From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Tue Apr 22 2003 - 04:22:25 BST
Wim,
Wim wrote:
> Sam wrote 21 Apr 2003 12:01:34 +0100 that he didn't agree with Scott that
> consciousness is full-blown and not something that comes in degrees. He
> asked Scott:
> 'If so, how do you understand the development of consciousness in human
> development, ie from embryo through childhood to adulthood? Aren't there
> degrees of consciousness there?'
>
> Sam wrote 29 Oct 2002 07:56:14 -0000 that he had a good deal of agreement
> with my statements that it is better to speak of 'adding people/societies
to
> 4th level patterns of value' than of 'adding 4th level values to
> people/societies' and 'that it is not people or societies that "become"
4th
> level patterns of values (that wrongly reifies patterns of values), but
> people or societies that start experiencing 4th level patterns of values
> (their experience bringing them into being)'. He added then:
> 'I wonder how far it would be fair to describe someone being added to
> fourth level patterns of values as being
> "born again"'.
>
> If both of you (still) agree with what I wrote and with Pirsig's
> identification of consciousness and intellectual patterns of value in
> 'Lila's Child', would you agree
I don't know what I would be agreeing or disagreeing with here, so I'll just
pass on to the following.
> 1) that the intellectual level is something that exists once intellectual
> patterns of value are experienced by some humans,
Not quite. In my understanding [following Barfield] of the fourth level, it
occurs when intellectual patterns of value are experienced by some humans
*as coming from themselves*, and not as coming from "the gods".
> 2) that intellectual static quality, i.e. the value of the stability and
> versatility of intellectual patterns of value, doesn't come in degrees
> during the evolution of the MoQ levels, but once and for all at the moment
> that the intellectual level was first experienced by humans,
Paraphrasing my posts to Sam, I see intellectual patterns of value as being
in existence at all levels, that all static patterns of value are word-like
(symbolic of nature), but it is only our conventional way of looking at them
that prevents us from "reading" them. However, to differentiate among the
levels, I use conventional truth, and mostly agree with this. The exception
is that in the social level there are experiences of symbolic patterns, so
the difference here is, as in (1), whether the human experiences him- or
herself as the originator of those patterns.
> 3) that individual human development can best be understood as a
succession
> of 'births' and periods of being brought up to full participation into
> successively the biological, the social and the intellectual level and ...
No, at least not in the sense that the social is completed before the
intellectual begins. They all overlap, though the biological begins before
the social, and the social before the intellectual.
> 4) that 'intellectual patterns of value' and 'the intellectual level' can
be
> substituted by 'consciousness'?
Not the way I use the word consciousness. And I don't think in general.
Sensory perception is a part of consciousness but doesn't require intellect.
(Conventionally speaking. One can say that there is something intellectual,
that is symbol manipulation, going on -- in the non-conventional sense --
but in contemporary humans it is unconscious. It is what Barfield calls
"figuration": turning the potential (say quantum reality) into
visual/auditory/etc. macroscopic patterns.)
- Scott
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