From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Wed Jul 09 2003 - 07:17:45 BST
Hi Steve.
You are exchanging views with many, but give this some
consideration, I'll be away for a week so take your time.
On 7 July you wrote:
> Bo, let me see if I understand what you are saying. I think you
> claim that all of our intellectual patterns are formed within a
> broad SOM cognitive structure
Exactly ...as Q-intellect it's S/O, the 'M' taken over by the MOQ, but
OK.
> ....................and thanks to Pirsig we now have a new structure
> of the MOQ within which to form an alternative set of intellectual
> patterns.
The Quality Idea is from intellect and is still an intellectual
pattern, but an unruly one, one that DQ will use to escape intellect
....for intellect is a STATIC level, it can't change it's value.
> SOM was a "container" and here we have a new container in
> the MOQ so you don't want to say that these containers contain
> themselves.
I could start on my old assertion that the various levels were its era's
"metaphysics" and thus contained everything, but let's not get lost, I
so badly want to explore the two definitions of intellect.
> I also think it makes sense to think of the MOQ container as
> containing SOM but I disagree that SOM is equivalent to the
> intellectual level if that's what you are suggesting. I see both
> containers existing within the intellectual level.
OK you are of the "thinking" definition. One of my many objections to
the latter is that I don't see any logical path from "thinking" to the
intellectual value patterns that Pirsig lists in LILA. For instance
how can it lead to an impartial juridical system? The
S/O-intellect explains it perfectly as the value of distinguishing
between what is objective (true) in contrast to (subjective)
opinion. Pre-intellectual (in the s/o sense) people had courts of law
but it was justice according to the ruler, or according to religious
(social value) law. How could "thinking" or "manipulation of symbols"
lead to this?
I had said:
> > What I meant was just that ideas or thinking or language once were
> > part of social reality. You say that "inter-subjective agreement"
> > (between people no?) is important to the stability of INTELLECTUAL
> > patterns of value". If language - per se - is intellectual, then
> > the intellectual LEVEL is as old as language - as the human brain
> > even, but Pirsig of LILA says that the transition took place AFTER
> > Homer's time.
> Steve:
> I think the transition he's talking about in ancient Greece is when
> the first people began to become dominated by intellectual patterns
> of value and the transition exemplified in Wilson after WWI was
> about the bulk of American society becoming dominated by
> intellectual patterns. In neither case do I think he is talking
> about when we might board a time machine to go back and observe the
> first intellectual pattern evolving. That happened much earlier
> than Homer.
Maybe I have forfeited my right to cite Pirsig, but the author of LILA
says "..in Homer's time when evolution had not yet
transcended the social level into the intellectual ...". What were the
intellectual patterns before the said transition?
The MOQ says that one particular pattern from a level becomes the
"vehicle" for the next (the carbon atom became the building block for
biology) but while in the parent level it is parent value through and
through. Language which is what we mean by thinking (Wittgenstein)
was an advanced social pattern and became the vehicle that DQ rode
to intellect ...where it (or thinking) became something different
from reality. This detached S/O attitude was an enormous
improvement which - after having hibernated through the Dark Ages
and all that - fostered modernity.
I said: (about the annotating Pirsig)
> > I think he says "..the idea of '...collection and manipulation of
> > symbols as different from the physical counterpart in the brain'
> > became the intellectual level of experience".
You replied:
> I don't follow your point.
Don't you? Intellectual VALUE is splitting experience into
SUBJECTIVE THINKING different from OBJECTIVE REALITY.
Above is my twist to the "manipulation of symbols" variant.
> Steve:
> I do think of societies as existing before the intellectual level.
> It would be interesting and probably astounding to think about
> exactly what such societies were capable of using only biological
> instinct and socially copied behavior just as it is astounding to
> see the complex emergent behavior in bees though they presumably
> have no social patterns.
Please Steve. "Using only biological instincts and social copied
behaviour" ? Who has invented these absurd terms about humans as
intelligent and capable of mastering their environment as any latter
day individual. The absurdity is due to the unholy mixing of
INTELLIGENCE and INTELLECT.
Bo
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