From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 21:04:55 BST
Hi Mike
On 13 June Michael Hamilton wrote:
> DMB's recent comments about explaining the MOQ to people from
> different cultures provoked other thoughts about this problem. Can the
> intellectual level in its entirity be understood without extensive
> experience of the thought of other cultures, where thought has been
> built on a different consensus/uniformity of social patterns?
> What I
> am suggesting is that SOL may be true from our Western perspective,
> but that there may possibly be more to discover.
This touches the "Oriental intellect" (the Pirsig letter to Paul at
the moq.org. site)
> The infiltration of
> Western culture into all areas of the world in which there exist
> suffient social developments to support alternative intellectual
> patterns
"Alternative intellectual patterns" This is a most odd formulation.
The universe is the inorganic pattern, can we speak of alternative
universes (except the multiverse nonsense)? Biological patterns
likewise. We may visualize other worlds with the most weird life
forms, but it is biological patterns nevertheless. This goes for
social patterns too, whatever form cooperation of biological
patterns take it is social patterns. But suddenly when it comes to
intellect the strange "alternative" intellectual patterns pops up. It
is af intellect is one entity and its patterns something else, but if
intellect is a static level it must obey the same rules; intellectual
patterns are the same in Greece as in Inner Mongolia or at
Proxima Centaurii. (my favorite resort ;-)
> will make such a project extremely difficult, and this for me
> highlights the evil represented by this destruction of social and
> intellectual variety.
You will find highly developed societies with people as intelligent
and smart as anyone else, but without traces of intellectual
patterns and guarantee without modernity. All this is based on the
"thinking" fallacy a mixing of intelligence and intellect. No, the
intellectual LEVEL is what is described in ZMM as the emergence
of SOM.
> Basically, I'm saying that, given our lack of static "parameters" in
> intellect at this point in its evolution, and given our limited
> cultural perspectives, it may be extremely difficult to define the
> intellectual level. But I'm not saying that we shouldn't try! I'll
> continue to read with great interest.
Back to the "Oriental intellect". Pirsig's idea (in the RT part in
LILA ) is that the East long ago resolved the Dynamic/Static
conflict. If that sprang from an intellectual level (a S/O-conflict
who an Oriental Pirsig transcend) is dubious, all that talk about
Gods sounds social-levelish. I am uneasy about this part, to me
it looks like some earlier insight so precious to Pirsig that he
included it in LILA, but in connection with the MOQ it seems a bit
displaced.
Bo
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