[MD] Intellectual and Social

[John Carl]

Steve,


>
> Steve:
> Whether or not economic activity involves emotion is not really the
> issue here. The question is whether emotional activity can manifest
> without social patterns.  I still say it can.
>
>

I say it can't.  But I conclude that the self is a social pattern.  Without
some sense of self, there is no emotion possible.





> Steve:
> I think I heard that the part of the brain that is responsible for
> human emoptions is present in mammals but not reptiles, so you may be
> right about lizards and cows with regard to fear. But then after
> saying that cows experience fear you say "For fear to occur, some
> sense of self must be in place." Are you saying that cows have a sense
> of self? If so, this is an unusual claim that needs some defending.
>


Fair enough.  It's an intuitve grasping on my part, it's why I call it
hypothetical.  Truly, I have no proof that anything outside my own
consciousness has a sense of self.  Heck, in an ultimate level, I have no
evidence for my own sense of self.

It's just a sense.

But interacting with these various creatures, man and animal, I get the
impression, the strong impression, that my dogs, my cats and cows have a
sense of themselves.  They express an emotional attachment expressed through
predictable behaviours that they highly value being fed and they dread being
beat.

You can postulate all this as mere mechanistic stimulus response type
behaviour, but I'd say that such a stimulus response mechanism relies upon
the emotional mechanism as its driver - an empirically demonstrable function
of the mammalian brain.




> At any rate, what I've argued as key to distinguishing social and
> biological patterns is that biological patterns are "hard-wired"
> through DNA while social patterns are learned. Fear seems pretty
> clearly to be this sort of "hard-wired" response to biological threats
> rather than a behavior copied from one individual to the next through
> social learning.
>


Young horses don't know what to fear.  They pick this information up from
their mothers during the infant nurture phase I've been ranting about.
Humans have the longest infant nurture period of all the mammals, followed
by the great apes, and the less sophisticated the "society" the shorter the
period of nurture.  Thus the correlation between social complexity and
infant nurture is a big clue.

Did you know goats love roses?  Yet a goat herd will ignore a rose garden if
their herd leader ignores the garden and heads out elsewhere.  Ultimately of
course, DNA is responsible for the evolution of potential socialization but
the actual behavior of social animals, and emotions, are picked up by these
all important social cues.

The predators are much less social, but even mountain lions must teach their
cubs to hunt, and isolated territoriality is a form of social behaviour in
the same way self is a social creation.  You don't need a lot of beings to
have a society.



>
>
> John:
> >SOL is social, not intellectual.
> >  SOM is intellectual, because it takes this SOL as fundamental to
> existence.
>
>
> Steve:
> I don't know what you are talking about here. There is no SOL in the MOQ.
>



What I meant was subject/object consciousness.  I  was looking for a quickie
shortcut to express that term.



>
> >From Lila:
> “The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between
> intellect and society,
> subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them into a
> larger system of
> understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects
> are social and
> intellectual values.”
>
>
>
No problems there.  It's the applicability of handing out subjectivity to
mammals, that is probably the crux of my heresy.



Thanks Steve, for the fruitful dialogue,


John





> Best,
> Steve
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