From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 23 2005 - 04:31:09 BST
All,
> Ian:
> > Anyway ... your second para graph is full of thinly veiled, but
> > anonymous, crticisms of other MoQ'ers views. Would you care to
> > elaborate as to who is ..
> > "mesmerized by social pattern values, ... to many it appears we're all
> > helpless captives" ?
>
> Except for our mutual admiration of Pirsig, I don't see much championing
> of the individual inventor or artistic genius by the vocal segment of our
little group, do you?
LILA (ch12,p155-156): This ficticious "man" has many synonyms: "mankind,"
"people," "the public," and even such pronouns as "I", "he," and "they." Out
language is so organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is
impossible to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like "substance"
they can be used as long as it is remembered that they're terms for collections
of patterns and not some independent primary reality of their own.
"The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between
these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are
missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic
nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which
originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what
a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are
dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by
inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and
matter. As the atomic physicist Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in
language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally
derived."
"The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of
independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close
examination shows it isn't so."
Later, p201, Pirsig goes on about the "Me" analogue: "The language we've
inherited confuses this. We say "my" body and "your" body and "his" body and
"her" body, but it isn't that way. That's like a FORTRAN program saying, "this
is my computer." "This body on the left," and "This body on the right." That's
the way to say it. This Cartesian "Me", this autonomous little homunculus who
sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgement on
the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This self-appointed
little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the
moment one examines it. This Cartesian "Me" is a software reality, not a
hardware reality. This body on the left and this body on the right are running
variations of the same program, the same "Me", which doesn't belong to either
of them. The "Me's" are simply a program format.
Does the "individual" have a role? Of course it does, it is able to respond to
DQ, bring this DQ into the static social realm, and instigate evolutionary
change. But, the "individual" responds to DQ "through" the socio-cultural
semiotic.
Pirsig recounts the "green flash" (ch26): "When Phaedrus started to read yacht
literature he ran across a description of the 'green flash' of the sun. What
was that all about, he wondered. Why hadn't *he* seen it? He was sure he had
never seen the green flash of the sun. Yet he *must* have seen it. But if he
saw it, why didn't he *see* it? This static filter was the explanation. He
didn't see the green flash of the sun because he'd never been *told* to see it.
... The culture hadn't told him to so he hadn't seen it." "
Earlier, Pirsig had talked about the Brujo: "The brujo's values we in conflict
with the tribe at least partly because he had learned to value some of the ways
of the new neighbors and they had not. He was a precursor of deep cultural
change."
This is the dialectic between the individual and the social. They are not
independent entities. They are part of an evolutionary process, each wholly
dependent on the other. And it is only "myth" (as Pirsig calls it) , abeit a
useful analogue, to focus on a "Me".
As I wrote to Ham, from ZMM: "The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact
that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from
reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing
mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common
knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel
that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one
pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."
Maybe this is a reason that members of the MOQ list don't "champion" the
individual.
Arlo
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