From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Thu Jul 29 2004 - 10:18:24 BST
Hi Johnny
Johnny said:
I wonder what [Pirsig] means by "mind"? Don't you think that the fourth
level has to be somehow above and dependent on the third level? How is
mind higher or dependent on society?
Paul:
I'll try to provide an answer to this with something I've been thinking
about. I haven't refined this yet, so take it as a work in progress.
Pirsig defines the intellectual level as the skilled manipulation of
abstract symbols that stand for patterns of experience. The dependence
on society may be seen if you consider that a symbol, in its strictest
sense, stands for something else by *convention* and not by
*resemblance*. A symbol by resemblance is more correctly termed an
analog. Analogs include things such as pictures and sounds that
represent something to the degree that they resemble sensory experience.
As such, the cave paintings at Lascaux, for example, are not evidence of
intellect.
If one studies early records of written language, the use of pictographs
is dominant, and whilst the pictographs have to be socially learned,
their dependence on resemblance means they are not truly symbolic. When
we see the historic emergence of words that do not in any way *resemble*
experience, we have the creation of symbols. Once this occurs, language
is no longer restricted by physical sensory resemblance and can generate
meaning by convention. General terms for collections of experiences can
be formed with no reference to particular experience, furthermore, such
abstract concepts as truth, freedom, causation, matter, justice,
addition, multiplication etc. can latch. They must latch, however,
within the rules of symbol manipulation - grammar, logic, mathematics -
which are also socially learned and maintained.
Therefore, mind is symbol manipulation and is dependent on the socially
learned set of symbols and rules that have meaning by convention - a
certain stage of language.
To demonstrate this, if you picked up a copy of Lila written in Arabic,
if you didn't have the patterns of socially learned conventions that
turn the ink you can see on the paper into meaning, it would be
impossible for you to perceive the intellectual patterns which they
"contain."
Intellect is therefore dependent on the meanings that a society creates
- therefore different society, different intellectual patterns. However,
if we consider that the conventional meanings society creates evolved to
some degree from the analogs - meanings by resemblance - within that
society, and they are analogs of biological experience, this may explain
why there are some things common to all cultures, alongside great
diversity.
Thanks
Paul
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