[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Krimel]

[Mary]
What we have here is a failure to communicate.  My next favorite movie quote
(totally irrelevant), "I love the smell of napalm in the morning."

I take it you do not see the levels as a collection of patterns of value?
Quick, dirty example of how I see it.  A minister values social conformity
and is offended by any ideas that threaten to undermine faith (such as
evolution).  A scientist values empirical research, and is offended by any
ideas that threaten that (such as religion).  Both use language.  Both
think.  One represents the Social Level and one the Intellectual.  I take it
you disagree?

[Krimel]
I do see a level as a collection of patterns of value. I think the
intellectual level is a collection of intellectual patterns. A pattern, to
be a pattern, must have extension in time. It must persist. It is not just
an idea or a thought that flits through someone's mind.

When a minister avoids, shuns or banishes from the congregation, someone for
their ideas or actions, that might be a social pattern but when the preacher
sermonizes about deviant social patterns, he does so using intellectual
patterns. In speaking he may be performing a social pattern but what he
says, regardless of the topic, is an intellectual pattern.

A geologist a talks about rocks does she employ inorganic patterns to do so.



Empirically yours,
Mary

-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at lists.moqtalk.org] On Behalf Of Krimel
Sent: Saturday, January 09, 2010 3:49 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Intellect's Symposium

[Mary]
>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."

Pirsig's letter to the Apostle Paul - or was it The Turner Diaries?, re the
Intellectual Level: "the skilled manipulation of abstract symbols that have
no corresponding particular experience and which behave according to rules
of their own."

Wouldn't it have been best for Pirsig to just leave well enough alone with
the first statement?  The second brings obfuscation and changes the intent
of the first entirely, looks like.  

[Krimel]
Actually, we would all be better served by omitting the first statement. The
second is almost a textbook definition of language. Language is the means by
which we humans express and preserve our thoughts. 

[Mary]
To clarify the Intellectual level, would it be useful to explain what
exactly it is that is missing in the early books of Bible?

[Krimel]
In the first statement Pirsig seems be channeling Julian Jaynes' "The
Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." Jaynes
uses the same argument but he is talking about conscious self awareness NOT
"intellect". Jaynes argues that before about 3000 years ago people did not
think for themselves, they heard voices in their heads.

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