Ian (and group)-
Hey there!
On 6/11/99 at 7:13 PM +0100, Ian Warburton wrote:
> Interesting statement. What about animals though: do they have
> intellectual patterns?
I was hoping someone would ask that...thanks!
If humans can exist on multiple levels, why not other living organisms? Is
that the idea? They can of exist on the lower ones, of course, but why not
the higher ones?
I'm not sure what to say. Really...this is a medium post about me not
knowing the answer for myself. I don't have a position yet. I do have some
ideas about what is necessary to come up with a position, though, so I
thought I'd pass them on to folks.
I think that Pirsig's comments, in his vegetarianism argument on page 184
of Lila (teal), imply that he feels animals are closer to vegetables than
they are to man. I find that too anthropocentric (my word of the day).
Can animals work in low-level social SPoVs, for example? Wolf packs seem
social, so do herds of zebras, etc. Are they are very low-level
social...so low that they might be considered biological as Pirsig seems to
consider them? This is one of those borderline, "fuzzy" questions.
Anyway, I think we have to ask first if animals can be social before we can
ask if they have intellectual patterns. One reason is that Dynamic Quality
could be mistaken for intellectual patterns if we are not careful. Maybe
the stick just feels right...
My gut feeling is that social SPoVs can apply to animals, but I don't have
anything to back that up in the way of quotes from Pirsig or Nature or even
Zaboomafoo (American PBS show about animals aimed at very young children).
> Also I remember a story about a group of pigeons being trained to
> distinguish between Picasso and Monet paintings.
Really? I'd love to hear more on this one! We just went to a
Matisse/Picasso show in Fort Worth this spring and it's on my mind...
> Clearly when an animal is trying to get some food it is doing so
> because the food has biological value. However, that a chimp, for
> example, should do that particular stick thing instead of just vainly
> throwing, say, the shorter stick at the food suggests to me that it is
> choosing one intellectual pattern over many others - hence the title
> cognitive phenomena.
Is he letting a static pattern of value guide him? This goes back to the
"lacing shoes" thing...if they learn that Picasso gets them corn and
Matisse gets them water, they'll go with hunger or thirst, right? Are the
patterns taking over or are they making conscious decisions? Choosing to
get the food the best way seems biological to me and "stick use" seems like
a learned social trait (I've seen film of them teaching youngsters).
Let me throw a counter-example to you. Monkey likes food, man puts food in
container which is shaped so that monkey can put open hand in but cannot
pull closed fist out. Monkey is trapped and killed because he will not drop
the food even when the man approaches with a weapon.
Did the monkey act on the intellectual level at all or was he "stuck" (in
the classic Pirsigian sense) in lower static patterns of value? He may have
never seen that type of container of food before. He may have realized how
to get the food out even. He could have done problem solving in order to
get to the container in the first place. However, my vote is that the
monkey is completely, totally, *fatally* stuck in not only a
non-intellectual mode, but in a static mode as well.
> It seems to me that this is undeniably a chimp responding to
> intellectual quality so that it can ultimately satisfy its biological
> needs.
The use of tools is a sticky question. One way to look at it, when a chimp
has a breakthrough like this (stacking crates to get bananas attached to
the ceiling comes to mind), is that they are both looking at learned static
patterns of behavior (climbing/stacking/eating) and applying them to the
current situation. That they are, in fact, dealing directly with the
dynamic quality by applying "known" SPoVs.
Another way to look at it is that they have abstract ideas about structural
design, etc, and they can put those ideas into practice. I'm not sure I can
go with this explanation in the examples given.
Is problem solving an intellectual pattern when it is not abstract?
I guess that could be a core question in this discussion. There is a
certain abstraction to intellectual thought that animals do not seem to
possess, yet some animals clearly problem solve. My solar-powered
calculator can also problem solve. It knows a few basic operations (which
deal with "real" entities as far as the calculator is concerned) and can
put them together in sequence...
Pirsig seems to say that knowing what is good and getting to the good are
not intellectual activities. If the animal is after the food and it gets
the food, where is the intellectual level? In how it got the food? An
amoeba recoils from acid, but it doesn't "know" anything (experiential or
theoretical) about fluid dynamics...
I've skimmed some recent (and archive) posts discuss the problems in
defining the intellectual level. This issue is another reason why such a
definition is needed...perhaps I should reread those.
> Yet intellectual pattens of value require social patterns of
> value to sustain them. However, social patterns of value are a creation
> of humanity. So we have intellectual patterns of value existing
> pre-socially which is not allowed by the MOQ!
My gut feeling (again) is that chimps, wolf packs, etc, can be in a
low-level social SPoV. I don't know if an animal living in that environment
when everything is going right can, on occasion, make intellectual
decisions...but if it happens, it is rare. I'm inclined to say they do
things that "just feel right."
I also think that a good portion of mankind never make intellectual
decisions (Lila). Having the capability to act on that level is not the
same as making use of that capability. That's digressing a little much,
maybe that's for another day...
> Of course, the obvious rebuttal here is to say that animals aren't
> responding to intellectual value but is there really any fundamental
> difference between a chimp doing that stick trick and Pirsig fixing his
> bike? Personally, I have a hunch that there something going astray
> here.
This is a problem only if you accept that man is the only social animal and
therefore the only intellectual one. If you remove that restriction on the
social level (wolf packs, herds of zebras, etc), then you might be able to
say that exceptional animals can show some intellectual patterns in
exceptional circumstance.
Be careful of equating intellectual thought with a full experience of
Dynamic Quality (and proper latching), though. Was Pirsig intellectualizing
when doing the maintenance? He was when he recounted stories to us, of
course, but while he was actually doing the work was he intellectualizing?
Coco (and friends) is the main reason that I've not come to answer about
animals and the intellectual level. She's a good case because of her
ability to communicate. I know other animals communicate, but she
communicated through language to humans which makes her interesting. Also,
she was in a very stable social environment before that intellectualizing
could occur if it did.
So, did she communicate anything that would imply intellectual SPoVs? I'll
have to look with an eye on the fact that Pirsig doesn't believe Lila acted
on the intellectual level. Lila clearly communicated...(but did not always
communicate clearly). Coco could prove a pivotal case in this discussion
about intellectual levels and animals. The trick is to compare Coco to Lila
and see who was more intellectual...<G>.
Anyway, I don't have time to research Coco today or I would have done so
before posting. I am open to the possibility of SPoVs other than humans
being able to intellectualize, but I don't think that even all humans
intellectualize. Animals can certainly choose and prefer, but so can
everything else in MoQ terms, at least from my POV as expressed here today
and in the LS earlier this week. I do think animals can act on the social
level in a very primitive way and that they are perfectly able to do things
which are amazing to us simply by "doing what feels right" and embracing
Dynamic Quality.
> Finally, of that statement - We are suspended in language - I always
> think of Einstein saying that he did his most abstract thought without
> words but in pictures. I don't think he was suspended in language when
> he was doing that.
No, but he was at times suspended in culture. God and dice come to mind.
Cheers,
Mark
________________________________________________________________________
Mark Brooks <mark@epiphanous.org> <http://www.epiphanous.org/>
How do you know who wrote this? <http://www.epiphanous.org/mark/pgp/>
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