From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Fri Jun 24 2005 - 08:34:30 BST
Hi Folks
I'm away on a vacation trip and don't have much time for
answering posts. There has been a lot of interesting inputs lately,
I have read them all.For now just one to Paul and Mike.
On 22 June Paul quoted Mike's
> --- 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 agree about bacteria, I don't think what we mean by thinking
occurred before language. This capacity requires a certain neural
complexity and is beyond bacteria and such.
> 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.
The ape brain is big, but it lacks the neo-cortex layer which is
indigenous to humans, but my point is that even humans with
every last "hardware" installed - with the "software" of language
too - still didn't think intellectually until they made it to - um -
intellect.
> --- "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.
I have some objections to the DNA-language comparison
because this makes language equal to to intellect. DNA is not the
inorganic pattern that became biology's building block, this was
the element carbon (DNA already is life) In that sense language
is social through and through even if being the said building block
of intellect.
Manipulation of symbols became intellect the moment the Greek
philosophers' language had convinced people that there was a
symbol realm different from what is symbolized and a million
other offshots of the subject/object template.
> --- 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.
This Oriental issue is too big for me to handle at this moment.
But as said: If the Greek experience was the intellectual level's
emergence (something Paul admits to) then there can't be a non-
S/O oriental intellect. Unless we are back at the thinking intellect.
> --- 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.
No! As Paul says above"...this is how a modern scientific ...etc"
Ancient people did not know the "belief vs knowledge" distinction
because it is intellect and had no skeptics among themselves that
doubted the myth reality (I think Scott says something affirmative
to this point). To say that intellect is a belief is - only to employ
one half of its S/O pattern: Intellect is the "subjective belief vs
objective knowledge".
> --- 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".
This was spot on Mike!
> Paul: But SOM or SOL is not the sole custodian of the value of truth,
> and "truth" and "objective truth" are not synonyms.
The pre-intellect era knew truthfulness, but hardly "truth", in the
objectivity over subjectivity sense. Maybe this is what Paul
means with saying that "truth" and truthfulness aren't synonyms.
> Only the
> correspondence theory of truth is strictly bound to SOM.
I believe this is what you say and I agree.
> 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.
We discuss what the intellectual level OF the MOQ "describes",
that the MOQ itself describes only patterns of value we all know.
For example, "substance" describes patterns of inorganic quality,
but this says very little about the patterns themselves, intellect
must step in to find the truth ABOUT things, and here we see
intellect's value. This is the way it is described in most of LILA.
See you
Bo
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