Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Tue, 11 Aug 1998 19:39:21 +0100
Hi LS and glove.
You're really giving me a workout. I love this. Thanks for the
challenge,
Dan!
glove wrote:
> i have a problem with the notion of self-awarness and just how it may be
> determined to exist in anyone or anything other than the self who is
> experiencing it. i am self-aware (i think, therefore i am) and so i
> assume every other human being is too, but i cannot prove it. but am i
> really self-aware? perhaps i am merely aware and the mind has learned to
> form what seems to be a continuous series of events out of a
> discontinuous series of leaps and jumps in perception (the self),
> leading me to believe i (as self) am in a flow of awareness through
> time, when in fact 'reality' is really a series of leaps which my mind
> irons out into a continuous series of events taking place.
I don't think that the fact that a being's internal reality analog has
gaps
in it matters as much as whether or not that being has an internal
analog
and can use it to control the social world of self and other. I would
say
that this ability is intellect, and many members of the animal kingdom
have
that ability. I even think there are animal societies whose social
patterns
include the use of intellect, as in the pack that recognizes leadership.
What they *don't* have is access to the geometrically-huger number of
human-based intellectual patterns that have evolved over the course of
human
history and made such a huge impact on the world.
> within the learning process, which seems to extends to all life forms we
> are aware of, exists a mechanism by which repeated patterns of
> experience can form canals, or chreodes, which enable life forms to
> follow successful patterns more easily the more the successful patterns
> are repeated, the result sometimes being instinctual, or inborn traits,
> appearing in successive generations. this feature of the learning
> process leads some to believe that all our learning patterns follow this
> canalized, or chreode type of advancement. and once a chreode is formed,
> it takes a leap in order to advance to an outer layer, and advancement
> is always in an outward fashion.
>
Interesting, this term "chreode". Where does it come from? I have been
struggling with the fact that my traditional viewpoint wants instinctive
social patterns to be very different from learned social patterns, yet
in
the MoQ model I'm playing with now, the difference may be irrelevant.
What's your source?
> if our learning follows this pattern as it seems to do, it may be that
> it is a underlying factor in the very way we perceive the world around
> us...we simply have learned to ignore the discontinuous nature of
> perception in favor of a continuous one. we have canalized our
> perception within chreode layers (static latching of DQ) held in place
> by repeatable behaviour not only of the self, but of all selves.
>
ok. It's pretty obvious we don't perceive the discontinuity between
social
and intellectual. That's my usual soapbox.
> one interesting example of this type of perceptual trickery our mind
> allows the self to do is indicated in an experiment done to determine
> how we determine our body parts from other objects within the field of
> our vision. the subject, seated, rests his/her left hand on a table,
> while a small screen placed beside the hand blocks it from view. also on
> the table, in full view, is a rubber hand. while the subject watches the
> phony hand, the researcher strokes both the real hand and the rubber
> hand with a brush and asks the subject to describe what is being felt.
>
> almost all the subjects tested said the rubber hand felt like their own.
> even more telling, when the researcher missed stroking the real hand and
> only stroked the rubber hand, the subjects reported a numb feeling in
> the hand. it seems that the mind is locked into a canalized pattern of
> response and when the response is not what has been patterned, the mind
> responds by attempting to remain within the canalized pattern even
> though conflicting data is coming to it.
>
> this phenomena seems responsible for the 'leaps' in science, technology
> and other improvements in human history. it also helps to understand the
> static latching occurring in all layers of the MoQ. the latching occurs
> because of successful, repeatable patterns forming chreodes, thereby
> insuring easier latching once a successful ratchet leap has been made.
> at the same time this phenomena keeps successful patterns in place, it
> also prevents new patterns from arising unless sufficient precessional
> momentum allows a leap to the next level.
>
This seems like a good explanation of the value of intellectual
patterns,
expecially when they can be replicated or shared. They essentially
create
"something" out of "nothing".
> this is why the brujo was so instrumental in helping the zuni
> civilization survive and thrive. the brujo used the synergetic effects
> of static latching to make DQ leaps into higher ratchets of SQ. while at
> first glance, this action might be seen as detrimental to the status quo
> of society, but without it there would be no growth, and stagnation
> would result. this is why Pirsig said that dynamic quality has a higher
> morality than static quality. dynamic quality is the precessional
> momentum which allows the leaps to be made from chreode to chreode in an
> outward fashion, resulting in what we call evolution and self-awarness.
>
> if this is true however, it means both evolution and self-awareness are
> only continuous constructs in the mind, perhaps using an underlying
> awareness in the universe to create the awareness we feel, not as a
> goal, but because that is its nature, that is what awareness is. in
> order to function as we do perceptually, our minds turn the leaps and
> jumps of 'real' perception into a continuously flowing pattern of events
> we call the passing of time.
>
But arent' they both useful constructs? Without evolution (change over
time) and self-awareness, the universe is just rocks. It must value
these
expansions to itself or they wouldnt be there. ;-)
> now we get to the intellect within the awareness and what its functions
> are. the reason Schumacher and many others place humans on a pedestal
> above all other life is the fact we are able to use our intellectual
> perceptions to create higher value situations in the universe for our
> survival in a collective fashion. the intellect is so formidable that it
> certainly deserves an entire layer to itself. but because humans
> perceive the intellect doesnt automatically mean they also deserve an
> entire layer to themselves in a metaphysics of reality.
>
I don't disagree with you here that we humans didn't create ourselves
and
don't deserve credit. The fact is that now, as far as we know, we
humans
are the only major participants in the highest level (that level that
escapes social) and the method of escape not only happens most often
within
a human mind, but a mind that has been filled with the static
intellectual
ladders that other humans have built and shared.
> lets take a radio as an analogy. if someone had never seen a radio
> before and was unfamilar with its workings, they might believe that the
> music coming from it was being created by the radio. but once they
> became enlightened to the workings of the radio, they would realize the
> music was not coming from the radio itself, but from radio waves being
> transmitted by a broadcasting station being turned into sound waves by
> the radio so the ear could use them.
>
> the human mind could perhaps be said to be picking up 'quality waves'
> within the universe and turning them into what we call the intellect in
> the same way the radio is picking up radio waves and turning them into
> something we can use. what really makes the intellect different is the
> extraordinary range of relationships that are able to be formed by it.
> this is not by human design, but rather by the underlying way in which
> the universe seems to operate.
This is an interesting concept, but I don't think it's happening. As
far as
I can observe, there are no direct inorganic world-to-intellect
connections. That doesn't mean there won't ever be, but I expect the
world
as we know it will have disappeared, as all the levels of patterns would
become irrelevant and outmoded, therefore weak, and would be destroyed.
Actually, I think the only way the universe can pick up quality waves is
through the structures it has formed for itself, which, as far as we
know,
is what we are talking about. Kindof boggles the mind though, doesn't
it?
> it seems to me that to distinguish between social and intellectual
> patterns is amazingly complex and extremely difficult, so i will not
> attempt to do so at this time. but it seems also that the more attention
> i pay to the environment around me, the harder it is for me to say that
> humans have an exclusive domain upon the intellect layer. we are perhaps
> more able to 'tune' to it, but we are not its only occupants and to
> state we are is to aggrandize the self.
>
> if we are to really understand reality, or the MoQ for that matter, we
> have to start with the realization that reality, all four layers of the
> MoQ, is awareness, and not just human awareness or worse, human
> consciousness. our awareness contains so much more than our
> consciousness. it contains the entire universe.
>
> and so Maggie, i still disagree with Schumachers division of reality
> into a level containing humans only, no matter how it is rationalized.
> it just doesnt work for me.
I'm reading a fascinating book right now called "Ape Talk and Whale
Speak,
the Search for Interspecies Communication", and I recommend it to
everyone.
(Can't remember the author, darn it, and it's not where I can get it).
It's
fun to read, and full of real-life examples of intellect in animals;
animals' ability (and lack of ability) to enter into human
communication,
whether social or intellectual; examples of non-human sets of
intellectual
patterns; difficulties of truly separate sets of intellectual patterns
relating to each other in any way; and interesting thoughts like Dr.
Lilly's
(I paraphrase, don't have my book at hand), who noted that a severely
mentally-retarded human's mental ability far outshines any animal's (on
a
testable level) and wondered whether proto-humans killed off all their
near-competetitors in the intelligence area, and that's the reason there
aren't more gradations.
I don't want to suggest to anyone that humans are the only participants
in
intellectual capability, but that the set of human intellectual patterns
is
so vastly more powerful than any other sets of intellectual patterns
that in
a one-word label, it gets the point across.
Thanks,
Maggie
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