[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Krimel]

> [Krimel]
> Intellectual patterns are not thoughts, they are shared thoughts. When
> Grampa Uga sat around the campfire spinning tales about the Great Bear in
> the sky, his story was an intellectual pattern. It may have served a 
> social function but it was an intellectual pattern.

[Mati:] 
I think it is great that you see that intelligence or as you say
intellectual patterns served social patterns.  So when did
intellectual patterns free themselves from the social level and how?

[Krimel]
I am tempted to say emphatically NEVER! Intellectual and social patterns
have ALWAYS coexisted in Homo Sapiens.

If you insist on a "when" and a "how", I would say, When the first large
brained hairless ape emerged from the womb and by means of adaptation to
selection pressures in the early environment our ancestors called home.

[Mati:] 
I have read the "The Element" and likely written after Aristotle
but I doubt that it had a direct impact based on s/o split given it's
relative closness to time. But I could be wrong on this.  The question
is to what end does the story serve? The social level or intellectual?

[Krimel]
Euclid consolidated the mathematics of the Greeks into a textbook. But note
that above Plato's academy was inscribed, "Let on one ignorant of geometry
enter here."

"What end does the story serve?". Both, neither what difference does it
make?

> [Krimel]
> OK, look this "domination of social level" is not going to end. Not now, 
> not ever. We are primates. Social patterns are encoded in our DNA. We may 
> be able to intellectually identify our social patterns and try to modify 
> them intelligently. But the best we can do is exchange one set of social 
> patterns for another.

[Mati:] 
Social patterns are encoded in our DNA?  

[Krimel]
Yes, they are. From the production of oxitocin in Mom, Dad and infant during
the birth process, to the newborn's ability to imitate facial expressions at
birth. From our innate ability to acquire language to social emotions like
pride and shame; social patterns are biologically encoded.

[Mati:]
If a child is raised in
the wild we clearly see a being that only beholded the biological
level, there are no conventional social values.  He may be a social
creature but he must learn those social patterns through some kind of
communication/language that are beyound the biological level.  

[Krimel]
First of all I am not at all convinced that there are such children. But the
examples that are commonly used for this, all show children exhibiting deep
and profound pathology. It's called Reactive Attachment Disorder. Ask Lu
about it.

[Mati:]
Just so you understand my background in education has provided me the
experiences that reienforce the idea that we need to be able to communicate
our social values in order for them to learn.  Without this communication
bridge, conventional social patterns cannot have a chance to take hold.

[Krimel]
All biological organisms are programmed genetically to interact with their
environments. Learning is the process that allows past experience to
determine present behavior. This happens in humans and it happens in fish.
In humans the ability to encode and decode experience greatly facilitates
this process. It allows us to learn not solely on the basis of our
individual experience but from the experience of others. This ability arises
as an extension of the social level just as social living arises as a
biological strategy from the biological level.

> [Krimel]
> Look around the world and you will find that every primitive culture had
> arrowheads.  Snip.......

[Mati:] 
And I quote Pirsig...."  But if one studies the early books of
the Bible or if one studies the sayings of primitive tribes today, the
intellectual level is conspicuously absent."

[Krimel]
I do not regard blindly following Pirsig as a virtue. It's the one thing I
agree with Bo about. If Pirsig had meant to monopolize the MoQ he would not
have kept referring to it in the third person. 

In this instance he seems to be appealing to Julian Jaynes in a kind of
mixed up way. Jaynes said that we do not find evidence of "consciousness" in
ancient writings. He is not talking about intellect. Still, I think the best
one can say about Jaynes is, "my, that's interesting."

> [Krimel]
> SOM is an intellectual tool.

[Mati:]
We agree, and more so it was a tool that was able to deliver us
from the social level like no other tool we had before.

[Krimel]
The only way to be delivered from the social level is to be stranded like
Robinson Crusoe. 

> [Krimel]
> But paintings and tools are intellectual patterns regardless of the 
> function they serve.

Mati: 
I once wondered the same thing. But that doesn't make sense
related to timing and the dawn of intellect as a seperate level not
beholden to the social level. So Art itself is not a litmus test for
intellect.  Art is great, it is important and I believe that intellect
perhaps can be conveyed through Art, but Art itself is not by it
existence a default for intellect.

[Krimel]
When you see that intellect "dawned" with Homo Sapiens and is an outgrowth
of primate social patterns it's not so hard. 

Art is just a particular type of intellectual pattern.

> [Mati:]
> MoQ is perhaps the first major metaphysical breakthrough in 2500 years, 
> time will tell.
>
> [Krimel]
> The MoQ is merely a restatement and refinement of Taoism which has been
> around for 2500 years. I think the clock has spoken.

[Mati:] 
In 2005 in Liverpool Pirsig was very gracious in saying that his
ideas, MoQ are based on ideas that were not new.  But give him credit
for uliminating SOM and giving us a formal metaphysical construct with
MOQ. As to when it takes hold within society and we can point to
changes accredited to it, well the clock just started ticking again
.... :-)

[Krimel]
Chinese society is rooted in Taoist metaphysics. It is this metaphysics that
Buddhists co-opted as the metaphysical foundation of Zen. As I said, the
clock has been ticking for a long time now.