Re: LS is intellect its own level?

From: RISKYBIZ9@aol.com
Date: Sun Sep 19 1999 - 19:19:53 BST


ROGER TRIES TO NUDGE THE GROUP
TOWARD CONSENSUS ON THE ESSENTIAL
COMPONENTS OF THE INTELLECTUAL LEVEL
AND THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF SOM

Bo and Denis and Lilacs;

I hate to further add to Denis' growing ego, but I too must side strongly
with his arguments. He has been doing so good that I have just been sitting
back with silent nods, but I guess I should step in briefly with a public
affirmation of agreement. Below is primarily a cut'n'paste of Bo, Denis and
my posts. I hope to highlight the primary outstanding disagreements and lend
my opinion on which is the highest quality description. (Sorry in advance if
I deleted something critical in my quoting, I am trying to pare the arguments
down to their essentials).

I will start with Bo's concern with the following fundamental tenet of the
MOQ as espoused by Denis. This is absolutely key in understanding the
intellectual level and the MOQ, and of addressing Aristotle's big mistake..

DENIS:
One recurring problem we seem to see in those discussions is the nature
of the levels. I believe many people still
see them as ontological "things", entities in their own right.
This is not so.
The levels are intellectual PoVs

BO:
Denis throws the baby out with the water:
"The levels are intellectual PoVs" he declares and I get the feeling
that they become SOM's subjects. In the mind!!!?
The static levels are neither things nor intellect (in the mind).
This is sorted out at a much earlier stage when P of LILA
demonstrates that existence is VALUE.

DENIS:
.... I don't, and never will say that REALITY is in the mind, and only in
the mind. I'm no solipsist.

REALITY is Value, or QUALITY, I agree with Pirsig on that point, and
therefore, ultimately unknowable.
But when we talk about REALITY, when we enter this degenerate field of
behaviour, all we are talking about is how to classify our experiences
as Intellectual Static Patterns of Value (Words, and other complex
structures of meaning : sentences, equations, models, you name it).
Therefore, even if what gives birth to the pictures we draw ISN'T
intellectual (it's Quality), the pictures themselves are *nothing* but
Intellectual Patterns of Value. Therefore, the levels being Structured
Meanings describing REALITY, they ARE IntPoVs, and nothing is thrown out
because according to MOQ, we know that REALITY/QUALITY is still there
outside, waiting for us.

ROGER"S COMMENTARY:
As I stated in my post of Sept 5th, this idealism issue is critical when
getting our minds around the intellectual level and the ramifications of the
logos. As long as we continue mistaking our words and concepts for "primal
reality" we continue to live in Aristotle's world. I wrote:
 
"..... Pirsig's ZMM talk of ghosts, his identification with pragmatic Radical
Empiricism (only concepts are static -- reality is dynamic and flowing) make
it clear that the world of distinctions and things are conceptualizations
derived from the "primal reality" of Quality, which is inherently beyond
knowledge. .......This reality we discuss involves our conceptualization of
reality."

But Denis summarizes it even better with this line......

DENIS:
As one of my philosophy teachers said : "When you say "dog", no dogs
come out of your mouth". When you say that there IS an inorganic level,
what you are really saying is : "I'm classifying all those similar
experiences into a class, an Intellectual Static Pattern, that I will
therefore be able to talk about, and call that the Inorganic level. I do
this because it is convenient, useful, and, quite frankly, because I
think it is fun to do so. It has Dynamic Quality. But what is *really*
out there is QUALITY."

ROGER'S COMMENTARY:
Exactly!!! Go Denis!!!!

When you say 'dog' no dogs come out of your mouth! The dog you think of and
the dog we discuss are both just abstractions of a dog. Pirsig and Denis are
not stating that no 'external' reality, or dog, exists, they are stating that
it is Quality. The levels are intellectual patterns. Part of this
intellectual description of reality has the intellect emerging out of society
and biology. However, we must never forget that this is all an intellectual
pattern itself. When we say 'social level', no religions and governments
come out of our mouth. Intellectual patterns arise from Quality. We have all
agreed to call this particular class or abstraction of Quality 'the social
level'. But the reality of this Quality is infinitely richer and more
dynamic than our static concepts can ever capture.

A lot of members have problems with the recursiveness of this issue, but I
strongly urge them to spend an hour or two contemplating it. It opens up
entire new vistas into the meaning and the brilliance of the MOQ.

Comments, Bo? David?

The other major issue is closely related to the first. It involves language
and its role in the emergence of SOM and the intellectual level.
 
DENIS:
.....the
Q-Intellect is indeed capable of containing itself. This... is a function, a
characteristic of
language, the DNA of Intellect. Since any assertion (Intellectual
Pattern of Value) can be talked about, analysed and criticized, the
Intellectual level is indeed capable of recursive operations. SOM made
the first recursive step by defining Meaning, the bare bricks of
Language and Intellect, and MOQ the second recursive step by defining
Metaphysics, the houses in the Intellect City.

I think it is clear now that the MOQ *does* define metaphysics and the
Intellectual level, and that it does so within the Intellectual level
itself (where else is 'Lila' located, after all ?).
 
BO:
The reason I cannot think of SOM as being equal to the Q-Intellect is
that it is already too perfect, too developped to be a good candidate
for the post. So I've got to find a good (even if it's a little loosely
defined) one. Language seems to be such a candidate for many people.
It's supposed to be different from society, but is it ? Bees
communicate, wolves do too, but that's not language they're using. So
what is language ? I'll give you a linguist definition.

ROGER'S COMMENTARY:
Let me again cut and paste from my post on the 5th:.

".....to study man and his world, you must study his language. Language is
unique to man, and it allows a whole new world of attention, distinctions and
couplings. In addition, the world that men bring forth together in shared
language is a shared world.

....... language is much more difficult than communication. Animals are
frequent communicators, but they don't use language. Simply put, your cat
can meow to communicate its hunger, and your dog can bark at intruders. This
is how they successfully couple within their environment. But they cannot
make distinctions and objectify these communications. Cat's don't say "Hey,
I meowed three times today , wheres the darn milk?" And dogs don't reference
their barking when they aren't barking. Human language does make
distinctions of communications and of things. The "word" becomes a shared
distinction between the people of a culture. As an example, when we type
"sq" we all mean......

.....language is the man's distinction-making process. Language allows us to
objectify reality and it allows us to objectify ourselves as a consistent
pattern of experience...... Like Pirsig's "analogues upon analogues upon
analogues" (p317), the world created by man ..... is a recursive, growing
process.
In summary, language, and the Greek mythos formed in great part through the
Greeks strong linguistic divisions, is the foundation for
subject/objectivism. It allows man to create shared, static distinctions and
concepts within the essentially unknowable flowing and dynamic quality that
surrounds and permeates the boxcars." [snip]

Language is a key enabler of both the social and the intellectual levels. The
problem is that Aristotle and his followers forgot that the word and the
reality are not the same. They searched for the one truth rather than the
highest quality interpretation of reality. This leads us right back to our
members making the Aristotelian mistake of confusing the levels for reality.

To summarize the month's topic, the intellectual level is more than SOM. The
problem is that the SOM logos has become our mythos. The way language works
helped develop the objectifying mythos and led us to a shared view of reality
that was fundamentally flawed. We discarded quality for truth. We forgot
that our models of reality are not the full reality that we think they
describe. We forgot that when we say 'dog' that no dogs come out of our
mouth. We forgot that the levels are just shared abstractions to be judged
by quality, not truth.

But I could be wrong,

Roger

 

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