From: David Morey (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Fri Jul 30 2004 - 11:24:22 BST
Paul thanks for this looks spot on to me.
David M
----- Original Message -----
From: "Paul Turner" <paul@turnerbc.co.uk>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 10:18 AM
Subject: RE: MD the metaphysics of free-enterprise
> 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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