From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 14:28:28 GMT
Hi Bo,
> Platt (previoulsy)
> > Here's where we part company. I believe intellectual patterns (ideals
> > and such) have been around since the emergence of thinking animals--
> > namely humans--some 35,000 year ago. (There's even evidence that
> > Neanderthals were thinking creatures.)
Bo:
> Let me think loudly. We have Pirsig's letter where he draws the
> intellectual line with the Ancient Greeks, but it sounds as only from
> necessity lest it would stretch away into absurdity.
>
> PIRSIG:
> I think the same happens to the term, "intellectual," when one
> extends it much before the Ancient Greeks.* If one extends
> the term intellectual to include primitive cultures just because
> they are thinking about things, why stop there? How about
> chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about earthworms? Don't they make
> conscious decisions? How about bacteria responding to light and
> darkness? How about chemicals responding to light and darkness? Our
> intellectual level is broadening to a point where it is losing all
> its meaning. You have to cut it off somewhere, and it seems to me
> the greatest meaning can be given to the intellectual level if it is
> confined to the skilled manipulation of abstract symbols that have
> no|corresponding particular experience and which behave according to
> rules of their own.
>
> But this is NOT right in my opinion. If "thinking" (as a definition)
> allows for intellectual patterns to go back to the inorganic level it is
> clearly wrong, so why doesn't he discard it?
I agree this is NOT right. One of the few times I disagree with Pirsig.
Obviously bugs don't think. Aware, yes. But thoughtful, no. No ability
to symbolize, to abstract. (Remember the great 'Are atoms aware?'
debate of years ago?)
> A level must be identical with its patterns, anything else makes a mess
> of the whole MOQ. There was no matter before the inorganic level; no
> life before biology ...etc. Thus we can't speak about intellectual
> patterns before the intellectual level. Either intellect is older than
> the Neanderthals or it was social value that guided their "thinking".
I see your point. But I see an incipient contradiction in your
statement " . . . it was social value that guided their "thinking."
How do you define thinking as you used used it in that sentence? When
did that form of "thinking" emerge?
> In the letter Pirsig re-introduces the "manipulation of symbols"-
> definition from "Lila's Child", but I am as unhappy with it as with
> thinking. Symbol-manipulation is a definition of language and thus the
> mind-intellect again.
"Manipulation of symbols" works for me, and it's on that definition I
base my statement that thinking goes back to Neanderthals who left
evidence of symbol manipulation in art artifacts such as totems and
bracelets.
> Conclusion (of my thinking):
> The "mentality" of Neanderthals, chimps, earthworms, bacteria and
> chemicals have 2 different explanations: Intellect's and Quality's.
> Intellect's is a S/O-grid put over all existence; conscious chemicals,
> minful organisms, social beings with thoughts. Quality's however is that
> all these "skills" ARE the respective value levels ...at various stages
> of complexity. F.ex. the Neanderthal tribe reflected the social level at
> a primitive stage, while the Egyptian Empire reflected it at a most
> advanced stage. And we are sort of obliged to the Quality way of seeing
> things. The intellectual level is a static level with a limited point of
> view, it can't be QUALITY'S grand vista.
I don't quite follow your argument here. Seems to me that the
intellectual level, of all the levels, offers the broadest point of
view. But I grant that all points of view are limited by human
physiology. (A bee experiences light waves that we can't see in our
everyday lives.) That the Quality grand vista sees everything in terms
of some things are better than others, i.e., values, morality, means it
sees the intellectual level as better than the social, the social
better than the biological, etc. but not forgetting the higher depend
on the lower. This Quality "grand vista' is available not just to us,
but to all creatures, great and small. I willing adopt the 'grand
vista' stance, but that doesn't diminish my great respect for the value
of intellect and the transcendent values of truth, beauty and goodness.
> > Intellectual level values grew
> > to dominate social level values around the time of Woodrow Wilson. At
> > that time the intellectual level was born, but intellectual values
> > influenced society long before that, namely, in laws guaranteeing
> > certain individual rights--the Magna Carta for example.
>
> I agree with all this, but a definition of intellect must be found that
> allows for the LEVEL to have begun at a point in history, one can't just
> see it as something fading way into absurdity. Pirsig drew a line at
> Ancient Greece, but made it sound like an arbitrary decision, I would
> say that it definitely WAS the Greeks or their Homerian forebears
> ....everything points to it . Didn't you sort of agree with my
> Jaynes/Pirsig comparison? Don't we have a solution there? Even Paul
> seemed positive.
I don't recall. In any event, what matters most to me is using Pirsig's
levels to identify people who are driven by primarily by social level
values or intellectual level values. Thus, we agree on the current war
between the West and Islamo-Fascism.
Best wishes,
Platt
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