From: Steve Peterson (peterson.steve@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Jan 12 2004 - 02:13:54 GMT
Hi David M,
> The reality of the individual Ego is something that has
> developed in what was once an animal to give us something
> that we now refer to as human.
For Pirsig, what separates humans and animals are social patterns, but I
agree that what we now refer to as human requires intellectual patterns
which seem to require an individual ego.
>Being human is to possess an
> individuality that animals do not fully possess. How this development/
> evolution was achieved, I suggest has to go hand in hand with a sort
> of differentiation/separation/alienation/ of instinctual participatory
> being.
> The individual is a stance of separation. It says here I am and there
> opposed
> to me is the world, we are separate and not One.
I agree that the very first of all intellectual creations of "this" and
"that" distinctions that may define the intellect seem most likely to be
"self" and "not self." I think this is the transition from Piaget's
sensory-motor stage of cognitive development to the preoperational stage.
This could be the beginning of what Pirsig defines as intellect--the
manipulation of abstract symbols that stand for patterns of experience. The
very first abstract symbol may be the self. Patterns of manipulations of
such symbols are the patterns that comprise the intellectual level.
Animals and new-born babies have no sense of self. Rather than "I am
hungry", just "there is hunger." In stead of "I am in pain," there is only,
"pain is." Sensations and emotions are experienced without distinction
between knower and known.
>In this stance, in human
> being, begins a voyage that I suspect ends at SOM. The possibility then is to
>start putting things back together again and in the full light of intellect see
> that human being is utterly immersed in Being as a whole.
I disagree that the logical extension of cognitive development is a
philosophy that postulates material substances in interaction with mental
substances with sensed qualities as by-products.
Regards,
Steve
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