From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Jul 13 2003 - 21:07:35 BST
Hi David, all,
>dmb says:
>We built societies "using only biological instinct and socially copied
>behavior"?! I suppose the great civilizations that produced Babylon and the
>pyramids were really just a series of urges and grunts? :-) But seriously,
>the notion that our intellectual values are a property of our biological
>selves is one of those SOM problems Pirsig is trying to solve. He insists
>that there is a middle term between biology and intellect. He says the
>ususally unrecognized social level in NEITHER instinct NOR intellect, but
>something that is different from both.
I agree with you, but I do think that society had to begin before
intellectual patterns.
I think we built societies using social morals, by people doing what they
thought they should do. That sort of thinking isn't really intellectual,
but it isn't strictly copied behavior either, it is just doing what seems to
be the most desirable thing. After there was a society, it was then
inevitable for there to be Intellectual thoughts about it: how best to help
it find food, how best to distribute wealth.
Doesn't the "novel on a computer" heirarchy explain a lot? The Intellectual
level is a novel stored on a social computer, it can't run on a
biological-patterned computer, it would be like trying to run Excel without
installing Windows first. My contention is that Intellectual patterns are
about society and operate on society. Inventing a car would be an entirely
biological exercize if the inventor didn't intend to take it out of his
garage, go to the store, and sell it to other people. That is what makes it
an intellectual pattern, otherwise it would just be like taking a bath or
eating food.
This "novel on computer" way to see the heirarchy also suggests what the
fifth level is, it is something that are about the Intellectual level and
operate on Intellectual patterns, but are not intellectual patterns
themselves. This is what the Giant meant to me, though Rick and Platt have
shown me that the Giant is more general than that.
>Steve:
>Unbelievable as it may seem to think of people building physical
>structures,
>having social structures, perhaps farming, and using tools and forming
>families without intellectual patterns and only through copied behavior, it
>is also amazing to think that the value that results in a bee hive or a six
>foot tall termite mound built by tiny insects over many generations is
>somehow latched in DNA, though I think it is.
>
>dmb says:
>Yes. To achieve all that "only through copied behavior" is totally,
>entirely, and quite clearly "unbelievable". Yes, something quite important
>happened back in ancient Greece, but Pirsig is not saying we were mindless
>animals before that. The social level has an astonishing level of
>knowledge,
>wisdom, creativity, meaning, and 3rd level societies employed all sorts of
>uniquely human cognitive skills. If we add up all the terms, references and
>examples provided in Lila, surely we can see what the social level is all
>about. Just to begin a list...
>
>Homer. The Odyssey. Celebrity. The quest for fame and fortune. The mythos.
>Social culture and rhetoric. Language. The giant. God and kings and heros.
>Hitler. The Victorians. The Puritans. High school popularity contests.
>Douglas McArthur. Fundamentalism. Armies and economies. Cops and priests.
>Ritual and creation stories. War and genocide. Myths, legends, fairy tales
>and religions. Payday. Movies. Patriotism. Nationalism. Fascism. Tribalism.
>The social level values even include such standard roles as we are all
>likely to assume in our personal lives; as productive members of society,
>as
>parents, as buyers and sellers of things and all the other roles that
>constitute our conventional identities. There's a tendency to believe that
>we make rational choices about our lives, that we assume social roles as a
>matter of rational choice and so we imagine that since we can "think" about
>it and talk about it, well then it must be intellectual. (sound effects;
>Game show buzzer and descending trombone notes.) But that's just not so.
>Most of who and what we think we are is our social identity. (Let's not
>flatter ourselves at the expense of intellectual accuracy.) If the social
>level has been evolving for 160,00 years and the intellectual level for
>less
>than 3,000 years, then it only stands to reason. :-)
>
>Thanks.
Thanks for giving some much needed respect to the social level.
Johnny
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