From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 13:51:01 BST
Hi Paul,
You post of June 27 on "The Intellectual Level" was so good it bears
repeating. Thanks for a wonderful summary of the MoQ.
Platt
> 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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