Hi, Bo!
Glad to meet you, David! I've particularly enjoyed several of your posts.
I'm behind in my MD reading, and can't hope to catch up, but I wondered if you
might be interested in this: I've discovered Henri Bergson (1859-1941). I'm
still on my first reading of his books, so I don't make conclusions yet, but he
also has looked very hard at the dynamic/static and intellectual/pre-intellectual
questions. I'm going to just drop a chunk that I just put in my notes. It seems
to speak to your realization that q-intellect has room for acceptance of the
dynamic process, whereas SOM intellect seems somehow to exclude this.
(From Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, Transformism, pp 32-35, Modern Library
1944 hardcover)
begin quote:
The more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that
organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past
presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of
consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.
That the appearance of a vegetable or animal species is due to specific causes,
nobody will gainsay. But this can only mean that if, after the fact, we could know
these causes in detail, we could explain them by the form that has been produced;
forseeing the form is out of the question...Of the future, only that is forseen
that is like the past, or can be made up again with elements like those of the
past...All that can be said is that, once produced, (an original situation) will be
explained by the elements that analysis will then carve out of it.
...(Life and consciousness) are at every moment creating something. But against
this idea of absolute originality our whole intellect rises in revolt. The
essential function of our intellect...is to be a light for our conduct, to make
ready for our action on things...Intellect therefore instinctively selects in a
given situation whatever is like something already known; it seeks this out, in
order that it may apply its principle that "like produces like"...Like ordinary
knowledge (common sense), in dealing with things, science is concerned only with
the aspect of _repetition_. Though the whole be original,science will aoways
manage to analyze it into elements or aspects which are approximately a
reproduction of the past. Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat
itself--that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action of
real time. Anything that is irreducible and irreversible in the successive moments
of a history eludes science.
end Bergson quote.
I think, from my preliminary reading, that it is ok to equate Bergson's "science"
with rationality and perhaps with SOM.
I don't think "science"= q-intellect, though--just a mature, highly-visible aspect
of q-intellect.
Cheers,
Maggie
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