[MD] Intellectual and Social

[Ian Glendinning]

Hi Matt, Steve, Mary et al.

After Mary had picked up on this thread and I was one of those
"everybody jumped on board" according to Matt, and missed his point.

> Steve said about his idea:
> It comes from Wim. Remember him?

And  Matt corrected:
> Heh, well, I think pretty much everybody misunderstood
> what I was saying here.  I wasn't saying, as I think Mary
> said and everybody jumped on board in thinking that's
> what I was saying, that social patterns control intellectual
> patterns--I was trying to identify a way of thinking about
> how they interact.

Firstly the fact that social and intellectual are NOT simply distinct
and hierarchical is not any one person's idea (all ideas evolve -
Pirsig).

Steve's original point about one paralysing the other IF that were the
case, whenever we needed to make any decision is the origin of my
whole agenda incidentally - it was dubbed "analysis paralysis" many
decades ago - not something I or anyone else invented.

Clearly the error would be to assume one hierachically controls the
other. In fact they interact, and what's more, like everything else,
the way they interact co-evolves too - mimetically - ie not just in
individual brains, but in communicating groups including their
extended embodied physio-chemical systems beyond their brains and
minds.

That's my "way of thinking" about how they interact Matt. The
mechanisms and the patterns are not metaphysical, even if the value
(quality) they are made of is.

Regards
Ian