Re: LS is intellect its own level?

From: B. Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 15:24:35 BST


THIS MONTH HAS ENTERED ITS FINAL AND A CONSENSUS LOOKS POSSIBLE. BO
WILL TRY TO IRON OUT THE LAST WRINKLES, STARTING WITH ROGER PALMER
WHO WROTE:

> 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?

Hi Roger and Lilasq.
There is possibly another Denis paper in progress so I will just
address the above difference so well summarized by you.

Anyone objecting to the statement of "no dogs coming out of your
mouth" could be certified and I appeal to your lenience when
forwarding my case :-).

If the first MOQ axiom of everything being value is heeded everything
should be OK, but up through LS' life there have been tendencies to
shift the metaphysical split away from the DQ/SQ position over to the
'dog'/animal example. When you write:

> 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:

I am not convinced that you pay Aristotle full justice. HE did not
mistake words and concepts for primal reality, inspired by Plato he
created the distinction between substance and form; idea and
illusion. The fact that his 'substance' was reality and 'form'
the actual animal (in Plato's cave allegory primal reality is the
idea casting an illusory shadow on the wall) isn't so important; the
metaphysical split between the two realms is the main thing!

The reason for my stressing that Q-intellect is not mind, but rather
the mind/matter AGGREGATE, is that (as I see the MOQ) the barking or
whinnying forms aren't DYNAMIC reality until a human being comes
along and "gives names to all the animals". They are Biological
patterns.... grandparent of Intellectual patterns!

Look, it's not only 'dog' or 'horse' that are words, so if language
is on the other side of a metaphysical fence the rest is silence.
But as Denis pointed out, language plays an important role in the
forming of the Q-Intellect, but is not IT. Rather - as he also
pointed out - the "machine code" between Q-society and Q-intellect
("the DNA of Intellect". Very good!). Its notorious subject/object
nature slowly caused the conviction that the split between words and
the real thing was existence itself and - Voila, le SOM meme!
(supposed to be French: Look, the SOM incarnate)

When concluding as I will below I appeal to your collective goodwill.
Theorizing, naming - thinking - about animals and things even about
thinking itself - is not going on in an abstract sphere about
something more real in another concrete sphere. Q- INTELLECT IS THE
ABILITY TO MAKE THE BI-SPHERIC DISTINCTION ITSELF. The highest and
most valuable stage that evolution has reached - yet.

Roger continues:

> 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.
 
but this is not me, rather Denis, so I'll let it rest until
further notice ;-). The following:

> 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]
 

All is pure gold, but when you conclude:

> 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.

I am - as said - convinced that Aristotle said that SUBSTANCE
is reality while the running FORM is transient and illusory. I
contest that words (horse or dog) was his "substance", but the very
DICHOTOMY which did not follow our present lines slowly shifted up
through the ages ("Nominal/universal" was the Medieval dividing
line) to the one that we know as Cartesian today.

> 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.

My thesis is still that Intellect is SOM, but your "..judged by
quality.." bit may bridge the gap between us. SOM-as-Q-Intellect
immediately strips it of its METAPHYSICAL status. The division, be it
idea/shadow, substance/form, words/reality, mind/matter ..whatever,
is seen as the highest STATIC realm, but no longer as how existence
is constructed. For us MOQ followers the present construct is the
DQ/SQ split and that is not remotely related with those.

I dare not repeat your "but I could be wrong", but maybe our
difference is a Bodvar construction

Yours.

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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