[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

[Mary Replies] 
Krimel, you need to go back and reread your Pirsig.  Intellectual Patterns
are not simply the sum of all patterns that have to do with thinking, the
levels are patterns of value that have a purpose of their own that differs
from their parent level.  If you're gonna talk Pirsig, you gotta get the
rules of the game right.  This is not the same thing as taking "like" stuff
and putting it all in the same box.  There's subtlety here. 

[Krimel]
Intellectual patterns are ideas, symbolic encodings of experience. Not just
thoughts, not just emotions but the expression of those thoughts and
emotions. Those patterns may be spoken, as in the oral traditions; or
written down with the advent of writing; or painted or sung. 

Pierce talks about three kind of signs: icons where the sign has a direct
correspondence to the thing it signifies like cave paints or photographs;
indexes where the sign signifies the coming or presence of the thing
signified, smoke is an index for fire or clouds for rain; and finally
symbols where the sign stands in an arbitrary relation to the thing
signified like "cat" signifies a furry purring creature. 

Ideas or intellectual patterns are expressed through these sign
relationships. A "level" is a collection or set of all similar patterns,
inorganic patterns, biological patterns and so forth. Thus the intellectual
level is the collection of all ideas. 

I have read Pirsig many times and each time seems to bring new
disappointments. He does not pretend to be infallible and even speaks of the
MoQ as an entity separate from himself as in "the MoQ states, asserts,
claims etc." Your idol Bo has been most vocal in calling Pirsig out for the
errors he sees. What makes you all of a sudden an MoQ fundamentalist 
("If you're gonna talk Pirsig, you gotta get the rules of the game right.")
when you advocate for a position Pirsig explicitly rejects? 

About the only thing I agree with Bo about is Pirsig's fallibility. If a
level is a collection of all of a particular type of pattern why should the
intellectual "level" be special? With regard to what belongs on the level or
what should count as an idea or intellectual pattern there might be some
dispute; although Pirsig claims it is supposed to be obvious. Nothing can
count as a pattern unless it replicates or iterates or is somehow inherently
static. 

Ideas must be expressible or replicable since they are the most readily
changeable of the patterns Pirsig talks about. Humans use symbols to do
this. Pierce and Saussure both talk about how we do this in terms of the
sign relationship. Another way to think about it, which as a programmer
ought to be clear to you, is in terms of encoding and decoding. Experience
is encoded and stored first as electro-chemical nerve impulses. In order to
share them, they are encoded as sounds, gestures, bodily postures, facial
expressions or physical markings which can be decoded by others and passed
along. 

The intellectual level is hard to deal with because all of the patterns on
the other levels can be encoded expressed and decoded to into it. So while a
materialist might claim that all of the other levels are offshoots from
inorganic patterns; an idealist can claim that the intellectual level
contains all of the lower levels expressed as signs and qualia. 

Crap, while thinking about this I realized yet another problem with the
whole concept of levels. dmb says and I agree that Pirsig is a Heraclytain
and yet his claim that the "levels" are discrete is in direct contradiction
to this. 

Chew on that. I'll have to get back to you.