From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 29 2004 - 22:55:07 BST
Hi Paul,
I'm feeling argumentative at the moment, not in the mood to concede a point,
so maybe I'm just moving my king all over the board, I don't know...
>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.
I can see how doing that marked an important evolutionary step, and is
dependent on society, but I don't see how it is necesarrily seperate from
society and not a social pattern also. It seems to refer more to the
manipulation than to the ideas that are represented by the manipulation, and
not all ideas would seem to me to be intellectual. It would suggest that a
written meatloaf recipe is intellectual, but the same recipe learned from
watching each other is not. I agree that Intellectual patterns are noted
and propogated usually by skillfuly manipulating symbols, but the patterns
themselves aren't their material means of propogation. And couldn't an
intellectual pattern never be expressed with symbols, like say the pattern
of overthrowing a leader when he becomes too tyrannical or blasphemous?
>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.
I don't see how that distinction moves the use of symbols into a different
level. It is still social conventions, whether it's a picture or a word.
>
>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.
Social convention, though, right?
>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.
OK, I'll put freedom and justice as intellectual patterns, matter as
inorganic, and the rest as social, or at least socially learned concepts.
Causation is at the very core of Morality and Quality, and is essential to
existence and propogation of patterns. Talking and writing about it is
social.
>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.
But how is it that "mind" is not social, then? I see the distinction
between pictures and symbols, but not how this makes a new level. The
patterns are what define the level, not their mode of propogation.
>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."
But the intellectual patterns in Lila are not the book itself, right? Yet,
the book itself is those ink marks in the shapes of a written language. The
thing that makes this book intellectual is that it is about society, it
treats society as though it was an individual object interacting with other
social patterns..
>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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