[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

Krimel said:
... the Mythos is just discarded Logos. Any explanation expressed in symbolic fashion is an intellectual pattern. Claiming that God created the universe in seven days for example is an intellectual pattern. At one time it was Logos. The fact that it gets replace by "better" ideas that assume the mantle of Logos does not mean that the pattern is any less an intellectual pattern. 

dmb says:
That's what the Victorian scholars thought. That's what Freud thought but mythological symbols will be very badly misunderstood if they're taken as bad ideas. As Joseph Campbell says, religion is a misreading of mythology. And that's exactly the error, reading them as expressing ideas. By analogy, your claim is like saying that dreaming is just being awake badly. I think this analogy is most apt, because myths and dreams "speak" the same kind of language. Myths and dreams are both very far away from the skilled manipulation of abstractions. 

[Krimel]
As I recall these comments were made in the context of what constitutes the intellectual "level" and in that context my point was that the intellectual level is composed of intellectual patterns or ideas that have been deemed worthy of preserving whether that be  oral tradition, writing, pictures, art, music... Their truth value is irrelevant.

Earlier you said something to the effect that the Victorians were somehow responsible for turning the term "myth" into a synonym for false. But the term myth as far as I call tell has always been used to distinguish our stories from stories of others. Our stories are the revealed truth of an all powerful God. The stories of others are just folktales.

Myths can arise in any number of ways but the common 'essence' of myths is that they begin as symbolic vehicles for truth and are usually regarded as factual. For example it is a matter of 'common sense' that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. This comports with the common experience of anyone who has lived through a day and a host of explanations have been put forth in every corner of the planet to account for this. The Ptolemaic system replaced many of the fanciful explanations of say dung beetles rolling a fiery ball of shit or Apollo racing his chariot mainly because it provided a better and more precise guide for when to reap and when to sow. The more poetic accounts where as a result no longer regarded as factual. They entered into the Mythos to the extent that they still contain elements of truth that people who hear them deem worthy of preserving. Ironically when Copernicus first proposed his heliocentric model it was not seen as blasphemous because it was thought to be a fiction and while the Ptolemaic system may have been very useful it survives within the intellectual level main as a historic point of references and almost no one cares enough about its gory details to bother with them.

Dreams are most often just rehashing of the previous day's events their symbolic value is highly overrated. In fact the active synthesis model of dream holds that they result from random thoughts or the random firing of neurons during sleep. The mind abhors this kind of randomness and a vacuum of meaning and fills in the gaps with some kind of narrative. The same sort of thing happens during sensory deprivation.

Krimel said:
Both Mythos and Logos are part of the collection of intellectual patterns. You are confusing the function of intellectual patterns on the one hand and the quality of the patterns on the other. If levels are sets of patterns, then the level has to include all of the patterns. 

dmb says:
Well, no. The distinction is partly based on the fact that they function differently. When you read myths as myths rather than bad ideas, they are just as true as any true idea. To say myths are just bad ideas is like saying organisms are just bad myths. If you try to understand one in terms of the other, you'll fail to understand it for what it is. That's the problem with reductionism, see? It is a kind of category error.

[Krimel]
Myths survive precisely because they are good ideas they are just not regarded as factual. A story that no longer makes sense to the rational, sequential logical left side of the brain may still have resonance with the non-verbal emotional right side. Which is pretty much what Jung and Campbell are saying. But what makes them part of the intellectual "level" is the fact of their survival not the reasons for their survival or their veracity or even their emotional appeal.
 
[dmb]
Imagine if I described the music of a string quartet in terms of vibrations per second. Imagine that I report the frequencies with absolutely perfect precision and emphatically insist that there could be no music without those vibrations. All of that would be undeniably true. But if you objected because all this is irrelevant to music AS music, you'd be right. If you objected because I'd reduced music to a quantification of the physical facts, you'd be right. And that's what I'm saying about biological explanations of culture and language. I don't deny the biological facts any more than you'd deny the fact that strings vibrate.

[Krimel]
Music not only can but has been broken down in this way. There is a program call Band-in-a-Box that I have not used a lot but have had some experience with for about 15 years. It creates music on your computer with a minimum of musical ability required of you. You can type in a set of chords and tell it what musical style you want to hear them played in from classic, to hiphop. You can select the tempo, the number and kind of instruments you would like and it does a pretty good job of playing. Wolfram does something similar with sounds generated by cellular automata I believe here: http://tones.wolfram.com . But you are right what makes these algorithms worth preserving are the emotional aesthetic effect they produce upon the hearer. But this quantification of the qualitative experience dates back at least as far as the Pythagoreans.  

In biological terms the genome is code generated through trial and error over billions of year that produces organisms prepared to interact with their environments. The life an individual lives is a function of that code and the actual conditions they encounter. The outcome is a probabilistic function of the codes interaction with the environment. You really cannot understand what happens without knowledge of both.

[dmb]
My dictionary doesn't have a picture of you along with this entry, but it could.... 

reductionism |riˈdək sh əˌnizəm|noun often derogatorythe practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon, esp. a mental, social, or biological phenomenon, in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, esp. when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.

[Krimel]
My dictionary actually has a picture of you alongside an entry reading: reductionism |riˈdək sh əˌnizəm|noun a term Dave uses when he wants a plausible sounding excuse for dismissing someone's argument in the absence of actually having a valid counter argument. 

The way you toss out this term is like a chemist dismissing all of physics because it attempts to break chemical processes into more fundamental inorganic relationships. Or a biologist dismissing chemistry because it breaks life down into simpler more fundamental phenomena... 

Or try reading the half dozen times we have had this argument before. I thought the Da Vinci ones about top down and bottom up processing covered it pretty well. I know I am biased but I never thought you addressed those very well. You are welcome to try again. 

I think any belief or position someone holds is derived from the interaction of reason and emotion. Damasio's research is primarily in the area of emotion. He claims what without the ability to experience emotion people find it very difficult if not impossible to make decisions. Our commitment to ideas is likewise a function of right brain emotional commitment reinforced, balanced and guided by rational left brain functions. 

Emotion is almost always what guides us in the final analysis. That’s why commercials are about sex and status and not about the chemistry of your tooth paste. But in a philosophical discussion, it is one thing to express emotion for rhetorical purposes but what really should be important is reason. In reading your stuff it is often hard for me tell whether you know the difference. It's like Pirsig dismissing Kant because his ideas were "ugly". Not to belabor the analogy but it's as though you think your frontal cortex is working but your amygdala has hijacked your motor functions.