Hi All
Having been offline for some time due to computer collapse, buying a new portable with the
new "Windows XP" and being unable to get things plugged-and-played, being called off to
other duties and and ......phew, I just this day got it running and down-loaded hundred-and-
seventy plus messages. I will only respond to this summary by DMB.
(from 9 June) ...outdated of course.
> DMB sums it up:
> I think part of t goes for Elliothe confusion about this issue stems from the fact that the
> brains we all have today are pretty much the same brains our ancestors had
> tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of years ago and they could
> certainly "think" in some sense of the word. But to equate this with modern
> scientific thinking, rationality and Pirsig's intellecual level misses the
> whole point of the MOQ. The social and intellectual levels are not produced
> by the brain, they're not features of biological man. They're each an
> entirely different level of reality, with an evolutionary path of their own.
> SOM sees all human thoughts as "intellectual", but that's only in the
> broadest sense of the word. I've even heard scientists describe the making
> of stone tools half a million years ago as intellectual activity. But that's
> a different sense of the word. Pirsig is talking about something very
> different from that. I thinks its a terrible mistake to refuse to understand
> what Pirsig's distinctions mean. If we do that, we only undo his work, in
> which case we might as well have never read Lila in the first place.
Thanks David B. for holding the fort. The two of us have had some divergences, but
compared to the agreements over these fundamental tenets it's peanuts. In another recent
post you said (to 3WD):
> DMB goes further:
> I'd suggest that you'll find plenty of evidence of mythic thinking in
> pre-historic artifacts, such as the pyramid and stonehenge, which are
> religious, ritualistic buildings. Obviously, these extraordinary
> structures demonstrate amazing skill and intelligence, but still can't
> rightly be called intellectual. I get the impression that too many people
> here assume that any thought is intellectual, but this is a mistake. I
> think Bo is quite right in asserting that such an assumption puts us right
> back into the SOM soup, reintroduces the mind/body problem and creates a
> number of other problems. Pirsig and Wilber both insist that there are
> realities BETWEEN biology and intellect. This is were social level
> thinking fits. This is where Wilber's archaic, magic and mythic thinking
> fits. Both of them are presenting ideas that defy common sense notions
> because they are both defying SOM and this is designed to be an
> improvement upon common sense notions. See?
EXACTLY! I may even accept Ken Wilber the way you present him, nor will I spoil it by
starting my traditional SOL-sermon, or ask if you aren't "dangerously" close to my
interpretation of Q-intellect ....I just mention it in the passing. :-)
It seems like two camps (over how the q-intellect is to be interpreted) have formed. I will not
mention names for fear of misplacing the various personalities, but I am glad that its "nature"
has surfaced again because the MOQ will never live happily until this issue is settled. The
other camp claim to have Pirsig's backing and it's a point that he says that it's the dictionary
definition (...power of the mind to reason in contrast with feeling and instinct) yet, does this
really address our problem? "...reason in contrast to feeling..." is exactly what I have been
driving at. Feeling (emotion) does naturally require mental activity (or abstract qualities). No,
I guess it's CONSCIOUSNESS which is the real issue. Have we ever addressed that?
Thanks
Bo
PS
DMB invited us to investigate the emergence of SOM - or something to that effect. Platt
responded, but all this disappeared in the collapse of my machine and finding it in the
archives isn't easy. What thread was that?
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