From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2003 - 20:49:07 GMT
DMB,
Your last post (below) was very interesting and illuminating for me. Does
your "thinking about thinking" way of distinguishing the social and
intellectual levels reflect a change in the way that you are currently
thinking about the levels or is a new way to articulate how you've always
defined the levels?
"Thinking about thinking" doesn't sound far off from Wim's intellectual
static latch of "copied rationale." Would you agree? How would you
contrast your views?
Regards,
Steve
> Sam, Platt, Wim, Johnny and all:
>
> DMB says:
> The following comments show that there is a wide range of opinion about what
> distinguishes the social from the intellectual level. Johnny seems to be
> saying that all living things have ideas. Platt seems to be saying that all
> human beings have intellectual values. Wim seems to insist that the social
> level is altogether unthinking so that even the manufacture of tools is an
> unconscious behaviour. Clearly, these various notions are not compatable and
> somebody, or maybe everybody, has to be wrong. Check it out. I'll have more
> comments below...
>
> Platt asked Johnny:
>> How do you define "idea?" Is a buzzard swooping down on an a gazelle
>> carcass acting on an idea? How about a bee looking for nectar, or a
>> germ looking for a cell to infect, or a sunflower following the sun
>> across the sky? Where do ideas end and instincts begin?
>
> Johnny answered:
> This is why I think using "idea" is problematic. I do think bees have
> ideas, and I could even, if drunk enough, defend the idea that sunflowers
> have ideas too, just not very many. Schopenhauer's "The World As Will and
> Idea" suggests that everything is an idea of itself and what it will.
> Certainly we humans have ideas that we would put at the social level,
> anyway, right? Like 'adultery is a sin' and stuff like that?
>
> On Nov 24 Platt said:
> 'All humans have intellect. To suggest that an individual's religious
> beliefs, political leanings, or sexual practices are the decisive criteria
> in determining intellect is ... "quite preposterous."'
>
> On Feb 18th, Wim said:
> Intellectual patterns of value were first created by homo sapiens, between
> 50.000 and 100.000 years ago. Rituals (elaborate patterns of essentially
> unthinking behavior preserving the best know-how available to a society) may
> have been 'the connecting link between the social and intellectual levels of
> evolution' (according to Pirsig in chapter 30 of 'Lila'). ... Anyway, among
> those patterns of unthinking behavior that were passed on between
> generations of hominids long before intellectual patterns of valuewere
> around were ...
> the making of artifacts. At first only sharpened sticks and stones to beat
> of predators with. They were neither designed nor consciously discovered.
> They were simply used because they worked. ... Even today, although most
> artifacts are consciously designed or discovered the first time, they are
> often (re)produced by unthinking routine behavior, by social patterns of
> value.
>
> DMB says:
> I guess it comes down to what we mean by words such as "instinct",
> "unthinking", "idea", "intellectual" and other key terms. But surely the
> trick here is to see what Pirsig means. He's the one who has "invented" the
> MOQ's categories of being, but of course these are supposed to sort out the
> things in the world that we already know. Only the sorting is new. The
> social level is one of the most important ways that the MOQ is different
> than SOM, and as such it is the source of a great deal of confusion. Thus
> the various opinions re-posted here. Let me take another stab at it.
>
> The social level is the level between instinct and philosophy. It is BETWEEN
> the biological and the intellectual, but is neither of them. SOM can't solve
> the mind/body problem because it does not see this middle term. It goes
> directly from biolocial brains to intellectual ideas, as if there were
> nothing in between, as if myth, ritual, religion and other social patterns
> were merely immature, irrational, unscientific ideas. They are seen as BAD
> ideas, but ideas all the same. Pirsig says no, these two forms of
> consciousness, may seem to be all of a kind, but are in fact two completely
> different levels of reality.
>
> This important distinction is undermined by saying all living creatures have
> ideas because it confuses biology with intellect. This distinction is undone
> by saying all people have intellect because it confuses social values from
> intellect. This distinction is erased by insisting that the social level is
> unthinking or unconscious because that deprives the social of its
> thoughtfull and wisdom. There was a point I made months ago that was pretty
> much laughed off the stage, but perhaps the light shed on the issues in
> conversations since
> will make it easier to see. I'm especially thinking of the exchanges Between
> Sam and me and others. I'd like to suggest that people "think" with social
> values most of the time, that our "ideas" are social values. We could say
> that thinking is social, whereas thinking ABOUT thinking is intellectual.
> Take a look at what the Oxford Companion to Philosophy says about philosophy
> itself.
>
> "The shortest definition, and it is quite a good one, is that philosophy is
> thinking about thinking. That brings out the generally second-order
> character of the subject, as reflective thought about particular kinds of
> thinking - formation of beliefs, claims to knowledge - about the world or
> large parts of it. A more detailed, but still uncontroversially
> comprehesive, definition is that philosophy is rationally critical thinking,
> of a more or less systematic kind about the general nature of the world
> (mataphysics or theory of existence), the justification of belief
> (epistemology or theory of knowledge), and the conduct of life (ethics or
> theory of value). Each of the three elements in this list has a
> non-philosophical counterpart, from which it is distinquished by its
> explicity rational and critical way of proceeding and by its systematic
> nature. Everyone has some general conception of the nature of the world in
> which they live and of their place in it. Metaphysics replaces the unargued
> assumptions embodied in such a conception with a rational and organized body
> of beliefs about the world as a whole. Everybody has occasion to doubt or
> question beliefs, their own or those of others, with more or less success
> and without any theory of what they are doing. Epistemology seeks by
> argument to make explicit the rules of correct belief formation. Everyone
> governs their conduct by directing it to desired or valued ends. Ethics, or
> moral philsophy, in it most inclusive sense, seeks to articulate, in
> rationally systematic form, the rules or principles involved."
>
> DMB says:
> Here I think we can see the difference between social level thinking and
> intellectual thinking. Social level thinking is that "non-philosophical
> counterpart", is everybody's "general conception", is the "unargued
> assumptions", is thinking "without any theory". The social level is the
> reason we can think, but it takes intellect to think about thinking. Science
> is really not much different. The scientific method proscribes a very
> certain way to think about what is being explored in the lab. And just about
> any intellectual field will employ rationality and take a systematic
> approach to the issues.
>
> I think this is consistent with everything Pirsig says, such as the point I
> keep making; that all our intellectual descriptions are culturally derived.
> This is consistent with the idea that the first intellectual ideas could
> have been derived from ritual and primitive cosmology stories. It fits with
> Pirsig's insistence that Descartes depended on French culture to think. The
> social level, which includes language itself, supplies us with our "general
> conceptions" and "unargued assumptions" about the world and the intellect's
> job is to think rationally and systematically about these conceptions and
> assumptions. It is thinking about thinking.
>
> Thanks for your time,
> DMB
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