From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jun 22 2005 - 17:40:33 BST
Mike,
--- Bo has often stated that to equate "thinking" with intellect is to let
--- SOM pollute the MOQ. I tend to agree. I certainly agree that in a
--- general sense, the human _capacity to think_ has its roots in biology,
--- and was then invaded by the social patterns of language. The need for
--- a narrower definition of intellectual patterns than "thinking" has
--- been forcefully stated by Pirsig. I think you're all familiar with the
--- quote from the Paul Turner letter, but I'll repeat it here because it
--- gives a useful point of focus:
Paul: Thinking, to me, is obviously something that bacteria don't do, so
this passage is, in my view, a bit of reductio ad absurdum in overkill. I
always associated thinking (as opposed to, say, problem-solving) with
something only humans did but given that many are prone to ascribing thought
to chimpanzees I am happy to drop the term from any definition of the
intellectual level.
--- "If one extends the term intellectual to include primitive cultures
--- just because they are thinking about things, why stop there? How about
--- chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about earthworms? Don't they make
--- conscious decisions? How about bacteria responding to light and
--- darkness? How about chemicals responding to light and darkness? Our
--- intellectual level is broadening to a point where it is losing all its
--- meaning. You have to cut it off somewhere, and it seems to me the
--- greatest meaning can be given to the intellectual level if it is
--- confined to the skilled manipulation of abstract symbols that have no
--- corresponding particular experience and which behave according to
--- rules of their own."
---
--- Yes, there is most definitely a need to "cut it off somewhere", so
--- long as we remember that evolution is continuous, not discrete. And I
--- think I can see Occam frowning at the "manipulation of symbols"
--- definition. It certainly hasn't helped at all in the recent SOL
--- debate.
Paul: It seems not. I think Pirsig is saying that the manipulation of
abstract symbols is to intellect as DNA is to biology. DNA is the
"mechanism" by which the biological value of life is asserted and
maintained. The manipulation of abstract symbols is the "mechanism" by
which the intellectual value of truth is asserted and maintained.
--- The SOL sets out to ensure that intellectual patterns extend no
--- further back than the Ancient Greeks and their S/O divide. This omits
--- one of the key things about the emergence of static levels as outlined
--- in Lila: patterns from a higher level can exist in the service of a
--- lower level, _before that higher level has emerged as something
--- independent_.
Paul: SOL also allows nothing other than SOM to exist in the intellectual
level, whereas Pirsig's MOQ allows Indian philosophy and the MOQ itself and
therefore must identify something more elementary to intellect than SOM.
Hence, the similarity between what happened in Greece and what happened in
India is that abstract generalisations (e.g. objects, existence, reality)
began to appear in texts, most notably in the Upanishads. The
subject-object duality was indeed something of huge import, but even at this
stage, was seen as contingent upon language and not a universal matter of
fact.
"People persistently hold to the idea of unreality i.e. duality. But such
duality does not exist. One who has realized the absence of duality is not
born again, since there remains no longer any cause for his birth."
[Upanishads, Mandukya Upanishad, Ch IV, 75]
"Vedanta recognizes the ordinary state of waking, in which duality,
consisting of objects and the idea of coming in contact with them, is
admitted. It also recognizes a purer ordinary state i.e. the dream state, in
which is experienced duality consisting of objects and the idea of coming in
contact with them, though such objects do not exist." [Upanishads, Mandukya
Upanishad, Ch IV, 87]
"The wise recognize another state, in which there exist neither objects nor
ideas regarding them." [Upanishads, Mandukya Upanishad, Ch IV, 88]
--- MH, in the present:
--- You're right, the Bible wouldn't talk about "truth" in the Greek
--- _objective_ sense, but how about "the word of God"? You're not telling
--- me that before the Greeks, nobody ever wondered about those basic
--- philosophical questions "how and why did the world come to be?" "who
--- made the world?" Pre-scientific man answers in the only way he can: by
--- stipulating a God. Who has the answers to all the mystifying
--- questions? God! Truth comes from God, because he knows - he made
--- everything. These are the best explanations available to the
--- pre-scientific mind. So I hope you won't cryctu SOM when I say that
--- the Old Testament was a primitive attempt to explain and describe
--- reality.
Paul: My view is that this is how a modern scientific vocabulary reads or
describes their texts. I don't think they were purposefully written as
explanations or theories, for how does one postulate a mere "theory" when
one has no concept of propositional truth or fallacy? As Wittgenstein said,
there is no "knowledge" without "doubt" - or something like that. I think
Bo would probably agree with me on that.
--- But anyway, my interest isn't in showing that mythos was indubitably
--- one thing or the other. My interest is in showing that a complete, and
--- _much_ simpler categorisation of static patterns is provided by the
--- following definition of intellectual patterns. It's shockingly simple.
--- An intellectual pattern is a *belief*, or set of beliefs.
Paul: I think that sounds about right.
--- Armed the distinction between the nature of a static pattern and the
--- static level that determines the value of said pattern, we can see
--- that before the S/O divide, the value of beliefs was entirely shackled
--- to the needs of society. It's quite possible that a kind of natural
--- selection occured - if a belief was detrimental to a society, one of
--- two things happened. Either the leaders of the society eradicated the
--- belief/believer, or the belief spread, leading to the destruction of
--- the society. For example, can you imagine a totally nihilist society
--- surviving for very long?
---
--- And this, I suppose, is where SOL comes in. The S/O divide states that
--- truth is independent of any individual and any society. Thus, as
--- described in ZMM, intellectual patterns (beliefs) free themselves from
--- the dictates of social value and begin to pursue the ideal of
--- objective truth, or "knowledge".
Paul: But SOM or SOL is not the sole custodian of the value of truth, and
"truth" and "objective truth" are not synonyms. Only the correspondence
theory of truth is strictly bound to SOM. In the MOQ, "truth" describes
patterns of high intellectual quality and that quality is not at all
dependent on the existence of independently existing objective states of
affairs to which they must correspond or try to accurately represent.
Regards
Paul
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