From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Nov 25 2005 - 20:46:09 GMT
> [Arlo previously]
> Others include, the law of gravity, calculus, Quantum Physics, semiotics,
> etc. Hardly "individual vs group" values. Indeed, they are the collective
> product of group activity, essentially socially constructed ideas. Hardly
> "individual values".
>
> [Platt]
> These are "collective" socially constructed ideas? Hardly. Someone, an
> individual, was first. The rest, often reluctantly, followed.
>
> [Arlo]
> And without the "collective consciousness of all communicating mankind"
> (Pirsig) coming before (or perhaps better, "co-occuring") the "individual",
> without the historical dialogue that is language, that individual would
> hardly be able to do anything, let alone create Calculus.
Well, at least you admit the existence of individuals. That's a start.
> Calculus is a socially constructed idea, created over historical time by
> "individuals" immersed in the "collective consciousness", accessing its
> stored treasures, engaging in temporal and local dialogue, and
> appropriating its filters (or "grid") to conceptualize and categorize
> experience (through the ventriloquation of historical dialogues).
Now there's a mouthful from an individual named Arlo, who I dare say,
spoke thus like no one else in the history of mankind.
> Without this, your Randian "individual" is naught but a lump of cells. No
> calculus, no MOQ, no Platt, no Arlo. Unless "you" are nothing more than
> your body. Everything you are in your head you are because of dialectical
> blending of the "collective consciousness" and your "proprietary
> experience". From this "blending" emerges Intellectual level ideas such as
> Calculus and Quantum Physics.
As yes, the magical "emergent," the great "oops" of the inexplicable.
Reminds me of "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly there was a
scream."
Surely you can do better in telling your story about how ideas materialize than
Snoopy. And while you're at it, perhaps you can tell me what collective mind
first drew the curves that defined Snoopy on a piece of paper.
> As Pirsig says, "Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was a historically
> shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of
> evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if
> he had been a seventeenth century Chinese philosopher? If he had been,
> would anyone in seventeenth century China have listened to him and called
> him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had
> said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think,
> therefore I am," he would have been correct.""
But you cannot escape the fact that Descartes said it, not a committee,
bureau, department, council, commission, jury, conference, convention,
fraternity, parliament, commune, pow wow or group of any kind. One man,
alone, declaring independence from the social level, just as Pirsig, one
man alone, burning the midnight oil in his study, accompanied only by his
faithful dog, Rigel, asleep at his feet, putting pen to paper to declare, "A tribe
can change its values only person by person and someone has to be first."
(Lila, 9).
My hero, the "someone," the "active catalytic agent."
Platt
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