From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Mon Jun 27 2005 - 19:36:18 BST
Bo,
Bo said:
Thanks Scott, this is enough to affirm my hunch that the
mysterious "separate oriental intellect" is a hoax. There can as
little exist a non-S/O intellect as there can a non-biological
biology. Even the dictionaries define intellect as S/O, but my
pointing to it is like pouring water over a goose (as we say) There
must be something with the English-American mind that
"beatifies" intellect.
If you disagree with this and join Paul in the "belief" that intellect
may harbour any "thought patterns" ...I have problems with your
logic. The below ..
Scott:
I agree with you that the S/O divide is what makes intellect among humans in
our stage of consciousness possible. However, when mystics like Franklin
Merrell-Wolff speak of Knowledge through Identity, which is not S/O-divided,
then I do not accept equating intellect with the S/O divide. And mathematics
is a special case, see below.
Scott previously:
> I wouldn't say it corrects all shortcomings -- one still needs to see
> Intellect as the driving force of evolution, as being the same
> (non)-thing as Quality. The belief that intellect just came into being
> in humans 2500 years ago is unworkable. And mathematics is an exception
> to the SOL idea that all intellect is S/O.
Bo said:
Reveals that you subscribe to the "intelligence" definition of the
intellectual LEVEL and that is untenable. People of the social era
surely made calculations (the Egyptians of the pyramidical form)
and what is the big difference between calculation and math?
None whatsoever, and "mathematics an exception to the S/O"?
I'll wait for your elaborating here before answering this seemingly
nonsensical statement.
Scott:
I don't know what you mean by "subscribe to the "intelligence" definition of
the intellectual LEVEL", so can't comment on it.
On mathematics, as Coleridge and others have pointed out, mathematical
"objects", such as zero-dimensional points, perfectly straight and
width-less lines, proofs, and so on, exist only when they are thought, that
the thinking of them *is* the object, so there is no subject working with a
separate object. An ancient Egyptian knew that a triangle of 3, 4, and 5
unit sides gave him a right angle. He did not know that for any a, b, and c,
where a^2 + b^2 = c^2 one gets a right angle. He could not have the concept
of an irrational number, and so on. Applied mathematics is not the same as
pure mathematics, and calculating is applied mathematics. I do think that
mathematical thinking would not have arisen without more general S/O
thinking, but in itself, in the act of thinking, it is not S/O.
> Yes, I've read Jaynes. I am also aware that Jaynes' had to squeeze his
> correct observation (that intellect -- that my thoughts are *my*
> thoughts -- started after Homer) into a materialist framework.
Bo said:
How you manage to nail me a materialist is beyond me, maybe
because you are an idealist and sees no other alternative. After
rejecting the SOM - and its idealist/materialist dichotomy - this is
"over and out".
Scott:
I do not call you a materialist. I am only pointing out that you, and
Pirsig, and most everybody, continue to work within a framework that is only
required by materialists, namely, the belief that the inorganic existed all
by itself, and then -- somehow -- evolved into the biological, etc. When you
consider that all that we perceive of the inorganic through our senses is
created only when we sense it (color, extension, etc.), and when you toss in
quantum non-locality, there is no reason to persist in this framework, and
good reasons to reject it, mainly because there is no "somehow" for
sentience to arise from non-sentience, intellect from non-intellect.
- Scott
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