Hello All,
I'm sort of responding to everything here, it's related to a lot of
what we're talking about (I think). It starts with the Nature-nurture
problem and of course in involves the Levels (surprise surprise):
In some strange way the hard-core SOM biologists who say that
everything we do is because of nature and the hard-core SOM
social-whatever people who say it's all nurture are closer to MOQ
that it might seem: It's as if the former have correctly identified
MOQ's biological level and are looking at it from there. Indeed in
this level everything IS caused by biology, it doesn't understand the
values above. Humans having brains to create societies is just a
biological trait. Likewise the later group see everything in MOQ's
social level. Allthough it is implemented on top of the biological
level, it has such a complex set of values that the original
constraints of the underlying level can effectively be ignored.
But since we know both of these levels exist, we can look down (from
our 5th dimensional quality dimension) and chuckle :-).
But this has got me going on what I think is essential to put more
stress on in our levels-discussions: Each higher level is implemented
in the system of the lower level(s): It is completely dependant on
it. We talk about the higher level "dominating" the lower, trying to
"restrain" it, But think also that a new level is "created" when
trying to solve a goal in a given level but needing to go beyond the
value system of that level to try to achieve a higher quality result?
The social level may seem capable of having lots of values that the
biological level dislikes, but at the end of the day it's only
catering to that levels needs in a complex way. Women binding(?)
their feet in historic China may seem like a social value pattern
that only opposes the biological level (that sees it a low quality
i.e pain, inability to walk). But in reality it was an abstract
forward-looking value pattern created to satisfy other biological
needs (getting married -> having offspring = high bio quality)
Each level can have so many "abstract values on top of each other"
that the top values define their own value system independent on the
lower (main) level, but their resting on other abstractions that
actually "touch" the lower level and who's only goal is to help it
out.
SO the less hard-core nature-nurture discussions by SOM folks that
say "both" nature and nurture govern behavior are positioning
themselves within these layers of abstraction within the social level.
In a sense these layers of abstract values go all the way up through
our main levels, what Pirsig did was isolate where to separate them
that would be useful and pinpoint where the level above makes a shift
in what it values and becomes unintelligible to the layer below.
As we talked about last month at a given level, behavior governed by
values at a higher level is irrational to the lower level, and can be
seen seen as "being under the influence of DQ". This ties in with's
Jaaps recent:
>As I wrote I see more in a DQ flowing downward through the levels
>creating a vertical chain of events but working only creative ;) at the
>highest (active) level.
Which I don't disagree with either, it doesn't exclude my quantum
spark bit in my mind though, I'll get back to that.
But I'm all of a sudden kind of puzzled by my own statement above
that "behavior governed by values at a higher level is irrational and
can be seen seen as "being under the influence of DQ" ... Have we
actually really touched this before? Can being influenced by a higher
level and being influenced by DQ actually be distinguished? A static
value at a higher level can seem to me to create a quality event at a
lower level that changes it's static values.
Of course this static pattern at the higher level was created by DQ
originally, thereby the flow.
This brings on the next question: Can a level actually experience DQ
on it's own and change it's own SQ patterns? Perhaps not, that change
must come from either above (Jaap and me now) or below (my
quantum-spark idea).
So now I've got DQ rippling up and down the levels, but the
source-spark has to be at the inorganic level, I can't get by this
source spark bit without all layers becoming deterministic because
they are implemented by the layers below...
This may sound more harsh than I intend, it boils down to the fact
that you can't implement randomness in a deterministic system; You
need a seed that is random. In computers a single such seed can
create infinite new pseudo-random numbers though. Such a
seed-quantum-spark can flow up to different levels and create all
sorts of DQ events going down, or further up or whatever. Until a new
seed is sent up though, the system is deterministic.
OK, I'm bailing out before I switch from talking the "machine code of
intellect" (language) to using real machine code!
-tor
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
