[MD] What Bo Doesn't Get

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> Right, everything you can think of and everything anyone has ever thought 
> of are potentially part of the intellectual level. To actually be part of 
> the intellectual level as such, it must be a pattern. That is it must 
> persist or have extension in the temporal dimension.

[Mati:] 
I think of the early primitive art in which animals were drawn
on the cave wall, from my perspective they certainly were thinking
about the animals and were conveying them in a temporal interpretation
of the animals themselves. Based on what you suggest they must have
been intellectual.  I would suggest they were displaying behavior that
had an intelligence, but they were not intellectual.  Intellect
requires a metaphysical basis.  That basis did not exist in a capacity
to sustain itself as a level until Aristotle's S/O divide. I think
there is a common agreement that intelligence existed long before
intellect.

[Krimel]
I think the intellectual level was around way before cave art, which dates
to about 40,000 years ago. But cave art and burial of the dead are among the
first bits of evidence we have of an intellectual "level". They suggest not
just that thoughts occurred but that they persisted in time and were shared
within a community.

Intellect does not require metaphysics. You have this backassward.
Metaphysics is a product of intellect. As for the intellectual level its
very existence as a level is supported entirely by the processes of encoding
and decoding. Language is the first layer of the intellectual level that
provides the extension in time needed for ideas to be transmitted and to
persist in time. Amongst tribal people this meant that the intellectual
level was at first confined to those who shared the language, values and
traditions of small communities. As one group or another becomes more
wide-ranging or families of common languages grew large so to did the
intellectual level in the form of stories told around camp fires and the
transmission of lore and skills to the young. Writing was the next step in
the development of the intellectual level as it allows symbolically encoded
concepts to extend for centuries. Next came the printing press, then film of
various sorts and now the digital revolution. All are phases in the
explosion of the intellectual level in the modern world.

Aristotle and the Greeks just happen to coincide with a period during which
writing had allowed for the accumulation of ideas to the point of critical
mass. It was a marvelous time but it is not the beginning; it is merely a
particular phase where in recognizably modern forms of thinking begin to
appear.

> [Krimel]
> I don't think it is possible for intellect to precede society but if that
> were the case it would indeed be a problem for the MoQ. However, we see 
> that the social level is primary in almost all primates and most mammals.
> Intellect on the other hand only begins to show up in the great apes.

Mati: 
I will respectfully suggest that your premise that thinking is
intellect then indeed MoQ has a problem.  That has been the Achilles
heal that Bo has been pointing out so persistently for so long.

[Krimel]
A proton is inorganic but it is not the inorganic level. CO2 is an organic
molecule but it is not the organic level. A thought or even a method of
thinking like logic may be intellectual but not the intellectual level. A
level is the accumulation of all such patterns in one level or another. The
inorganic level consists of static pattern in the subatomic realm. The
biological level is static patterns of carbon molecules and the intellectual
level is symbolic encoding.

> [Mati]
> The point is when we discuss something that can defined metaphysically has
> always come home to the S/O reality.
>
> [Krimel]
> That does seem to be Bo's oft stated notion. It is so clearly wrong that 
> it is a wonder that anyone buys, much less repeats it.

Mati: 
It is not clearly wrong from my humble perspective, based on
what you believe is the metaphysical value of intellect. It seems that
some other might have come to the same conclusion as Bo has suggested.
 The problem is SOM has created a messy web which tangles our notion
of who we are.  Bo's notions rids the tangles and puts intellect in
it's proper place and allows MoQ to be the next possible level.
Otherwise MoQ seems fail to gather any meaning with any legitimacy.

[Krimel]
As I said metaphysics is a form of intellectual activity. Metaphysics of any
stripe is a part of the intellectual level. We can argue about the relative
merits of one metaphysics or another but this is hardly the basic for
constructing a new level. 

[Mati:] 
I understand the need to suggest that MoQ is an intellectual
pattern. And I agree that SOM and MOQ are two distinctive different
patterns.  But if MoQ is a pattern of intellect of sorts it is
completely separate entity from SOM(intellect).  I have privately
discussed this issue at length with Bo. They function similarly in the
same metaphysical discussion but MoQ is radically different from SOM
in that provide a far more clearer understanding of all values that
are defined.  Pirsig suggests, and I think correctly, that accounts
for the meaning of all values, that was the shortcoming of SOM.  I
know Bo will cringe at my suggestion that MoQ might be considered a
Neo-Intellect, but that is an entirely different discussion.

[Krimel]
These are all fine reasons for preferring MoQ over SOM. But nothing in what
you say suggests that they are sufficiently different to constitute a
different level. Giraffes are very different from elephant but both are
vertebrates, both are mammals. Even the platypus however difficult it was to
classify finds its way into a comfortable niche in the tree of life.

{Mati:}
Truth is based on the prospective that is based on. Walk into
any church and ask were truth resides, they won't give you an answer
that is neccessarily intellectually based.

[Krimel]
I might argue with the quality of the intellectual effort they put into
their account of truth just as I am with you and Bo but that does not make
their account any less intellectual. Their arguments are expressed
symbolically and refer to patterns of thought and action. After all cancer
is a biological pattern just as much as a bad idea is an intellectual
pattern.

> [Mati]
> The metaphysical path of "encoding of experience into concepts" is a
> dead end that gets nowhere metaphysically speaking in the same manner
> as SOM.  Bo's simply points that out.
>
> [Krimel]
> Saying it is a dead end does not make it so. This issue of encoding and
> decoding experience into concepts is fundamental to perception and
> discourse. It is what we are biologically and socially equipped to do and
> without it we have nothing to say no capacity to say it.

Mati: 
Encoding and Decoding of experience is done at the biological,
social and intellectual level. 

[Krimel]
Such patterns as exist at the inorganic, biological and social levels can be
encoded and decoded conceptually but nothing in those patterns is
conceptual; they merely happen in response to the existing conditions. When
we detect such patterns and render them symbolic then they are at the
intellectual level. 

[Mati:]
The conceptualization is experience is done at both the social and 
intellectual level, and some might suggest it even happens at the 
biological level.  Again encoding and decoding of experience of 
concepts seems to be part of the capacity having intelligence not 
intellect, though it should be suggested that one needs a capacity 
of intelligence to allow intellect to function.

[Krimel]
A concept is a pattern of thinking that has extension in time. When we think
about anything, we are operating at the intellectual level. But thinking and
conceptualization are not required at either the social or the biological
level. The Pecking Order is a social pattern that runs up and down the
animal kingdom. Animals in a group organize their social behavior according
to each individual's rank in such hierarchies. They do not analytically
describe their group dynamics, they just act. Primates are among the most
social of animals and human patterns of social interaction do not differ
significantly from what we see in other primate groups. Our species
characteristically over thinks everything and we intellectualize and
formalize certain forms and expressions of social behavior. But talking or
understanding social behavior in intellectual terms does not make such
talking and analysis any less a part of the intellectual rather than the
social level.

> [Krimel]
> BTW, metaphysics, like physics, is mainly a matter of finding the smallest
> set of concepts to account for the largest amount of experience. Static 
> and dynamic are two such concepts that account for a wider range of 
> phenomena than do subjects and objects or mind and matter.

Mati:  
I find it interesting that of all the metaphysical phenomena
that you had to chose from to contrast MOQ, you chose SOM to make your
point.  Pirsig did the same thing. That is why, in part, I believe SOM
defaults to Intellect.  There isn't any other metaphysical construct
to default to in the same capacity, or any capacity for that matter,
as the static value of intellect.

[Krimel]
Odd that you should say this because it has been my experience that when
someone here throws out the "you talking SOM" line, it merely mean they
either don't get what you have said or they don't like it. There is nothing
inherently SOM about physics. I suspect if you took a random sample of
metaphysical leanings of a group of particle physicists you would get a
pretty broad spectrum of opinions. After all Pirsig draws heavily on Bohr in
his SPOV paper and it is exceedingly difficult to read Bohr as an advocate
of SOM. 

That said, neither you nor Bo has ever presented, to my knowledge, anything
to suggest that the MoQ is not an intellectual pattern. Sadly the SOL (which
I firmly believe is an apt nom de plume, since in my neck of the woods it
means Shit Outta Luck) is little more than a lame attempt to elevate SOM to
the privileged position from which the MoQ seeks to dethrone it.