ROG, BO, DMB, ROD, 3WD... all
thank you all again for sharing your precious thoughts. Few sparse comments.
I think this thread is going to reach its natural end... with a substantial
agreement on almost everything, but the 4th level. As always :-) Maybe a
post on my own conclusion, tomorrow.
==> ROG,
glad to see your brain came out from the "frozen" state :-)
thanks for your musings and suggestions.
> 4th Principle: Individuality is better than conformity
>
> Hmmm. It seems each of the prior levels is about a type of
> stability, with each gaining in versatility and adaptiveness.
> I would argue that the intellectual level is about the stability
> and evolution of ideas themselves.
> Some or most of these ideas are of course applied back to
> the prior levels to improve life and society and to better
> understand the universe. Your individuality concept gets
> to the important elements of versatility,
> creativity and the free exchange/competition of ideas, but it misses
> something as well. I think that I would lean more toward... "Good
> ideas are better than bad ones."
>
> This would thus lead us to:
>
> Basic principle: Better is Better.
> 1st Principle: Something is better than Nothing
> 2nd Principle: Alive is better than Dead
> 3rd Principle: Together is better than Alone
> 4th Principle: Good ideas are better than bad ones
Ideas.... well, indeed the MOQ puts ideas at the 4th level: "ideas take a
moral precedence over a society.... it is more moral for an idea to kill a
society than it is for a society to kill an idea".
But saying that good ideas are better than bad ideas, well, does not say a
lot. Even a good life is better than a bad life... and a good law is better
than a bad law. By definition.
You have pointed out the stability of the levels. Good. Well, I think that
our individual "system of ideas" is stable, just like a living being is
stable. You will accept and/or develop new ideas only if they are coherent
with your system. And the social inter-subjective realm is the testing
environment for our individual system.
I think that what I'm really searching for is in the end a good reason for a
social-focused person to leap onto a new level, and starting develop ideas.
Why should a person decide that it is better to develop ideas than accepting
social habits? What is the initial "dim apprehension" of a possible
intellectual "better"?
As I have explained in the past, IMO the first emergence of intellectual
patterns out of society happened when division of
labor created roles, and then rituals, and then abstraction from society.
" These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and the
intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals and
dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which
generated the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual
truths could have been derived ". (Lila, chapter 30)
[Rod, can this partially answer your question "where does awareness
of the self come from?" Read also Pirsig's Cruising Blues for that]
hmmm, if no one likes individuality.... what about "Art is better than
ritual"?
I must muse on it....
PS to ROG
you should not be worried 'cause you are not much "right" on the economic
scale... you should be worried as you are less libertarian (-3,95) than me!
(-4.26)
==> DMB
> it seems that it would be far easier and cleaner to stick with
> the re-statement of the codes just as Pirsig puts it.
> 1. inorganic patterns are better than chaos
> 2. life is better than death
> 3. the law is better than life
> 4. rights are better than the law
> 5. dynamic betterness is best
Sorry, Dave, but IMO you yourself are not sticking with Pirsig. Maybe we
both are splitting hairs, but you start your series with patterns and end
with laws ... If you want to stick with Pirsig, you have to simply write:
Inorganic patterns are better than nothing
and laws of nature make them triumph
Biological patterns are better than inorganic patterns
and laws of jungle make them triumph
Social patterns are better than biological patterns and
the law make them triumph
Intellectual patterns are better than social patterns
and are still struggling by means of human rights
Right?
And I have no problems with it. But my intention was to find
out the "better" in its initial "dim apprehension", and not the "better" in
its definitive stable configuration after the "triumph". Imagine the first
idea of the world. Or the first family. Or the first cell. Or the quickest
proton that came out from the Big Bang.... What could they have "said" in
that moment? They were experience. Experience of value, of a new kind of
value; more moral.
You see, inorganic patterns are not dead, 'cause they have never been alive.
They are dead only from the viewpoint of a living entity. So, we can imagine
the very first cell looking at the rest of the world and say: "I'm alive...
and it is better than dead". But the rest of the world, blind to it, could
not understand or answer.
Equally, only after you have tested a social "together" you can
say it is better than alone. Biologically, there is no loneliness.
Maybe, to find the 4th principle, we can try this question: "How was the
first idea of the world?"
==> 3WD
> 4th Principle: Some Qualities are better than Others
> the role of the intellect within this system seems to be
> to uncover and order all qualities, values, or
> morals. And the single underlying "given" with which
> to do it is this one. The process by which this is
> accomplished is neither simple, fully understood,
> nor assured.
IMO, my "basic principle", Better is Better, is always valid, and covers
your worries. Not only intellect uncovers and orders the lower levels and
decides that some quality are better than others. The simplest amoeba can
decide that some inorganic qualities are better than others. Every pattern
orders this "better" of the lower levels.
> ... as good as the intellect is, it is still inadequate, still flawed. To
help
> compensate for the intellect's fallible nature it is necessary and helpful
> to make sure that we are taking into account the broadest, most dynamic
> range of experiences possible. We all have access to this fuller range of
> experiences but most often discount them. It's just that we, individually
> and collectively, have been so focused, for so long, on the intellect that
> we have lost or not found our abilities to move beyond it. And if this is
not
> enough, we regularly revert to baser qualities of the lower levels as the
focus
> in our lives.
Agree that intellect is flawed. But, it should be "less flawed" than
society, to an extent. About "moving beyond" intellect, I think it is a
reasonable statement saying that we still have not found how to do it
(except, maybe, few very enlightened persons, in some rare event). Of
course, there is nothing bad in focusing sometimes on the lower levels....
being a good citizen, or a good member of your family, or caring for your
health is perfectly good as taking care of your scientific knowledge and
visiting a museum. As well it can be good, after a while, becoming the bad
guy who picks up a bar lady, or screams against the politics in charge, or
writes a new metaphysics... this is life. Anyway, in my opinion intellect
is not still completely stable as leader of evolution, and often many people
fall down to lower qualities.
p.s.
I like your PS to Bo:
> I still think we might all just be on a "solipsist journey" not in
> the sense that "nothing is real but the self" but that each
> individual "self" makes up so much of what it calls "reality"
> along the way that it might as well be.
==> BO:
> OBJECTIVITY IS BETTER THAN SUBJECTIVITY
Well, impossible to state you are not coherent. :-)
> I gladly give credit to Platt for launching this before my own
> (his from 11 Feb.) but hope that he sees the connection
> with my age old campaign for exactly this definition of
> q-intellect ... among other in the Emotion (social) vs
> Reason (intellectual) form.
Many find my 4th principle as a simplistic definition that puts the
individual against the collectivity. This is not my intention of course, but
I'll have to work to refine my concepts. I don't want to be solipsist :-)
On my hand, I find this equation:
thought/reason/objectivity(intellectual)
vs.
emotion/feeling/subjectivity(social)
much much much more simplistic.
I have to find the time to put in a written form my thoughts and feelings
:-) about it... It will be another thread sooner or later.
For the moment, let me say that a romantic philosopher, as well as an
introspecting artist could well say that subjectivity is better than
objectivity; without, for that, becoming a social focused neovictorian.
========
Ciao,
Marco
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