Marco
You ask,
> Long time ago you have suggested MOQ-Intellect as "patternmaker". Don't
> know if you are still on that position. I was not very happy, 'cause in that case
> we have an intellect that creates itself. A loop that is hard to be handled.
The intellect as "patternmaker" is somewhat of an overstatement but
still not completely wrong in my opinion. In general I would say that
the intellect is primarily a pattern "cognizer" and "organizer." But
when my senses experience a pattern, let's say my first rose, the values
and patterns that correspond to this experience are "made" or "created"
internally then stored in memory. The precise way this is done I do not
know. Nor do I think anyone, fully knows. It is suffices to say that
this involves values on at least the first two levels. But this is not
enough, while I now have a pattern of all the values of redness, smell,
shape, form, etc that is this rose, without the social input I don't
have the word "rose" that catalogues or organizes this pattern. If my
first rose experience was as a young child in my mother's garden, she,
responding to my quizzical look, may have supplied "Rose." My "five
year old" concept of rose has now risen to the social. But what about my
mother's "rose" pattern. As a master garderner she knows the common
name, species, genus, heritage, growing characteristics, and that roses
are " a large and widely distributed family (Rosacease, order Rosales)
or wild and culitivated dicotyledonous flowers and shrubs, and trees;
including cinquefoils, meadowsweets, hawthorns, strawberries, apples,
peaches, and almonds." In short her patterns of value for "rose" in
general, and this "rose" in particular has risen to, or includes the
horticultural and biological sciences which are ,according to Pirsig, a
type of static intellectual patterns. And she "made" or "created" or
"built" her own intellectural patterns over the course of her life. Now
indeed most of her intellect was "borrowed" or past down from others,
some of it is incomplete, other parts just plain wrong, but she still
"made" her particular, individual, personal copy of the broad group of
intellectual patterns that are human.
Now when we go back in time till when the first human crossed that
social intellectual divide this event falls into the same league as the
question "Why is there something rather than nothing." that religion and
philosophy have struggled with for eons. The question; How is it that
the intellect appears to be "a loop" or "creates itself"? as you say,
is hard to handled. I think the Zen/Pragmatist/MoQ approach to these
type of questions are while not perfect are at least a good start in
trying to ask the question right.
Marco
> Aren't you now meaning that the skill of creating "concepts" is biological, and
> that it is by means of these concepts that we build firstly society and then,
> eventually, intellect?
3WD
No, I wouldn't go quite this far. Just like the "mind"/ "body" split I
think we go to far if we divorce the intellect,or any level, from the
supporting or underlying levels. While they all may work under a
different set of "laws" or "rules" they still all work in concert. Take
drugs, alcohol for instance. It is an organic chemical (OPoV) made up of
inorganic elements (IPoV) and when it is introduced into the biological
system, me, given sufficient quanities I predict, based on past
experiences, that it will have effects on the biological,social, and
intellectual patterns not only that I experience, but that ARE. Now this
may seem like a silly example but science continues to find all kinds of
seeming tiny chemical imbalances that effect the biological, social, and
intellectual values people experience in everyday life. If we looked
I'm sure we would find many more examples of inorganic, biological, and
social patterns that for both good and bad are built upon and affect the
quality of intellectual values.
So for this reason when someone asks me to somehow define the limits of
"mind" I find it next to impossible to do. Where do I draw the line?
I seems to recall that the whole concept of "mind" was a reaction to, or
creation of religious thinkers in a effort to salvage the life after
death aspect of the "soul" from the ravages of science. But this could
just be because I drank too much wine last night.
3WD
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