From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Wed Jul 20 2005 - 17:48:54 BST
Sam,
>What I am trying to do is distinguish between the patterns which represent
>the human being (or, perhaps better, the discriminating intellect) from the
>patterns which represent,eg, an equation. I'm not denying that the human
>being - the interesting thing about the human being - can be described as
>intellectual patterns, I just think there is an important division between
>the one set and the other, and the division is that the human intellectual
>patterns are able to respond to Quality, whereas the equation patterns
>can't.
Paul: Okay, I see. Well I think in LILA it says that intellectual patterns
can't respond to Dynamic Quality without the parallel social, biological and
inorganic patterns ("the living being") which support them. Is this what
you mean?
>>>When you say that 'generalised propositional truths' do some organising,
>I
>>>am wondering: how? In what way can a proposition organise anything? Are
>>>the
>>>sentences in the books on my shelves secretly plotting together for that
>>>glorious day when the tyranny of human beings is overcome and the
>>>propositions can leap free from their imprisonment on the printed page?
>>
>> Paul: Uh, yeah, that's what I mean....
>>
>> Please.
>
>That image was intended to raise a smile, not a sigh... ;-)
Paul: How dare you inject humour into the proceedings! :-)
>OK, I'll go through the next bit slowly to see if I can tease out what my
>concern is (where I see the gap)
>
>> The self-reweaving web which responds to Quality *is* the intellectual
>> patterns of value.
>
>I would rather say the self-reweaving web (SRW) is made of intellectual
>patterns of value, but yes.
>
>> Humans *are*, along with the other patterns,
>> intellectual patterns of value, they don't *have* them.
>
>I'd rather say that a mind is an intellectual pattern of value, and keep
>'human' for the whole agglomeration of inorganic, biological etc. In which
>case it makes sense to speak of a human having intellectual patterns, but
>of
>the human mind being intellectual patterns. Happy with that?
Paul: As long as it is understood that there is no mind separate from the
intellectual patterns i.e. a mind that would be there without any patterns.
>> Generalised
>> propositional truths are intellectual patterns.
>
>OK.
>
>> Generalised propositional
>> truths are in the web of belief, so I can't see what the issue is.
>
>So, generalised propositional truths (GPT) form part of the SRW. I'm happy
>with that.
>
>> All I'm
>> adding is that there are some intellectual patterns in this web of belief
>> which justify a significant amount of other intellectual patterns.
>
>I quibble with the 'justify' but that's a bit beside the point here (I see
>the logic going from the detail to the abstract, you seem to see it the
>other way round. Plato/Aristotle?).
>
>Are you saying that the mind IS a GPT?
Paul: No, I'm saying mind is webs of intellectual patterns and GPTs are
central to the organisation or structure of the webs.
>I would say the mind (a collection of intellectual patterns) is able to
>contain GPT, and manipulate GPT, but is not itself adequately described as
>GPT.
Paul: Agreed, but given that the intellectual patterns are self-reweaving
I'm not sure why you say that mind is "able to manipulate GPTs."
>And, most importantly, I don't think that GPT has the capacity to respond
>to
>Quality independently of other aspects of the human mind which don't
>qualify
>as GPT. Hence I question whether GPT can organise anything.
Paul: Okay. I wasn't clear on this. I think that the whole web is what
responds. This is because the atomistic idea of individual concepts being
paired off against reality is part of a representationalist position which I
would like to leave behind. Each pattern in a web is what it is - is
valuable - by virtue of its relationship with the rest of the web. Some
patterns have more justificatory relationships - are depended on by more
patterns for their truth - than are others. These are the GPTs. I think it
was the organisation of beliefs around these GPTs that marked the beginning
of a new level of static quality. Beliefs became justified by their place
in a web rather than by the social level authority of their proponents. Do
you see where I'm coming from?
>> From
>> Aristotelian logic, the tetralemma, the number system, algebra,
>> geometrical
>> axioms through to evolution, cosmology, "nothing can travel faster than
>> the
>> speed of light," and "everything is value," there are propositional
>truths
>> which hold webs together, decide what is part of the web and what isn't -
>> they organise knowledge. They are the roots from which branches grow.
>> They
>> are the definitive beliefs of paradigms. When they go, much of the web
>> goes
>> with it.
>
>I would describe them as the ropes which lash together a cargo. I'm
>interested in what is valuing the cargo, and therefore making use of the
>rope.
>
>A different image: my kids play with lego. The lego can be organised by
>colour, shape, size etc. Colour, shape and size are GPT, but the GPT are
>applied to the lego, the lego doesn't self-assemble (which would it
>choose?). The GPT (of colour, shape or size) is valued at a particular
>point
>in time by the patterns in the mind of the child, but that which is doing
>the valuing (and therefore guiding the sorting and the application of the
>GPT into colour OR shape OR size) is not itself a GPT.
Paul: I'm afraid your analogies aren't helping me see the problem.
However, as I've said, it's the whole web which is responding to Quality and
reweaving patterns. Maybe that answers you?
>It's as if the GPTs are algorithms which are used to sort and render more
>efficient processes in the mind (in the same way that an algorithm can
>compress a digital picture into a JPG format). But I don't think that a)
>the
>mind is completely reducible to algorithms in this way, and b) the most
>interesting things about the mind, from my point of view, are the ones
>which
>don't naturally fall under the description of GPT. Virtues, for example, or
>decision making. (Of course, it's precisely the decision making which I
>think GPT is incapable of).
Paul: Algorithms? No, they are just the intellectual patterns which
justify lots of other patterns, like centres of justificatory gravity to
mash up another Rortyan term. If the whole web of patterns is responding,
they are the patterns which are least likely to be modified, the patterns
that are of the highest static quality.
>> Paul: Okay, well maybe she learns the general propositional truths later
>> but the beliefs she learns first may still be organised around those
>> general
>> truths regardless.
>
>Hmmm. I think there is a really large disagreement between us here, one of
>those disagreements that is so large it underlies just about everything
>else. Interesting. I think it's that Plato/Aristotle thing again. Is a GPT
>the same as a Platonic form?
Paul: Not at all. I am just saying that one is born into a culture which
already has these huge webs of intellectual patterns which are "transmitted"
to people through education, media, families etc. Infants don't work it all
out from scratch.
No, I'm not saying there are transcendent GPTs waiting to be fathomed out or
recollected. Is that really how this is coming across?
>Are you saying that the GPT (an intellectual pattern) organises social
>level
>patterns (some beliefs are social level patterns, would you agree) - even
>before the intellectual level has come into being?
Paul: No. I think those beliefs were (and still are) part of the stories
and rituals that were/are organised around static social structures of
cohesion, authority, status etc. When beliefs were/are organised into
static structures of their own I think we have an intellectual level.
This is a work in progress so if all of this sounds like gibberish, perhaps
I should work it through on my own and present a more refined idea to you.
Regards
Paul
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