Hi Wim.
You wrote: (on 8. March):
(me from before)
> > I don't know if the "principle" is different from what the VALUE is?
> Let's first make clear what 'the principle of a level' is in this
> context. Marco introduced the expression 10/2 14:11 +0100 as 'basic
> moral principle' and explained 17/2 15:21 +0100 'writing these
> formulations, I tried to imagine *who* could have said such statements
> for the very first time...
OK, I see.
> ' The 'principle of the intellectual level'
> is NOT 'what the Q-Intellect is all about', but the FIRST intellectual
> value 'safeguarded' (latched) by this new type of static patterns of
> values.
Hmm. It sounds as there must be some value ahead of the first pattern to
prepare the ground for it. Wish you would provide an example.
> The fact that the value of distinguishing objective from
> subjective is a dominant value now and at the core of most
> intellectual patterns of values, doesn't make it into the principle of
> the intellectual level.
My vision of how Intellect grew from Society can be compared to how Life
grew from Matter, namely by utilizing an ambiguous inorganic pattern
(carbon). Its "carbon" was language: a social pattern (communication), but
ambiguous in the sense that it contained an element of "abstraction". Where
before the individuals had had to read direct signals (sneers/smiles,
angry/friendly looks, blows/caresses ...etc.) language could do the same by
remote control.
[An aside: Right here one sees Pirsig's way of integrating SOM. At the social
level an element of abstraction enters.]
For tens of thousand of years language was solely in the service of society:
The elders telling the young about their myth, but the said abstract quality of
language ever so slowly instigated an "idea" of a realm where concepts
existed independent of the world around them, and that they - manipulated by
rules of logic (math) - could reveal principles more stable than the whimiscal
gods. Finally it started the Hellenic thinkers on the quest described in
ZAMM...(page 366)
* But now, as a result of the growing IMPARTIALITY of the Greeks to the
world around them, there was an increasing power of abstraction which
permitted them to regard the old mythos not as revealed truth but as an
imaginative creation of art. This consciousness which had never existed
anywhere before in the world, spelled a new level....etc (my caps)
Impartiality? Isn't that another name for objectivity? Oh, yes, I think telling
what's objective from what's subjective is the value of Intellect.
> I think that explaining/understanding/reflecting itself was the first
> value latched.
Maybe irrelevant dear Wim, but I feel that your approach to the Intellect is
centered on the "reflecting" part much like the (present) Artificial Intelligence
is centered on computers not becoming intelligent before they "reflect" on
being computers ...ah, I am a computer. This is SOM's blind alley and will
never happen.
> As Scott's 7/3 20:29 -1000 quotes from Owen Barfield
> suggest (primitive people 'participating' in phenomena) the first
> humans creating intellectual patterns of values may NOT have explained
> their experience by distinguishing (subjective) experience from
> (objective) phenomena,
Well, I don't think these were immature intellectual patterns but mature social
ones, but you know my "crusade" against any notion of a vague mind-intellect
that nowhere can be "cornered".
> but by recognizing an 'I' that experiences,
> wants things and acts (a subject) and other, separate subjects that
> experience, want and act. We would say 'nature was animate for them',
> distinguishing objective 'nature' from subjective 'them'. They would
> just say 'everything is animate' (if they could grasp the possibility
> of anything being inanimate, which they probably couldn't).
Your "subject-self/other-selves" here is obviously not my subject/object, again
I feel that this becomes so subtle that you end up in Biology which means
"mind out of matter (brain)" but by all means, these distinctions are
forerunners of the said "impartial" intellect.
> The first
> way of explaining/understanding/reflecting did NOT involve
> distinguishing subjective from objective, but distinguishing different
> subjects, 'I' versus 'them'.
I perfectly see what you mean, but we must not extend Intellect so far back
that it excludes the social level. That one is an important part of the MOQ -
here I profoundly agree with DMB - the stone-agers' mythology was their
EXPLANATION, they UNDERSTOOD it and REFLECTED upon it too.
> This distinction was very vague at first.
> Hence the experience that a subject 'participates' in and has
> extra-sensory links with the rest of reality (other subjects).
> That's my answer to your challenge to David B. of 6/3 19:38 +0100 'to
> tell [you] what Intellect was before SOM'...: not 'subject/object
> thinking' (or something like that), but 'multiple subject
> thinking/feeling/intuiting/sensing'.
IMO this is a perfect description of the social reality: The individuals'
participation via extra-sensory links with other and with nature. There was of
course no "nature" at that time, it was a whole animated universe that
characterize the mythological past. Again I must point to the immense time
span, according to Julian Jaynes the Myth (gods) spoke to them via voices "in
their heads" and when this direct link was severed these became subjective
(delusions) in contrast to objective facts .......... Intellect again.
> I don't think Platt's 'thinking
> is better than feeling' is a (historically) a very primary value of
> the intellectual level.
Well, I think it catches it beautifully. Subjective feeling is exactly what Intellect
sees as Society's weakness while objective thinking is it's own strength.
> What primitive humans did when they first
> started explaining/understanding/reflecting upon their experience
> would not be recognizable for us as 'thinking' (conscious reasoning),
> but rather as a mixture of feeling, intuiting and sensing in which
> intra- and extra-sensory perception were indistinguishable.
Sure, there were millennia when nobody could tell the intellectual apart from
the social (if they had known) so you have a point.
Bo
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