BO TRIES TO CATCH UP WITH THE RECENT POSTS FROM MARY, ROGER, DAVID and
GLOVE. KEN, DONNY, JONATHAN, FINTAN AND HORSE WILL BE ADDRESSED NEXT.
Greetings. Having been through a few days of what Donny called
"Schwartzwald" pageantry, combined with old Norse myths overlaid
with some Christianity ...and much consumer mythology....I have
stolen away from the social settings to respond to the intellectual
calls.
MARY.
Not to inflate my message out of proportions I will only zoom in on
this passage from your 24th post (on snail's intellect):
> I would agree if what was meant by intellect was actually Q-Intellect. No,
> snails don't have that, but as to whether they have some rudimentary form of
> intelligence?
Yes, the Intellect/intelligence is an important distinction, and
the very reason that the subject-object metaphysics never seems to
come to grips with the artificial intelligence issue (or any other
for that matter). I have promised David to stop my Q-uipping, but you
have taken the point: intelligence is signal-processing (remember the
"amoeba" example of ZAMM page 143. Corgi paperback), and can be said
to be another name for "life". From this intelligence-as-life the
Social level grew, and as IntPov is a value outgrowth of that again,
it contains social intelligence as the base for its own Intellectual
patterns. We will never have computers "awakening to consciousness"
because the latter is Social intelligence plus INTELLECTUAL
INTELLIGENCE. Societies have to reach a very high level of
sophistication to "support" Intellect. The humans have closed the
"window of opportunity" on all other life/intelligence forms - be
they carbon or silicon based.
You ended thus:
> Believe it or not, I agree with you. But at the same time, I will fight
> tooth and nail when Dynamic Quality is equated with god, or Zen, or most
> particularly with a New Age "awareness". These terms have been
> misappropriated to support so many things that are not dynamic and certainly
> not of high quality, that I really must shy away from them...etc
Amen!
*********************************************************************
ROGER.
Re. your post of 24 Dec. to Donny and the paragraph...:
> As for your argument that these are biological values.......of course they
> are, originally. As RMP says, all levels emerge to offer freedom to those
> below. The pack is a more successful biological strategy in many cases. But
> once groups form, they get a life of their own. The strongest packs stay that
> way by valuing the many even if it is (occasionally) at the expense of any
> one. Society or pack or tribe become the new pattern. Eventually the
> patterns of society that thrive and multiply and grow are those that sustain
> themselves best, and evolve as needed while avoiding needless deterioration.
> THE GIANT is a very advanced socially influenced pattern.
Right you are. Any level is out of the previous and following it
downwards it looks very much like its parent. It comes a point where
living and non-living is impossible to discern; where organic society
and social society fuses and where social thinking and free-thinking
blends.
> AS to the value of Metaphysics topic , Donny, I think the reason it atrophied
> so long was that most philosophers became philosophologists, and because the
> SOM assumptions were eventually taken for granted. Some day the DAM will
> break open and a better paradigm will take its place. Meanwhile, it has
> helped me reorient my life , change my thinking, and influence those around
> me. The MOQ is a practical, pragmatic metaphysics. Haven't others of you
> changed your lives (or broadened your horizons -which is really the same
> thing) based on your beliefs?
You bet it has changed my life. I probably strive to sound as
matter-of- factly as possible, but at more private moments the
quality idea strikes me as heavy as it did at my first encounter with
it, and I wonder what made a person arrive at such a break with every
previously known idea. The answer eludes me. I tell in my essay that
I had reached some sort of rudimentary quality idea before meeting
Pirsig, but I was not strong enough to hold on to it; it scared me
stiff and I "recanted".
**************************************************************
DAVID.
You wrote the 24th:
> Glove and Bo have mostly been confusing me. Who is using a capitol 'Q'
> in front of words? Cut it out! Use standard English! Talk like a person,
> will ya? :-)
Slow down David, I was about to answer your post of Dec. 23, but
then this arrived. All right, that's me and I will stop it, but the
distinction between the quality patterns of value and their SOM
counterparts is important to keep in mind. Inorganic value patterns
aren't quite matter nor do Intellectual value patterns correspond to
mind; not to speak of Life and Society that have no reality in SOM at
all. So I will continue to use uppercase letters for the MOQ variants
and lowercase for SOM usage.
As said I was in the process of answering your post of the 23rd
because it was something there that struck me as not quite my
MOQ. You wrote:
> It seems some squad members are confused by the word "intellectual".
> It doesn't mean a high minded or elite scholar. Any conscious mental
> activity is intellectual. Even romantic, poetic, intuitive thoughts are
> preformed by the intellect. We could argue about the value of my mental
> activitiy, but surley the intellect is engaged when one is making a
> stone tool or discussing philosophy.)
I don't think that ANY mental activity can be viewed as Intellectual,
many are Social intelligence or even Biological intelligence (see the
'Mary' section). A sensation of hunger or an emotional flash
of of anger are not Intellectual values.
And 'conscious'? What exactly does that mean? Along with
mind/matter, mental/physical, sentient/insentient, abstract/concrete
...etc, conscious/unconscious and the rest of the SOM divisions go on
and on. They are Intellect (as SO-logic) all right, but only as
pairs; not unto themselves. In the overall MOQ picture there is no
such division.
> He puts the intellectual level at the top, yet
> he wants to overhaul it. Subject/object thinking works for practical
> purposes, like Newtonian science, but when it comes to answering the
> really tough questions about the nature of reality it fails. He wants to
> help usher in new intellectual patterns that can recognize and
> accomodate the underlying Quality; new words and concepts that describe
> reality in terms of the MOQ.
Good! Here it sounds like you intuit the idea that Intellect is
subject/object-ivization. Did you do it "naturally" or...?
It is agonizingly difficult to keep the Intellect clear of the mind
lure, but you seem to have made it after plunging in deep at first.
Great.
Back to the 'fall myth' of your 24th message. You are not the first to
have seen it in a MOQ context, I think it was Jay Lahkani who
claimed that it was something even more basic than the
Social-Intellectual divorce; it was Society from Biology! That may
fit Donny's more advanced society, but cooperating creatures don't
have qualms about good and evil or a sense of having been
ousted from a state of bliss. Intellect is that split itself and as
long as it was reality itself (SOM) nothing could heal the wound,
but now....?.
However, we must see the long lines. Intellect wasn't SOM's awakening
to consciousness from one moment to the next, it took ages when it
grew from languages generalizations to a conviction that the subject
was different from objects and that this division was reality itself.
Still this ability was very much "in the service" of Society; the
common myths were not questioned; when Homer wrote the Iliad, the
gods weaved out and in among the mortals. Only much later when
(another?) Homer wrote the Odyssey the gods had become a little
fairy-taleish. The events that ZAMM speaks of is still later when
Intellect-as-SOM challenged the social order, but even then, for
hundred of years the two competed for supremacy.
Finally you wrote:
> One more thought to tease - I think that subject object thinking
> dominates Western civilization because of the forces of value, but its'
> time is limited and its' task is almost complete. The intellectual level
> may soon be radically transformed. There may even be a new level about
> to emerge from the intellectual level. Anyone care to speculate?
Welcome after David! This idea was forwarded by Platt Holden long ago
and I think it is valid.
******************************************************************
GLOVE.
I apologize for giving you a crowded feeling, but someone had to
be a spoilsport and ask for discipline in postings. We "crowded" each
other the way it developed. Your closing words about the kitten moved
me, but I can't for the life of me see that the (rationalist) MOQ
represses any cosmic feeling of unity behind it all. To the
contrary: the opening replacement of the subject-object dichotomy by
the Quality one fulfilled my cravings for a new paradigm, and the
craving was enormous I assure you. It is the introduction of
"mysticism" on top of that that strikes me as superfluous; it's
"butter on bacon" as we say. I agree with Mary: we are not far apart,
also do I agree with David's "PS" saying:
> P.S. I don't know where the other mystics went, but I'm absolutely
> convinced the MOQ is mysticism. The very heart and soul of the central
> issues are involved in this dispute. I'll bet you each a dollar I can
> produce evidence that the author himself and at least one professional
> academic philosopher believes the MOQ is mystical. I believe that to
> think otherwise makes it nearly impossible to discuss Pirsig's work in
> any meaningful way and only demonstates a misunderstanding of myticism
> or the MOQ or both. I know that's a harsh statement, but I'm very
> worried about the quality of our debate.
Except for the "worry" part. This is a high quality exchange
Skaal!
Bodvar
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