[MD] Intellect's Symposium

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Mary and Andre.

17 Jan. :

Mary (to Dave and Bodvar):
> What I've been saying is that the Intellectual Level represents
> basically the mindset of the scientific method, which serves its own
> purposes rather than those of society or belief systems.

There are so many posts and comments I should have liked to 
comment and thank you for, Mary, but this discussion races on like 
a runaway train. Particularly the one on logic and computation and 
also your exchange with Mark Smit on "belief and faith" even if 
there are some finer SOL-based "observations" to be made.  

OK, your above comment IS as SOL-id as they come. "...the 
Intellectual Level represents basically the mindset of the scientific 
method, which serves its own purposes rather than those of 
society or belief systems". I know you will agree to the reservation 
that science did not spring full-fledged out of the social - 
mythological past, but was the fall-out of the still greater revolution 
taking place in Greece in the last century BC.  

Andre:
> This is my understanding of Bodvar's SOL argument precisely. Not only
> does this scientific method serve its own purposes but in the process
> argues that the basis upon which 'those of society or belief systems'
> rest are subjective, therefore mere opinion therefore superfluous
> therefore having no legitimate basis. They are figments of people's
> imagination,,,mere ghosts.

Right, this is possibly the most profound thing to understand, 
namely that is is intellect that has coined the derogatory terms 
about the past which - in MOQ's hindsight - becomes the social 
level, and now we understand that the 3rd. level was neither 
subjective nor superstitious, it merely was before intellects and its 
S/O.   

> But as Pirsig says,science is , in fact, not independent from society,
> science and its products are ghosts as well. Should science respond to
> this it would probably argue that its ghosts are more real than the
> others. Ladidadida. 

Well, the "ghost of reason" argument was Phaedrus' in ZAMM, but 
in the MOQ, its level system and the tenet about the upper level 
being out of the lower kind of supersedes it. The uppermost level - 
intellect - is truly the best, but is static quality explains its 
limitations. What an "intellectual" who doesn't know the MOQ 
context, i.e. a SOMist will argue may be what Andre says, but 
soon (in a hundred years time) everyone will be MOQ-aware.       

Boy from the Country (John Denver): 

    'Because he spoke to the fish in the creek. He tried to tell 
    us that the animals could speak.Who knows? Perhaps they 
    do. How do you know they don't just because they've never 
    spoken to you?'  

> Well, scientists talk to data...photons, protons, quanta, one's and
> zero's, molecules etc etc. Difference between the Boy from the Country
> and the scientist? The MoQ says they operate at different levels of
> evolution. The former in the social and the latter in the intellectual.
> But I stand corrected. 

Well, the MOQ is out of SOM - out of intellect - in a level-like 
sense and employs intellect's reason albeit for a better purpose. I 
don't think the MOQ will mean a return to a magical reality (where 
fishes talk). They (the fishes) haven't reached the social level's 
language, much less the intellectual where language is seen as 
symbolic, but they surely communicate their fish information 
perfectly among themselves.  

Bodvar