction, the species. 3. COGNITIVE: the origin of mind, i.e. the basic cybernetic, cognitive organization, going from simple reflexes to complex nervous systems, learning, and thought. 4. SOCIAL: the development of social systems and culture: communication, cooperation, moral systems, memes" While it would seem at first glance that Turchin's system of categories or "tracks" inverts the MOQ's SOCIAL-INTELLECTUAL levels, that's not necessarily the case. Turchin's cognitive level is the biological capacity supporting thought & social interaction, not intellectual patterns per se. Looking within Turchin's social level <http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/SOCEVOL.html>, we see the concept of the evolution of memes, which undergo their own evolution: "We can define such non-genetic information, when carried between people, as memes. Memes, similar to genes, undergo a variation and selection type of evolution, characterized by mutations and recombinations of ideas, and by their spreading and selective reproduction or retention." ... "Using the material of language, people make new --- symbolic --- models of reality (scientific theories, in particular) such as never existed as neural models given us by nature. Language is, as it were, an extension of the human brain. Moreover, it is a unitary common extension of the brains of all members of society. It is a collective model of reality that all members of society labor to improve, and one that preserves the experience of preceding generations." I would equate "advanced" and "scientific" memes with Pirsig's Intellectual level. I think Pirsig wanted so desperately to enthrone reason as ruler of society that he pushed it into its own moral level. (While I agree with his conclusion, I have trouble with the lack of theoretic support for this move. Intellect seems to me to be so entangled in our human biology (neurobiology and cognition, representation, language capacity) and in human culture and society (communication/language, inherited belief systems), it doesn't deserve its own level. In any event, there are other models of Kosmic evolution with emergent levels, such as Wilber's holarchy. I won't go into his model in detail here, partly because I don't have time to explain it properly (especially with all the nuances of "Wilber-5"), partly because I don't have time to defend the parts of it I agree with against Krimel. ;-) In short, though, Wilber has another set of criteria for holons, apart from their intrinsic definition as being simultaneously wholes in & of themselves & parts of a larger context: self-preservation, self-adaptation, self-transcendences, & self-dissolution (*Sex, Ecology, Spirituality*, Chapter 2.) There are some good criticisms of these criteria, but at least he advances some. Unfortunately, the holarchic model Wilber develops which interestingly correlates via the AQAL perspectives major interior/exterior individual/group emergent phenomenon throughout Kosmic evolution jumps from one stage to the next with less explanation than Pirsig's levels. Regardless, I think it's useful to see how these models that extend the concept of evolution beyond the biological realm in which Darwin discovered it compare to Pirsig's ethico-evolutionary MOQ. I think this comparison can shed light on the MOQ and suggest clarifications to our thinking. Another writer who's looked at the scope of evolution beyond biology is Robert Wright. In his book *Nonzero* (excerpts available at <http://www.nonzero.org/intro.htm>), Wright elucidates "nonzerosumness", or the positive gain realized among interacting entities, as the generalized mechanism for evolution throughout the levels. His work is in a similar vein to Robert Axelrod in *The Evolution of Cooperation*. Wright takes the central game-theoretic concept of net positive gains for cooperative behavior as a driving force for the evolution of increasing levels of complexity both within biological and cultural contexts. While Wright doesn't name a specific hierarchy, he does see evolutionary progression both between and within the inorganic, biological, and cultural levels. Upon reflection, I think the levels of MOQ are not so much emergent but super-emergent. They are entire categories (or tracks, as Turchin says) of sublevels of emergent behavior. The Inorganic includes both quantum physics and chemistry, neither one of which is reducible to the other. The Biological contains multitudes of levels of emergent complexity recorded in the evolution of life. The Social another set of progressively complexifying cultures, institutions, artifacts. The Intellectual contains an entire range of modes of thinking, traditions, and philosophies. The common thread seems to be that these categories are so divorced from one another that their interfaces are fairly narrow. That's at least arguably true for the Social to Biological to Inorganic realms, which have fairly clear boundaries. The Intellectual to Social boundary I find less clear, perhaps because, as Pirsig alludes, the Intellectual level is still in the midst of differentiating itself from the Social. Or perhaps, as I've argued earlier by light of the comparison to other evolutionary models, the Social and Intellectual are really more bound up with one another and entangled in feedback loops than we might like. In any event, I'd love to see how the concept of emergence informs the MOQ because, as I've said, I find the 4 MOQ levels so broad that I have difficulty applying them to concrete questions. If we had generic criteria for judging evolutionary advances across and within these domains and could talk meaningfully about both intra- and inter-level moral conflicts, I think we'd have a much more powerful intellectual framework. It seems to me that the concepts of game theory, general systems theory (and its subdisciplines, especially hierarchy theory, cybernetics, and complexity studies), and allied disciplines, are beginning to generate the concepts necessary to identify cross-level criteria for emergence that may shed light on this process of universal unfolding. Keith -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ron Kulp Sent: Monday, June 18, 2007 11:10 To: [email protected] Subject: [MD] emergence and MOQ I thought this snip from "Emergent properties & processes" sounded a lot like Pirsigs description of the four levels. [edit] Emergent properties & processes "An emergent behaviour or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. In other words there is often a form of top-down feedback in systems with emergent properties. The processes from which emergent properties result may occur in either the observed or observing system, and can commonly be identified by their patterns of accumulating change, most generally called 'growth'. Why emergent behaviours occur include: intricate causal relations across different scales and feedback, known as interconnectivity. The emergent property itself may be either very predictable or unpredictable and unprecedented, and represent a new level of the system's evolution. The complex behaviour or properties are not a property of any single such entity, nor can they easily be predicted or deduced from behaviour in the lower-level entities: they are irreducible. No physical property of an individual molecule of air would lead one to think that a large collection of them will transmit sound. The shape and behaviour of a flock of birds[1] or shoal of fish are also good examples." [Ron] Has anyone else connected/compared Emergence with MOQ? I do know there are those who object to the idea, I find it interesting though that Pirsigs levels can be accepted although the idea of emergence, particularly as it applies to consciousness is in hot debate. "Regarding strong emergence, Mark A. Bedau observes: "Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing."(Bedau 1997) However, "the debate about whether or not the whole can be predicted from the properties of the parts misses the point. Wholes produce unique combined effects, but many of these effects may be co-determined by the context and the interactions between the whole and its environment(s)." (Corning 2002) Along that same thought, Arthur Koestler stated, "it is the synergistic effects produced by wholes that are the very cause of the evolution of complexity in nature" and used the metaphor of Janus to illustrate how the two perspectives (strong or holistic vs. weak or reductionistic) should be treated as perspectives, not exclusives, and should work together to address the issues of emergence.(Koestler 1969) Further, "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe..The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. At each level of complexity entirely new properties appear. Psychology is not applied biology, nor is biology applied chemistry. We can now see that the whole becomes not merely more, but very different from the sum of its parts."(Anderson 1972)-wiki [Ron] All opinions welcome, I'm very interested in the contrasts/simularities with MOQ and "Emergence" 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
