From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 03 2003 - 18:02:58 BST
Thanks Rick,
So it is the social patterns that shape humans that are the giant. I agree
with you that Platt and I were being too narrow, and that the economic
systems are organs of the giant. A long time ago, humans were shaped into
social roles by a giant that was probably 90% environmental - biology
dictated what it meant to be a farmer, a hunter, a mother or father. But
now those organs are 90% intellectual, the economy and technology shape our
roles and wills.
Social patterns have been changed by intellectual patterns, some have
suggested that perhaps all social patterns started as static latches of
early simultaneous intellectual ideas but I wouldn't go that far, I think
most evolved out of biological necessity. But since those early days,
social patterns have been shaped by their own Giant, the Intellectual Giant.
But to us, it is all the same, just one big Giant. It doesn't really
matter if it is social forces or intellectual forces that force us to go to
work in the morning.
Johnny
>From: "Valence" <valence10@hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: moq_discuss@moq.org
>To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
>Subject: Re: MD The Giant
>Date: Thu, 3 Jul 2003 03:48:18 -0400
>
>Hey Johnny, Platt, Scott and all,
>Thought this was an interesting thread and just wanted to throw my two
>cents
>in...
>
>JOHNNY
>Is the Giant primarily the social patterns, along the lines of government,
>that keep cities humming, as Platt says, or is it more the economic system
>of free enterprise, and technology?
>
>Platt wants to put the Giant in the third level, so that the fourth level
>can be free of any "bad" patterns. I think the Giant is a fourth level
>pattern, I like to see the third level as pristine.
>
>
>PIRSIG (LILA 247)
> It used to fill his dreams, night after night. When he was little it
>was a giant octopus that he'd seen in a cartoon movie. The octopus would
>come up on the beach and wrap its tentacles around him and squeeze him to
>death. He would wake up in the dark and think he was dead. Later it was
>huge, shadowy, faceless giant who was coming to kill him. He would wake up
>afraid and the slowly realize the giant wasn't real. He supposed
>everyone had dreams like that although he doubted whether most people had
>them so often.
> He had come to think of dreams as Dynamic perception of reality....
>The
>static patterns of dreams were false but the underlying values that
>produced
>the patterns were true. In static reality there is no octopus coming to
>squeeze us to death, no giant that is going to devour us and digest us and
>turn us into a part of its own body so that it can grow stronger and
>stronger while we are dissolved and lost into nothingness. But in Dynamic
>reality?
> ....He'd seen drawings of manhole of how manholes led down to
>staggeringly complex underground networks of systems that made this whole
>island happen: electric power networks, telephone networks, water-pipe
>networks, gas line networks, sewage networks, subway tunnels, networks he
>had never even heard of, like the nerves and arteries and muscle fibers of
>a giant organism.
> The Giant of his dreams.
> ....When he was young Phaedrus used to think about cows and pigs and
>chickens and how they never knew that the nice farmer who provided food and
>shelter was doing so only so that he could sell them to be killed and
>eaten.
>Thy would "oink" or "cluck" and he would come with food, so they probably
>thought he was some sort of servant.
> He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same
>thing to people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and
>though of as beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from
>enemies, but an organism that secretly was raising there people for its own
>sustenance, feeding upon them and using their accumulated energy for its
>own
>independent purposes. Later he saw there was: this Giant. People took
>upon
>the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon
>a
>farmer... Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its
>own
>purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals....
>
>RICK
>While Phaedrus's initial perception of the Giant came through a Dynamic
>perception of reality, the Giant itself he explicitly declares in the last
>paragraph quoted, is code for static social patterns ("...People took upon
>the social patterns of the Giant..."). This would make Platt correct in
>placing the Giant on the third level (at least in Pirsig's estimation).
>Moreover, the farmer analogy indicates Phaedrus's insight is that
>biological man (like the biological chicken) is really just being used by
>the Giant. A 'farmer', keep in mind, is himself a social pattern and thus a
>'tendril' of the Giant (to mix metaphors). That is, the analogy breaks
>down
>to ---Giant (social pattern) is to man (biological pattern) what farmer
>(social pattern) is to chicken (biological pattern). I believe the overall
>inference is that the Giant is the "sum total of all social patterns" and
>therefore I think both Platt and Johnny's conceptions of the Giant are too
>narrow. Free enterprise, capitalism, governments, agriculture, etc are all
>just "organs" of the Giant. Like a biological human needs a heart and
>lungs
>and a brain, a sociological Giant needs an economy, a government and plenty
>of farmers.
>
>take care
>rick
>
>
>Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to
>make it precise. - Bertrand Russell
>
>
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