Hi Bo,
I too have been offline for a while, about a month in fact, thanks first
to a finicky ISP and then moving. I've been looking at the archives, but
can't resist posting before I'm done, so bear with me.
Mostly I'm responding to your P.S.:
>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?
A while back I mentioned a book that, if I could only persuade everyone
on this list to read, I would think my life's work to be done (not
really :). It is Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances: A Study in
Idolatry". It addresses exactly this question, and gives a very
interesting answer to it. Briefly, he claims (as Julian Jaynes did later
in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) that prior to the post-Homeric
Greeks, there wasn't an intellectual level. There was language, and
there was something related to thinking, but the latter was
qualitatively different from what we call thinking. By studying Homer,
and other sources, he finds no understanding that thinking is something
"I" do. Rather, it was more like voices from outside.
Even more interesting is that perception was also different. From
anthropological work, he finds a consistent pattern of perception being
more than what it is for us. For us, it is something like "seeing a tree
is seeing form and color", but in earlier times it was more like seeing
the outer form AND the spiritual tree "behind" it.
In other words "mythical" thinking was not a matter of ignorant people
experiencing what we do and then explaining it with silly ideas of gods,
but an accurate description of what WAS EXPERIENCED.
The story goes on. The post-Homeric Greeks were the first to "think
about" things. However, it was only a gradual process before the
thinking came to be completely experienced as "my" thinking, only
completed around 500 years ago, and which made the scientific revolution
possible, and lo SOM (Descartes) was born. Barfield's point is that SOM
-- the clear separation of the subject from the object wasn't possible
until this evolution of consciousness occurred.
And, of course, consciousness will continue to involve, with the next
development being the re-merging of the subject and object worlds, ie,
what we now call mystical transcendence of SO dualism.
My own take on all this with respect to "defining the intellectual
level" is that it doesn't fully exist yet. The closest we come is with
mathematics, where there is no object. Instead the thinking is the
mathematics -- there are no mathematical objects being thought about.
(This requires more detail, but another time). I might also add (with
respect to the question of feeling and intellect) is that now mostly
feeling is a matter of reaction. When the intellectual level come into
its own, then it carries its own feeling, that is feeling and thinking
merge -- again the closest I can guess at might be the aesthetic
pleasure of doing mathematics, though perhaps music is another case.
- Scott
skutvik@online.no wrote:
> 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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