From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 18:09:40 BST
Nice to meet you Paul.
On 27 June you wrote:
> Squonk's idea of an ancient mind-intellect is direct
> from Pirsig.
I know. Let's rather see where this leads.
> 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.
Don't you think that Cro-Magnon people thought about existence,
theorised about origin and destiny ...besides hunting and reproducing
themselves? And they were solidly within social reality.
> 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.
Sure, if language is synonymous with the intellectual LEVEL,
everything is intellectual ...or in the mind. But that can't be if the
MOQ is to replace the SOM.
> A mind thought of it and directed a body
> to write it down
A mind directed a body? See where we end up.
> 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.
Me/not me is not the intellectual level - all organisms knows that
difference (humans "know" it biologically when the immune system
attacks an intruder) no, it is the capacity to ask what is (objectively)
true as different from (subjective) opinion. Social focussed mankind
(my Cro Magnons) did not ask for an "objective explanation" of
observed phenomena. There were no sceptics who said "is it REALLY
true this about gods and such"? The transition from the social- to the
intellectual reality is splendidly described in ZMM.
> The human body is
> a hugely successful biological pattern of value but is
> not mistaken for biological quality itself,
The human body (along with all mammals) is a hugely complex
biological pattern, but in terms of (biological) survival it is beaten by
the less complex ones.
> the USA is
> a hugely successful social pattern of value but is not
> mistaken for social quality itself.
The social patterns are almost invisible under the huge intellectual
superstructure of ALL western countries. USA's success - sure, and
that is no sarcasm.
> 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.
SOM's dilemma is that everything is either mind or mind is some by-
product. When complex enough biological grey matter spawns mind,
awareness or consciousness. If this mind is transferred into the MOQ
as intellect everything is intellectual. Even DQ which Squonk puts so
much faith in because DQ is part and parcel of the MOQ which
allegedly is an intellectual pattern) This can't be. The QUALITY IDEA
is some rebel intellectual pattern an the resistance to the proper MOQ
shows intellect's sway over reality.
> 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.
Ah, I see you and I have the same opinion here. Good!
> In
> the MOQ you can have both without contradiction,
> because it says that experience creates patterns of
> value that can be called matter
Agree! " ...can be called matter ..", but in the MOQ it's static patterns
of inorganic value.
> and experience creates
> patterns that can be called mind.
Yes, yes and yes again, it can be called mind, but the problem is that
it is interpreted as SOM's mind, nobody makes the distinction, not
even the annotating Pirsig who calls it "an exact equivalent".
> These are static
> divisions and the experience prior to when it is
> differentiated is not called mind or matter or
> anything.
Right!
> 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.
All levels grow on top of the former (right, no extension yet ...) so
intellectual experience does not come out of the blue creating
"thoughts" at the intellectual level, it's from society.
> 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.
Many mammals have brains the size of the human brain, but this is
really irrelevant IMO.
> 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.
I fully agree with you here, biologically we experience (the value of)
VISION (to pick one sense) my point is that if you first start down the
"symbols" lane regarding intellect you end up with symbols only.
> 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.
Agree. Re. senses we experience vision, smell, sound etc. It's the S/O
divide that says that colors are subjective, objectively they are different
wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum ..etc. So why apply the
S/O analysis to intellectual experience? It's the beauty of the MOQ
that it has rid us of SOM ....in my opinion by making intellect the S/O
divide itself. A a mere static value level, not a metaphysics. Intellect is
the greatest value there is, it has given us the modern world, but as a
metaphysics it's impossible.
I'm afraid this is approaching the message limit. I have read
everything you wrote and taken your point about me creating a new
metaphysics. However, the essence of the MOQ is the rejection of the
SOM, the DQ/SQ dichotomy and the static hierarchy and I embrace
everything, it's just the intellectual level I'm not all happy with .. it looks
like a few other are of the same opinion, maybe not as tenacious.
Sincerely.
Bo
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