[MD] What Bo Doesn't Get

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> Ideas that are preserved, however they are preserve: that is the
> intellectual LEVEL. Look at those cave paintings, for example. At the time
> of their painting, the artist and his contemporaries shared an 
> understanding of what they were painting and why.

Steve:
If they could indeed talk about WHY they were doing what they were
doing, then they were indeed participating in intellectual patterns,
but according to Pirsig, ritual action preceded such justification of
action, so at some point people were doing such things but could not
tell you why. Such people did not participate in intellectual patterns
at all.

[Krimel]
Interestingly, Skinner argues that ritual behavior results from random
reinforcement. He would also argue that asking people "why?" is not the best
way to identify the causes of their behavior. You can ask anyone, anywhere,
at anytime "why?" and they will give you an answer. The question may not
have occurred to them before it was asked and their answer many not have
anything to do with the actual causes of what they are doing. But
intellectual activity does not depend on the quality of either the questions
or the answers. I would suggest that both the asking and the answering are
intellectual activities and the intellectual _level_ is the accumulation of
questions asked and answers given.


> Krimel:
> The intellectual level is made up of ideas and what differs between the
> intellectual level represented in cave painting and the intellectual level
> today is mainly a matter of quantity and technological enhancements that
> make ideas static and less like to be forgotten, things like writing, the
> printing press, film, and the digital revolution.
>
> The _level_ consists not in the use of symbols but in the symbols
> themselves.

Steve:
A slight quibble here. I think that the symbols themselves are best
thought of as social patterns while the "rules" or habits concerning
how such symbols should be manipulated were the intellectual patterns.

[Krimel]
According the Peirce, symbols are the most abstract of his three classes of
signs. The pictures in cave art are iconic in that the picture has a direct
correspondence to what it signifies. Smoke is an index that signals the
presence of fire. Fever is an index of disease. Unlike icons and indexes,
symbols for both Peirce and Saussure stand in an arbitrary relation to what
they signify. That arbitrary relationship is both socially constructed and
socially mediated. The rules for combining symbols, or syntax, are also
socially constructed and socially mediated. In fact all intellectual
activity is somehow or another social or serves a social function. Both the
symbols and the rules for combining them are used socially to code and
decode messages. I am suggesting that the intellectual _level_ is the
accumulation of messages.

[Steve]
As an illustration of Pirsig's point about the absence intellectual
patterns in the Bible, consider the Noah story in Genesis quoted
below. Notice the almost complete lack of any justification for the
events described. The story is pretty much of the form "this happened,
then this happened, then this happened...." We can read into this
story to take it as an explanation of WHY things are as they are that
might ave satisified intellectual yearnings, but tend to think that
reading is our intellectually ethnocentric view of how these stories
functioned considering that there is so little about any of it that
reads as an attempt to explain or justify anything intellectually. the
story functions to answer the socially relevent question "who are we
as a people or society?" rather than the intellectual question "why
are things as they are?"

[Krimel]
I think both questions, who and why, are intellectual questions. In fact as
I have indicated I think any question is an intellectual pattern as is any
answer. You seem to be making your classification based on what kind of
question is being asked and what kind of answer is given. I would say this
misses the point.

[Steve]
A key is to consider the use of the word "because." So often in the
Bible, the word is used in sentences where the "reason" for an action
seems to have nothing to do with what it is supposed to explain, but
since this word is sometimes used an dbecause there is a grammar for
prescribing how sybols are organized to form words and sentences, we
still see the beginnings of participation in intellectual patterns.

[Krimel]
I would argue that the intellectual _level_ predates writing by as much as
150,000 years. Writing involves the encoding of intellectual patterns into
material form. Prior to that, intellectual patterns were encoded as speech.
The story of Noah, depending as it does on Babylonian legend, is among the
earliest written stories we have and is thus at the beginning of the
encoding of the intellectual level into written form. But it is by no mean
anywhere near the beginning of human participation in intellectual patterns.

[Steve]
For example, there is the justification that God decided to destroy
the earth BECAUSE the people were all wicked. This statement captures
the upper limit of the extent to which the Bible represents
participation in intellectual patterns in these chapters, which is to
say to only a very rudimentary degree.

[Krimel]
You seem to be attempting to classify ideas not on the basis of what they
are but on how precise they are. I think that works if you are talking about
Mythos and Logos for example but not in making social/intellectual
distinctions.

[Steve]
Again, I cite this example as evidence that people did not always have
intellectual patterns. Social patterns preceded intellectual patterns
and even in writing and early art we can be looking almost exclusively
at participation in social patterns only and perhaps only very very
limited participation in intellectual patterns in cases where some
justification of behavior is attempted and in the grammar of how words
are organized in telling a story or the "grammar" of how lines are
used in drawing a picture.

[Krimel]
When you put it this way it really makes it easier to disagree
wholeheartedly. I would say there have NEVER been humans (homo sapiens)
without intellectual patterns. Intellectual patterns are always preceded by
some other kind of pattern whether it is social, biological or inorganic. We
don't ask questions about things we have not experienced.

BTW, with regard to the story of the flood; what you quote is the story as
it appears in Genesis. In his book "Who Wrote the Bible?" Richard Friedman
provides a compelling account of the story's sources and how it got edited
into its present form. He points to two literary sources that were woven
together by an editor, whom he identifies as the scribe Ezra. who has his
own book in the Bible. I just looked and can't find where I put the book,
but you can see more about this here: 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/flood.html 

Friedman claims Ezra was attempting to reconcile two conflicting accounts of
the story. The first (P) was a product of the priestly class. In P God is
not named and is actually spoken of in the plural form. The second source,
(J) calls God by the name YHWH. Friedman finds, in the tension between them,
some surprisingly sophisticated issues. These arise not only from the
differences between the two accounts but in the subtle way they are woven
together by the editor. If you go to that link and scroll down to the
interactive part you can see which version is which and how they are put
together into a single narrative. 

It is interesting to note that both P and J are thought to have been written
shortly after the kingdom of Israel was divided, after the death of Solomon,
around 700 B.C. or around the time of Homer. Ezra's editing took place when
the Jews returned to Israel after their Babylonian captivity around 500 B.C.
both of these dates predate the classical Greek period wherein we are told
the intellectual level is supposed to have appeared by magic. I can't help
but think that the production of conflicting accounts and the attempt to
synthesize and reconcile them are all clearly intellect activities and the
result is an ancient contribution to the intellectual level.

That said, I have to confess that when it comes to the Flood story my
preference is for either Bill Cosby's version or "The Unicorn Song" by Shel
Silverstein. I thought "Evan Almighty" blew chunks. 

Since people seem to love posting inane YouTube links here's one for ya:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD90xcg6UaA