[MD] Intellectual and Social

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,


On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 3:25 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Matt:
> However much I don't think Pirsig is clear on any of this,
> the second half of your sentence suggests a very cunning
> idea that I've never seen applied to Pirsig before.

Steve:
It comes from Wim. Remember him?

Matt:
> If intellectual patterns are patterns of inference (used to
> justify), the implications of your simple statement, I think,
> look something like this:
>
> 1) actions occur at the biological level.
>
> 2) thoughts occur at the intellectual level.
>
> 3) a train of thought can continue on indefinitely.
>
> 4) for actions to walk out at the end of a train of thought,
> the train must at some point terminate.
>
> 5) because trains of thought can continue on indefinitely,
> something must be able to intercede.
>
> 6) what intercedes are social patterns.
>
> 7) social patterns are to be interpreted as "terminals of
> satisfaction" on the track of thought.
>
> 8) a well-used terminal (where trains stop) accrues what
> we call "authority" the more trains it is able to stop.
>
> There are a lot of other things we might pile on top of
> this skeletal interpretation, but I think it is fairly radical
> when it comes to how I've seen most people interpret the
> MoQ.  1) it adds a tremendous amount of missing flesh on
> how the patterns interact on an individual level; 2) it
> electrocutes the too-simple comparisons of cultures via
> MoQ-levels by showing that all individual people function
> at all levels all the time--cultural troubles are complex
> interrelations of _particular_ tracks of thought,
> _particular_ terminals of authority, and _particular_
> walkways of action; 3) it gives a lot to think about to
> those who think others think "too socially" or "too
> authoritatively"--on this interpretation, these epithets
> have to be handed in because we all think intellectually
> (thinking being defined as inference), and all thoughts
> must pass through a social-authority matrix to turn into
> action (every action our bodies produce speaks to it), but
> bad patterns at any particular level can be replaced by
> better ones (at least that would be the pay-off for using
> this interpretation--handing in sterile Enlightenment
> intellectual patterns of "reason v. tradition" or "reason
> v. passion").  I made some overtures towards
> interpreating "social as authority" and "intellectual as
> inferential" in an essay some years ago, but I never made
> the connection of action-output as biological pattern,
> which completes an interaction-model (it was "Pirsig
> Institutionalized" in endnote 6 as part of my specialized
> application of it to the idea of "philosophology":
> http://www.moq.org/forum/Kundert/pirsiginstitutionalized/pirsiginstitutionalized.html#_edn6).

Steve:
I'm not sure that it makes sense to say that the train of thought
needs social patterns to intercede. Intellectual patterns are social
through and through by the "mythos over logos" argument.



> Steve said:
> Intellectual patterns are copied unconsciously but can
> also be copied consciously. I think that the unconscious
> copying is how intellectual patterns become widely
> followed within a community. When justify our behavior,
> we are consciously thinking (a near tautology by your
> assertion that rationales are the paradigm of conscious
> behavior) but unconsciously applying patterns of thought
> that were copied unconsciously.
> ...
> We don't generally think about whether this pattern of
> thought called the transitive property is actually justified.
> We just apply it and jump from premise to conclusion and
> behave accordingly.
>
> Matt:
> I think you might have two slightly different insights on
> your hands here.  In the first part, I think you're talking
> about the assumptions we make in motivating inference.
> In your example, an unconscious assumption would be
> "'Bob' refers to that funny looking dude standing next to
> Ann."  That's assumed in the actual inferential thought
> "if Bob is taller than Ann and Ann is taller than Jane then
> Bob is taller than Jane."  This, I think, is right and
> well-enough referred to as "unconscious," though it could
> also be referred to as "habitual" (and dare I say, I think
> it might also count as "pre-intellectual").
>
> The second part after the ellipsis, though, is slightly
> different, though still "unconscious" in the requisite
> sense.  First we take inferential thought to be epitomized
> as "thinking about X," where whatever the object of
> thought is (which is a symbol for whatever it is your simply
> thinking about) jumps into the X.  The steps in any
> inferential pattern might be visualized as points on a
> graph.  The points at the outskirts of the pattern we think
> of as "assumptions," points with lines extending inwards
> (to form the pattern), but not outwards (which would
> thus enlarge what we are seeing as "the pattern"). The
> assumptions form the unconscious barriers, or outline, of
> what we are able to conceive conceptually/inferentially.
> This is the first kind of unconscious part of thinking.  There
> is a second, though, and that's the _form_ of the
> inferential pattern, the particular kinds of lines that are
> drawn between various points within "the pattern."  Not
> all lines that _could_ be drawn are legitimate, we say,
> based on the rules of logic we've been learning through
> the centuries.  (E.g., Point "P" cannot have a line drawn
> to Point "not P" because that would violate the law of
> non-contradiction.)  The form of inference, like the
> assumptions that motivate inference, can itself become
> an object of thought.  In this case, "thinking about X"
> becomes specifically "thinking about thinking."
>
> So I think I understand what you mean by the
> unconscious picking up of intellectual patterns now.  It's
> the copying of an intellectual pattern because it does
> something satisfying, though the particular intellectual
> pattern you are copying was not itself the object of
> thought.  This distinction can be dizzying, but we can
> think of it with the form/content distinction I used above.
> The points are the content that are the objects of thought
> (all within the outline).  The lines between them are the
> form of the pattern.  The form is not simply a function of
> logic.  Rather, as Pirsig taught us, logic (or dialectic) is but
> one part of rhetoric.  The form is rhetorical in nature (which
> makes inference itself generally rhetorical).  And as a
> simple example of an unconscious copying of intellectual
> patterns, we can just think of the picking up of habits of
> speech or turns of phrase.  An unconscious emulation of
> the _style_ of writing of a thinker we admire happens
> often, particularly with the young (at heart).  (One can
> simply point to the abysmal writing of a cadre of American
> English professors who'd read too much Heidegger and
> Derrida when they were in graduate school back in the
> 70s and 80s.)
>
> We might add another example that is probably even
> more common: conscious copying would be picking up of
> the internal points of content _because_ of the lines
> drawn between them--copying based on _argument_.
> However, what is not argued for are the assumptions--they
> have to be taken as given for the discourse to begin (as a
> shout-out for Ron, this would be what Aristotle probably
> meant by "arche"--not ahistorical "principles," but
> pragmatic "starting points").  These assumptions are the
> "frame" around which "things" (the points) are seen--quite
> literally: without the frame there are no things.  So, in a
> lot of ways, to pick up thoughts based on arguments is to
> unconsiously take on the frame the arguments are based
> on (this is not bad, but just a fact of life).  And even
> further, this "frame" might become habitual for a lot of
> one's other thinking, even when not based out of the
> consciously picked up points/arguments--it might, based
> on the utility of the points/arguments, eventually become
> your frame in general.


Steve:
I like what you say above. I think that the concept of patterns goes
hand in hand with the idea of copying, so it makes a lot of sense to
consider how patterns are maintained in terms of copying human
behavior (social patterns) and copying rationales for behavior
(intellectual patterns).

I've tried to focus discussion in the past in this forum on the
question of what Pirsig means by a pattern. I think "habit" is a
better synonym than "thing" for what Pirsig is getting at.


> Steve said:
> I'm not saying that the date of emergence question
> needs to be unasked because the answer is mu. I'm
> saying that the question needs to be unasked or not
> asked so frequently or obsessively since the answer is
> probably unknowable and because there is a more
> relevent way to think about the evolution of patterns of
> value.
>
> Matt:
> I don't think I understand why you want to say this.
> First, I concede about avoidance of obsession.  But
> "probably unknowable" doesn't make sense to me on
> pragmatic grounds--all narratives of making sense of the
> past are constructed from whatever materials we have
> lying around and all of them are justified in the same way.
> Our levels of _certainty_ may differ, but too it matters in
> judging the utility of these narratives what we want out of
> the narrative.  And in the case of when we moved from
> being merely social to additionally intellectual, I see it as
> neither mystifyingly unknowable or distractingly useless.
>
> In fact, I think these narratives are extraordinarily
> important in defining what the hell we are talking about
> with the phrases "social patterns" and "intellectual
> patterns."  Because if you can't tell a Darwinian story
> about how these things you've demarcated as subsisting
> were created, then you are in the dangerous territory of
> having created an entity like "consciousness" (which
> philosophers have had trouble in explaining just how that
> light switch gets turned on).
>
> In addition, explaining what you are talking about with
> reference to when it arose can help immensely with
> demarcating just what you are talking about.  For
> instance, saying that symbol manipulation began in
> Greece around the 5th century BCE tells us an awful lot
> about what phenomenon is being referred to.  (It also tells
> us an awful lot about what is possibly lacking in such a
> definition of "symbol manipulation.")  So when you say, "I
> also think that if we all agree that the first intellectual
> pattern occurred on such and such a date, we would still
> have little idea about what is meant by a social pattern as
> opposed to an intellectual pattern," I disagree entirely.  I
> think telling a story about an X is just as important to giving
> life to an X as explicitly defining an X.  And with reference to
> Pirsig, putting the story together with the theory gives us a
> definition of intellectual pattern as coinciding with the slogan
> "symbol manipulation is philosophy."  This creates enormous
> headaches for people trying to fit in where "language" fits in
> the theory.
>
> You also say that you "don't think that picking a moment in
> time for the occurence of the first intellectual pattern is
> important especially since this same evolution of patterns
> occurs every day as biological babies begin to participate in
> social patterns and later begin to participate in intellectual
> patterns."  This inference, between how babies learn, say,
> language to how language evolved historically isn't
> necessarily a safe inference.  An advanced culture might
> have learned quite a few new tricks in reproducing itself
> that weren't available when it was climbing out of the muck.
> I suspect it has.

Steve:
I don't mean to equate the historical evolution of patterns with
cognitive development of babies. I just think that we have more direct
understanding of human development than we do of history, therefore I
think that human development is better place to look than history
(unless you happen to have more expertise in history than human
development) if you want to understand the types of patterns of value.
One interesting place to inquire would be correlate Piaget's stages of
cognitive development the MOQ evolutionary hierarcy of patterns of
values.

Best,
Steve