LS Re: Growing consensus


Horse (horse@wasted.demon.nl)
Sun, 19 Jul 1998 06:25:43 +0100


>This is something I've been warning against for a while now, and
> thank you, Horse, for giving me a chance to make it explicit.

My pleasure Donny :)

> I strongly do not agree that "Thought" is an example of an
> intellectual pattern of value. There is a tendency to want to make
> IntPoVs into something basically translating as Mind, consciousness,
> ego... That is not my own belief and that is not how I interpret Pirsig
> in LILA. Thought (or consciousness) exisits (at least, and in some way)
> as biological patterns, social patterns (this is the kind of thought we
> are most familer w/ --actually I'm sure we do a lot of "biological
> thinking" but just pay a lot less atention to that) and lastly -- most
> recently -- as intellectual patterns.

I don't have a problem with the labels 'mind' or 'thought'. I think they
are both created by Intellectual PoV's as are a specific type of
memory at an intellectual level.

> As I read LILA, "IntPoVs" refers to a spicific *type of* thought
> -- one based on riger, objectivity (yes, objectivity), "logic"... but
> most basically on the idea that a proof is independent of the person
> who presents it. That's the big idea behind the Enlightenment. Before
> then, your ability to prove was highly limited by your social statuss.

It still is in a publicly accessible sense - hence the academic and
scientific process.

<snip>

> (As I've said before, no one is ever 100% objective, but so what? The
> point is that in certain social situations one is socially(morally)
> called upon to be as objective as possible.)

One can be called upon to be all sorts of things, the achievement
is different from the obligation.

> Pirsig himself says that IntPoVs have only fully developed in
> the *last hundred years*. Obviously he's not talking about just "thought"
> (or mind, or ego, or Subject-Object Consciousness).

I would imagine he is referring to the intellectual patterns that
purport to be free from the pressures of pure social quality.

<snip>

> This is why a wolf pack or a bird flock is not a SocialPoV (or
> not one in any but a very limited and basically metiphorical sense). The
> United States of America (and "the American way") is a living thing (a
> big "Giant"), and it survives even as generations of constituent members
> come and pass. Bird flocks don't have anything like "the American way," or
> Christiandom, or The Queen of England (essentialy a living, profesional
> symbol of that way of life, that Giant). England is its own life-form;
> analogus (on the Intellectual level) to the Theory of Relativity,
> Marxism, or the MoQ -- also, all, living things.

Animals other than humans have social systems in a very real
sense. They may be smaller than cities and lack the artifacts of
cities, but a family is as a social system which survives beyond the
death of a member etc. The family can also be seen to extend into
the biological realm. Definitions are not absolutes they are the way
we wish things to be so we say they are and hey presto reality
springs to life!!!???!!!

> That established, one can easily see that thinking,
> consciousness, etc. must have come in BEFORE (or w/)
> the Social level, not after. Am I making sense here?

Not completely, but that may be my interpretation and not your fault.
Many creatures are conscious in the self-aware sense (SOC). The
term thinking as I have used it, refers to activity at the intellectual
level which comes after the social level. This is one of the ideas
behind Distributed Artificial intelligence and some examples of
Artificial Life.

Horse

"Making history, it turned out, was quite easy.
It was what got written down.
It was as simple as that!"
Sir Sam Vimes.

--
homepage - http://www.moq.org/lilasquad
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