[MD] What Bo Doesn't Get

[Bruce Underwood]

Hello,

I think the intellectual level first appeared when one could recognize knowledge.  It is not just speaking/communicating or even intelligence itself, but to recognized knowledge and give it "value".  The ability to pass along knowledge.  Written "language", even in the form of cave pictures, allowed the social level to communicate beyond the grave, this was,IMO, the first great intellectual victory over the social level greatest problem, death.  Death is at the biological level, but the social level must overcome all of the issues of the biological level. The intellectual level came out of this need.

Bruce


----------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 12:31:43 -0800
> From: ridgecoyote at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] What Bo Doesn't Get
>
> Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Krimel is back and he's ba-a--a-d.
>
> And I mean that in a good way Krimel. Rarely have I encountered a post
> where every single point made seems exactly right to me.
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 10:17 AM, Krimel  wrote:
>
>>> [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.
>>
>>
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