From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Jan 12 2004 - 02:53:29 GMT
Hi Bo, and those courted by Bo,
> Steve:
>>> During this social era, which I take to mean the era
>>> before intellect
>>> reached a certain degree of freedom from social control,
>
Bo said:
> What strange "mechanism" is it that kicks in with the intellectual level?
Steve:
I don't know what sort of mechanism you are looking for. Did I suggest a
special mechanism somewhere? It sounds like you are taking a materialist
stance.
Bo:
> All levels are identical with with their first patterns,
Steve:
I don't see this statement as anything close to Pirsig's MOQ. This is only
true for Bo's MOQ which defines each level as "the value of X."
>...so why this
> mysterious intellect before intellect?
Steve:
Intellect before intellect is nonsense, of course. I'm saying that there is
intellect before subjective/objective metaphysical distinctions--intellect
before philosophy.
>The "freedom from social control"
> you speak of is what what Pirsig places around WW1.
Steve:
"Freedom from social control" comes in degrees. Judgment of the quality of
intellectual patterns will always depend on social acceptability to a degree
and the symbols that are manipulated in intellectual patterns will be
maintained through unconscious copying (i.e. Language acquisition).
You may be referring to Pirsig in Lila saying, "from the idea that society
is man's highest achievement, the twentieth century moved to the idea that
intellect is man's highest achievement. " This is a shift in the way
intellectual creations were esteemed.
Social patterns, which may be best understood in terms of roles and
institutions after WWI now include a higher status role of the intellectual
including even celebrity status in some cases and a greater respect for
institutions that support intellectual evolution. Such social patterns
provide greater freedom for intellect.
>Bo: 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.
I couldn't tell you when the first pattern of manipulation of abstract
symbols that stand for patterns of experience first occurred in history.
It also occurs during the early development of each human being.
I agree that it is important to establish that social patterns preceded
intellectual patterns in history and that intellectual patterns are
dependent on social patterns.
Not being particularly inclined toward study of history it is not all that
important to me to put a date on when the first of different patterns
evolved. But it is indeed required for the static hierarchy to make any
sense that inorganic patterns existed prior to life, and that life existed
before social status and copied behaviors, and that social roles and
institutions predated symbolic thought. I see no problem with the ordering
of the hierarchy in the way I describe the types of patterns.
>>>Steve: 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.
I can't make sense of "the whole social value" in terms of static patterns
of value. Its your "value of X" version of the MOQ, I suppose. But as far as
losing the social level, I do imagine a time before there were such things
as questions and answers, when humans didn't think about why they behaved
the way they did. They simply copied the behaviors of others selecting
behavior to copy on the basis of undefined quality rather than reasoned
arguments.
Pisig in Lila: "Cave men are usually depicted as
hairy, stupid creatures who don't do much, but anthropological studies of
contemporary primitive tribes suggest that stone age people were probably
bound by ritual all day long. There's a ritual for washing, for putting up
a house, for hunting, for eating and so on-so much so that the division
between "ritual" and "knowledge" becomes indistinct. In cultures without
books ritual seems to be a public library for teaching the young and
preserving common values and information.
These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and
intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals
and dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which
generated the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual
truths could have been derived. If ritual always comes first and
intellectual principles always come later, then ritual cannot always be a
decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that
principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around."
To me all that is to say that these people hunting, building houses,
washing, etc. couldn't begin to tell you why they were doing it. "Why?" did
not exist. These early humans were copying the behavior of others without
doing any manipulation of abstract symbols that stand for patterns of
experience. The first intellectual truths came later as derivations from
ritual.
>>> Steve: such an
>>> explanation of experience [spirits living in apples or something] was still
an example of intellect.
> Bo: Here it is again! Pirsig addressed it in his letter to Paul about
>"thinking" receding backwards into absurdity. Didn't you not notice Steve?
Steve says:
Of course I noticed Pirsig's comments, but they don't apply here. I too
think it is absurd to extend thinking to describe all value choices, and
I've never tried to. Only manipulations of abstract symbols that stand for
patterns of experience qualify as intellectual. Reasoning in terms of
special powers and spirits is bad reasoning, but reasoning nonetheless.
>>>DM: Any other
>>> suggestions for a sort of thinking that is intellectual but does not
>>> use SO divide?
>
>BO: Exactly!
Steve:
Any time we are not thinking about whether something is objective fact or
subjective opinion we are thinking without using the SO divide.
>> 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.
Bo said:
>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.
Steve:
No, I am saying there is pre-philosophy intellect. You have limited
intellect to thinking about whether knowledge is objective or subjective
which excludes most patterns of thought.
>>Steve said: 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.
Bo said:
> 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.
Steve:
Bo, I have explained my understanding of social patterns to you many times.
Social patterns are those maintained through unthinking copying of behavior
as opposed to intellectual patterns of thought and biological DNA-latched
patterns.
>> 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.
Bo said:
> Mental substances? Have we entered spiritism and ectoplasm ;-)
Steve says:
You may prefer "mind" to "mental substance." I was using the terms favored
by Northrop in his explanation of SOM in East Meets West. No need to bring
ectoplasm, orgasmotrons, or flux capacitors into it.
>> 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.
Yes, my point was to explain SOM and its shortcomings.
>> When Pirsig uses subject-object metaphysics he also is referring to a
>> distinction between subjective experience and objective experience.
>
> Bo said: 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.
Steve:
I think you are wrong. SOM is more common as a mind/matter dualism. There
are some who have maintained that "all is mind" and many who say that "all
is matter" but SOM is best characterized by its failed attempts to reconcile
mind and matter while not being able to do without one or the other.
>> I don't think intellect depends on making such metaphysical assumptions.
>> Intellect logically has to be in place before philosophy can evolve,
>> since one must think before he can think about thinking, so SOM
>> philosophical assumptions cannot be the equivalent of intellect.
Bo said:
> 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.
Steve says:
When it is asked "What does it mean to say that something is true?" is this
not thinking about thinking? It seems to me you equate intellect with
having some level of philosophical sophistication-some awareness of one's
own thought patterns--while I see intellect as the collection of all thought
patterns themselves.
>>> Also you (DAVID M) say: mathematics for example does not require the
>>> supposition of material substances interacting with mental substances.
>
> Bo said: 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.
Steve says: I do see calculation as intellect--a manipulation of abstract
symbols that stand for patterns of experience.
The biggest underlying difference to our understandings of the levels may be
that I see the levels as types of static patterns where you want to say that
a level itself is "the value of X." We are fundamentally talking about very
different things. Unfortunately we may just keep talking past one another.
Regards,
Steve
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