Denis and MF
>> I read a book on child development recently in which the writer identified
>> intelligence as the ability to see patterns in their observations.
>Patterning
>> just means organizing and associating new information with previously
>> developed mental hooks. Gifted children have an unusual ability to pick up
>> all kinds of patterns and relationships in everyday experience.
>
>It is, in fact, what IQ tests are supposedly testing : the ability to deduce
>patterns from raw data. I believe that defining intelligence by this ability
>is probably too restrictive.
Ahem, I'm not too happy about being cast as a supporter of IQ
tests! Sure, they "supposedly" test pattern-finding but I would say that
they fail to do this because their scope is far too narrow and arbitrary.
But just because you can't measure something, it doesn't mean it
doesn't exist, nor that it isn't important.
> I have a friend that isn't too good at finding
>logical patterns, but who seems to have incredible "intuitive" insights into
>fields as diverse as art, politics, sociology or human psychology.
He may arrive at insights intuitively, but I'll bet that the insights
themselves are revelations of some kind of pattern, or relationship, or
underlying principle within these fields. Tell us what one of the insights
is and I'll prove it to you.
I have a friend who's a designer who subscribes to some 20 magazines a
month, videotapes every style-related program on tv and spends her
weekends scouring department stores and boutiques to see what's on offer. I
don't know if it's logical and it certainly can't be measured in an IQ
test, but all she's doing is trying to identify the patterns in fashion.
It may sound like I'm dismissing intuition, but the distinction between
reason and intuition isn't obvious to me. I don't see how someone can be
really intelligent without being intuitive as well, and vice versa. My
designer friend seems highly intuitive to me but she didn't get that way by
sitting under a mushroom. She absorbs herself in her subject, she's so
familiar with every aspect of her field that when the dynamic spark of
newness does appear she recognizes it instantly.
>Unfortunately, he probably wouldn't get too good results on an IQ test, and
>has repeatedly failed scholarship exams. I would *never* call him stupid
>(*far* from it !), but then his scholarship shows me wrong. So much for
>"objective" tests...
Well if we can agree not to define intelligence by the ability to pass IQ
tests or academic exams then we may be able to get on the same track.
To get back to the subject ... before I read Lila I thought of philosophy as
something dead and detached from reality. I did read books by science
writers like Richard Dawkins and Roger Penrose, but they didn't call
themselves philosophers so I didn't realize that that's what they were. But
reading Lila has made me see why philosophy is the first intellectual
discipline and the one which all others stem from. It's the basic
question of, how can we make sense of all this. Of course it's not
irrelevant at all, there are perfectly good reasons why it makes sense to
try to understand the environment around you. The better you understand
what's going on, the better you can anticipate it and manipulate it. And
the way you make sense of it is simply by identifying, organizing and
categorizing information. I'm not insisting that everyone has to do it like
that but it certainly seems that Pirsig absolutely loves to do this stuff
and his enthusiasm for it, at least partly, inspired mine.
>I must confess, some of my retreating from the moq forums was due to the
>exact same problem. While my service was time-consuming, my present job
>isn't any less. But after a while, I felt I had to retreat and have some
>time to think about all the things we had discussed and all the problems we
>had uncovered in the MOQ. Going back to the text (when this forum decided to
>re-start the LilaSquad) wasn't what I wanted anymore, and I felt that going
>forward would need a bit of "slash'n'burn", first.
>Emptying the cup is necessary, and I find that all too many people are
>sloshing their tea around thinking what a great tea it is, if you get my
>drift... ;)
I think it's only natural to get tired of something when you spend so much
time on it. But it's also true that the dialog never really seems to
achieve much, and it can be very time consuming. I've sent on average one
post per month for more than a year now. I feel the need to have my 2c on
everything for the sake of getting it off my chest as much as anything
else. I might have sounded a bit negative about the MOQ, or at least not as
enthusiastic as I should be, in my last post, and I'm afraid Bo may be cross
with me for this so I'd better make it clear that I still think Pirsig's basic
ideas - like his rejection of the SOM and reality equals morality - are
profound, but I feel the full potential of these ideas hasn't been
explored. When I see people wondering what morality has to do with it
all anyway, or asking whether quality is subjective or objective (!!), it makes
me wonder if we'll ever make any progress at all.
Diana
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:28 BST