From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Sun Jan 11 2004 - 18:47:58 GMT
David M. Steve (David B. "courted":)
Steve:
> > During this social era, which I take to mean the era
> > before intellect
> > reached a certain degree of freedom from social control,
What strange "mechanism" is it that kicks in with the intellectual level?
All levels are identical with with their first patterns, so why this
mysterious intellect before intellect? The "freedom from social control"
you speak of is what what Pirsig places around WW1.
> > such an
> > explanation of experience was still an example of intellect.
Here it is again! Pirsig addressed it in his letter to Paul about "thinking"
receding backwards into absurdity. Didn't you not notice Steve? Tell us
when the intellectual LEVEL entered the scene? Not when it won
independence, but its emergence, and also how intellect is "out of
society" yet never free of it ..which is such an important tenet to Pirsig.
> > Spirits seeking mother earth has been proven to be a bad
> > intellectual pattern, but it is still an intellectual pattern, a
> > pattern of thought.
This makes the whole social value a bad intellectual "pattern" ....which it
is seen from intellect only, but the MOQ view sees things offset even
from intellect.
Social value is crucial in understanding the MOQ. I must again mention
DMB and his splendid defense of it, linking it to the mythological past.
Regrettably he got "seduced" by Paul Turner and has now turned silent
for the reason that he sees that his original take of it aligns with mine,
but as he has rejected my SOL-idea he is now stuck and have lost his
once great drive.
> > DM: I see what you're saying. I think Bo's point is that it is only
> > once the SO divide is being used by thinking that is has the sort of
> > power/use that we would now call intellectual.
Yes, that's it.
> > Any other
> > suggestions for a sort of thinking that is intellectual but does not
> > use SO divide?
Exactly!
> Steve:
> In the MOQ, intellectual is a type of pattern of value. Such usage
> must be distinguished from that of labeling a person an intellectual.
> Everyone thinks, by which I mean everyone participates in intellectual
> patterns, but not everyone is considered an intellectual.
This about Lila Blewitt being conscious though no intellectual and/or the
Egyptians as master-builders while not being an intellectual culture,
seems to say something to some (DMB among those) but to me it
muddles the issue further. As said, no one speaks about life before life,
but when it comes to the 4th level there is this mysterious pre-
intellectual intellect.
> I think
> when you (DAVID M) say "only once the SO divide is being used by thinking that
> is has the sort of power/use that we would now call intellectual" I
> take you to be talking about the high quality of the intellectual
> pattern of distinguishing subjective and objective experience. It is
> a good intellectual pattern, not the only one.
I will wait for Steve's verdict on when intellect arrived, it sounds as if he
means along with the human brain and in that case there is no social
level and good old "mind from (grey) matter" is back.
> The question also depends a lot on what you (and Bo) mean by the SO
> divide. When Pirsig uses the term subject-object metaphysics, I don't
> take him to be criticizing the structure of grammar with it's subjects
> and predicates, for example.
Right, this is not the S/O divide.
> When one uses the pronoun "I" he has not
> necessarily committed an SOM sin. I take Pirsig to be talking about a
> metaphysical assumption that primary reality is composed of mental
> substances and material substances.
Mental substances? Have we entered spiritism and ectoplasm ;-)
> Perceived qualities such as color,
> odor, and temperature are secondary qualities (less than real) since
> material substance is composed of particles that have no such
> properties, and such qualities as emotions are tertiary qualities even
> further removed from primary reality.
This "wheel" has been invented, all these absurdities is WHY Phaedrus
came to the Quality Idea in the first place.
> When Pirsig uses subject-object metaphysics he also is referring to a
> distinction between subjective experience and objective experience.
I can't go into all this again, but as the said the SOM has two
components, the 'O' is the notion of a reality independent of the human
mind. While the 'S' is that of everything IS mind!! Your "experience" bit
is MOQ and as Q-intellect it is the value of this divide which has given
us modernity. This divide is wrong as a metaphysics (SOM) but is an
enormous static value.
> I don't think intellect depends on making such metaphysical assumptions.
We go in circles, but the passage in ZMM that describes the coming of
the SOM is so obviously also that of Q-intellect. The distinction between
a permanent (objective) reality indifferent to what our (subjective)
perception of it is did not emerge clean cut, but had a long development
before it reached the mind/matter variety of Descartes, but from the first
moment it drove a wedge through the old mythological reality ..which
becomes Q-society.
> Intellect logically has to be in place before philosophy can evolve,
Here again (your) intellect is "thinking" and your own premises makes it
plain.
> since one must think before he can think about thinking, so SOM
> philosophical assumptions cannot be the equivalent of intellect.
The great Greek minds (who we call philosophers) did not speak about
"thinking about thinking" but about finding the TRUTH and defending
the value of the idea of a truth from its perverting by the Sophists.
> > Also you (DAVID M) say: mathematics for example does not require the
> > supposition of material substances interacting with mental substances.
Even though a white-frocked scientist in front of a blackboard scribbling
away at equations is the essence of intellect, calculation per se isn't
intellect. The Stone Henge "contractors" calculated things to get it right,
as did the pyramid builders and the Babylonians and all the great
cultures.
> > See the possibility of an argument that maths does exactly this via
> > its use of the concept of space as a form of experience:
I am not always able to interpret David's style, but hope he (too) says
that calculation - by mathematical or other means - isn't intellect. But as
math is used by science ...of course!
IMO
Bo
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