From: Paul Turner (pauljturner@yahoo.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jun 27 2003 - 16:57:48 BST
Hi Bo, Squonk
If I may throw in some thoughts...
Bo said:
"I would of course have liked Scott to stand firmer
against Squonk's idea of
an ancient "mind-intellect" that just spawned a SOM
around Homer's time"
Paul:
Squonk's idea of an ancient mind-intellect is direct
from Pirsig. Intellect is exactly the same as mind.
Intellect is just thinking. By the time anyone living
in ancient Greece was able to write the Iliad or talk
about mind and matter, the intellect had helped build
up a society advanced and organised enough to keep
records of what they thought about. The intellect used
society to further its evolution, just as social
patterns of value used biology, and biology used
inorganic nature to do the same.
In the MOQ, everything that has ever been written down
anywhere in the world is an intellectual pattern of
value. Odyssey, the Tao Te Ching, the Bible - it's all
intellectual. A mind thought of it and directed a body
to write it down in a socially learned symbolic
language. The ideas were propagated in society,
theatre, school, church, and recorded in scriptures,
tomes, tablets and books. The idea of me/not me that
appears to have dawned in ancient Greece is a hugely
successful way of differentiating experience which
seems to have exponentially advanced the intellect but
it is not synonymous with intellect. The human body is
a hugely successful biological pattern of value but is
not mistaken for biological quality itself, the USA is
a hugely successful social pattern of value but is not
mistaken for social quality itself.
Bo said:
"but at least Scott sees that - in that case -
"....all static patterns are in some
sense "intellectual"". Which is good old SOM's
"everything is in the mind"
and bye to the MOQ."
Paul:
The MOQ 'description' of patterns of value is 'all in
the mind', it is an intellectual pattern of value
providing a high quality explanation of experience (to
me at least). The value which differentiated the
experience which the MOQ describes is not in the mind
or in society or in plants or animals or protons or
electrons, it is prior to all of those distinctions.
Pirsig spends page after page hammering this point
because he recognises that it is a cultural blindspot.
Mind in SOM is a problem because you either have to be
broadly a materialist and say that matter creates mind
or broadly an idealist and say that mind creates
matter. In SOM, reality is either mind or it is
matter, and whichever it is, the other is not real. In
the MOQ you can have both without contradiction,
because it says that experience creates patterns of
value that can be called matter and experience creates
patterns that can be called mind. These are static
divisions and the experience prior to when it is
differentiated is not called mind or matter or
anything.
Bo said:
"In the above quote (and throughout the entire LILA
book) Pirsig points out
that intellect is out of social value, but the LC
comment sounds uncannily
like intellect is out of brain."
Paul:
At the biological level experience creates sensation
stored in the brain; at the social level experience
creates non-hardwired repetitively learned behaviour
stored in customs, relationships and institutions; at
the intellectual level experience creates thoughts
stored in a repertoire of symbols. Experience creates
patterns at all levels but each level is brought about
by the same undifferentiated experience.
In the evolutionary hierarchy set out by the MOQ, an
organism with a brain is a necessity for both society
and thinking, experience seems to support this and
therefore supports Pirsig's statement that experience
that creates intellectual symbols in the mind is also
biologically stored in the brain.
Intellectual patterns of value are built on top of
social value but are not an extension of it. The
non-hardwired rituals and routines created and copied
as social patterns of value to dominate biological
patterns of value provide a selection and valuation of
experience which will be created in the brain and
symbolised in the intellect. In terms of the emergence
of the intellect itself, the notion of 'good' and 'not
good' referring to such socially valued experience may
be candidates for concepts forming at the beginning of
the intellectual level, not the enormously advanced
and complex arrangement of experience into an abiding
self in a world of seperately existing entities that
is assumed by subject-object constructions. Pirsig
speculates that the first concept may be 'change', the
oldest words seem to refer to 'repetitive order',
which seems to indicate an awareness of the pattern
based nature of reality rather than the substance
based version we were lumbered with.
Bo said:
"What is not symbols if starting down that lane?
Sense impressions in the brain are electric pulses
which "symbolize" reality
"out there" (patterns of inorganic experience) thus
the biological level is
symbols too. "
Paul:
You can choose to cloud the definition of levels and
call sensations 'symbols' if you wish but remember
that, in the MOQ, the brain doesn't experience
"reality out there", it experiences value. If we
consider experience in terms of biological patterns we
can study sensation or as you put it, electrical
pulses. If we consider experience in terms of
intellectual patterns we can study symbolic concepts
such as "out there", neither necessarily dominates or
contains the other, they are discrete patterns of
value.
Also, when you say that sense impressions are created
in a brain as a "symbolic" electrical pulse you have
slipped into an assumption that there is a one-to-one
relationship between an electrical pulse in a
pre-existing brain caused by a pre-existing object.
That is a good materialist assumption within limits
(although there have been many different explanations
offered e.g. Pribram's holographic model and the self
organising neural network model which are equally as
good) but you could sample and probe the electrical
pulse forever and never recreate the 'object' that you
have assumed has caused it. In the MOQ, value
differentiated experience is the starting point of
static patterns, not an object or a sense impression
or a brain, they are the patterns and explanations
that come after. You can empirically verify the value
differentiated experience that 'causes' an electrical
pulse and the thoughts brought to mind about an
external object, but not the direct correlation
between an electrical pulse and an object.
Bo said:
"If not the "manipulation" term is the key? It
indicates a subject having
an objective view of things - able to shuffle around
with the symbols; to think
abstractly.. I'll try to develop this in my next
instalment. "
Paul:
I think "manipulation" refers to the pattern forming
process of a repertoire of symbols to organise and
explain experience in an attempt to provoke coherent
and appropriate activity. If those patterns involve a
concept of 'subject' and 'object' then that may entail
a subject-object organisation of experience. The mind
of an artist (or a good motorcycle mechanic :-)) may
organise experience in a non-dualistic way in order to
not shut out value.
If you maintain that subject-object thinking is the
same as the intellect then I suggest that you have
devised your own metaphysics and the forum may be
willing to discuss its merits (and I must say that
after reading page after page of it in LC and in the
archives your tenacity for the S/O as intellect theory
is staggering), but I would maintain that it is not
Pirsig's MOQ as presented in ZMM, Lila, SODV and LC.
In fact, Pirsig clearly states in LC that it is not
what is meant by the intellectual level in the MOQ.
But I don't think that this is the issue anymore.
cheers
Paul
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