In a message dated 98-10-27 20:50:16 EST, you write:
<< Perhaps I miss phrased what I was asking before. Let's try it this way...
Individuals, not societies, are the source of ideas. Societies may
eventually grow to embody and value those ideas, but they start with a
person, be it Buddha or Jesus or Bodhi Dharma or Plato or Robert M. Pirsig.
In fact you could use Pirsig's description of the formation of common
sense from ZAMM to explain how these values are formed: "We see what we see
because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the
Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on
and on and on..." Societies may seize on these ideas and combine them, but
they originate from individuals. So why doesn't "intellectual" come from
"biological"? I would very much like to be corrected on this point. I
hate thinking that Pirsig may have something wrong. His ideas have changed
the way I see everything and I want nothing more than to understand them as
completely as possible.
>>
Sorry that I disagree with you on the ZMM and LILA thing...LILA is definately
more valuable to me. It creates a Static pattern I could latch on to and
become more Dynamic. ZMM had its eye opening experiences, but in the same way
that zen itself is limiting so was ZMM.
To answer your other thought, once again I take my ideas from Lev Vygotsky
(who got it from the French Sociologists but developed it to cognitive
thinking as i beleive Eliade did it to religious thinking (Read "The Sacred
and The Profane")).
Vygotsky says that most learning is a social activity. Though there is a
certain amount that individuals can think up for themselves, most of knowledge
was created as an extension to earlier knowledge. So when an individual is
being educated, most knowledge exists outside his or her understanding. The
process of internalizing that knowledge requires the social environment of
family and society. And of course, it is usually effected from person to
person (and book to person or tv(media) to person). I hope this can give you
some idea on the mediation of society between intellect and biology that still
continues (and science needs to acknoledge).
If you read the history of any recent idea (such as the theory of
relativity )) or the biography of a scientist or inventor, it is often
apparent how much the ideas where dependent on the ideas of others and the
'seed crystal' thinking that goes around the development of ideas. It is the
integration of seemingly disparate preexisting ideas. I've been thinking
about Carl Sagan's last book (The Demon Haunted World) and he has a section on
how if some Queen or King in the seventeenth centure gave all the money to the
best scientist to create a machine that could send words across the country
(telephone) the scientist would create a lot of fascinating inventions, but
never close to creating what the scientist (I'll say he since they were all at
that time) was charged to create. But given a 150 years later it would have
been easy. Intellect Quality truly grows from the Society in which the
individual thinker creates.
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