[MD] The MOQ by the moqists Part 1.

[Mary]

Hi Bo & all,

> Mary, All.
> 
> 19 June:
> 
> Bodvar before:
> > > Where do I place the S/O distinction on the biological level?  I
> > > think it's Mary and I haven't yet figured out her assertion.
> 
> [Mary]
> > Anyway, back on the subject at hand, if there is value in being a
> > discrete living entity, then it behooves you to have a brain to go
> > with it that 1) recognizes your distinctness from all else, and 2)
> > values that distinction; and this, "My dear, Scarlett", is the much
> > maligned subject-object distinction in a nutshell.  Living creatures
> > have all had one through time immemorial and it has nothing much to
> do
> > with intellect, though it does make use of it.
> 
[Bo] 
> But the biological realm is just enormous, it spans from microbes,
> plants to the mammal organism. Brain - even anything resembling a
> neural system - is far far down the line. When the immune system
> entered I don't know but only then a "self/not self" distinction
> occurred.
> The social level may also be seen as having a immune system based
> on another distinction the "our cause/not our cause" but it has nothing
> to do with SOM  which is intellect's value of ourselves as detached
> observers of reality. The fact that this distinction is paradox-ridden
> and
> platypus-producing - as SOM - is a different matter
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Point taken.  Saying, "Living creatures have all had one [a brain]" is
obviously wrong.  Sloppy of me.  I was of course trying to talk only about
living creatures that _do_ have a brain.  Not rose bushes.  If your species
is advanced enough to be self-aware, then by definition, your species has
the capacity for ego.  You can 'mentally' value the difference between
yourself and not yourself.  You could trace the evolution of ego by
following this line of thinking.  First would come a recognition of
self/not-self, followed closely by 'valuing' continued existence of the self
you are aware of, as in "I don't want to die".  This is rudimentary ego and
is the necessary set of preconditions for all the rest of the mental mess
our egos eventually evolved into - culminating in SOM.  I suppose you could
term this a "biological psychology theory".  I've not read this elsewhere,
but my ego is not so big as to think it's not been thought of before. :)

My point is to illustrate that once biology started down the ego path as a
viable supporting mechanism to sustain a given life-form, the die was cast.
If you take advancing intelligence and combine that with ego, then the ego
also benefits from that increasing intelligence and increases in complexity
too.  It starts to encompass far more subjects than basic survival,
responding to things that are way beyond life-threatening events, like
insults for instance.  And though not in the original scope of the problem
designed to solve, it is now, since it resides in the same head as the
increased intelligence we've developed.  As intelligence evolves to the
level where you comprehend abstractions, the ego too enters the realm of
abstraction, carried along as the 'baggage' of another era, but a powerful
fundamental force nonetheless.  

If you have a powerful low-level drive to value yourself, then everything
you do gets wrapped up in it.  You start to measure your self worth using
your new-found intellectual abstractions and you'll find yourself feeling
good or bad based on your status  against others of your kind.  You start to
view your achievements as things of value too.  Things to be 'proud of'.  In
fact, I propose that without an advanced ego, there would be little
motivation to even have achievements beyond what's necessary to sustain your
life and protect your offspring.  The whole concept of achievement is
completely driven by the ancient force of ego in concert with advanced
intelligence.  It's one of the things you get when you mix the two.  A
question.  Can you name another species that engages in achievement for its
own sake?  And while writing this, another idea just occurred to me: maybe
it's not tool making or language, or any of the other things proposed that
separates man from the "intellectual life" of other species?  Maybe it's
this drive for achievement for its own sake.  I kind of like that one.  What
do you think?  Anyway, eventually you arrive at a life-form where its sense
of self-worth is wrapped up in all sorts of ancillary things that go far
beyond basic self/not-self, and the synergy of abstract intelligence plus
expanded ego leads pretty much directly to SOM.  

Oh yeah, almost forgot to tack on the obligatory IMHO, which Matt so
correctly points out, we all do here. ;)

[Mary]
> > Which brings me to aside number two (sorry) where I wonder how our
> > world would be different if resources had never (from the
> > single-celled beginning onward) been limited?  What if the biological
> > drive toward complexity existed but the constraints of limited
> > resources did not?  Who would we be? What would our social level have
> > been like if there was no need for competition?
> 
[Bo] 
> An interesting question, as you know the inorganic evolution towards
> complexity ended with the heaviest elements - fused together in the
> interior of stars that "burns" until carbon (I believe) is reached, but
> in
> novas and supernovas all the heavier elements are made and in the
> same instant spread across the universe as "stardust" from which the
> planets formed, however not all planets are mineral ones. If the
> inorganic resources were limited life may form, but just reach a
> certain
> complexity and the Q-evolution never transcend biology.
> 
> NB. I like your "drive toward complexity" phraseology which is more
> telling than - for instance - viewing bacteria as "low biological
> value",
> they are necessary phases of the biological complexity scheme. This
> bad/good within levels is most unfortunate in speaking about "high
> quality intellectual ideas" as in Truth a ..... etc. Truth IS the
> intellectual
> level itself in the sense of the distinction between objective truth
> and
> subjective opinion.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Interesting thought, that, Bo.  You point out that life would be severely
restricted in volume and perhaps also complexity on a planet with few raw
materials for it.  No shortage of carbon here, though, and a new source for
humanity is being pumped at a prodigious rate into the Gulf of Mexico as we
speak.  I wonder what would happen if it is never stopped?  I don't know how
much is down there, but what if it didn't stop pumping out into the Gulf
until it was all gone?

BTW, what does "NB" mean?

[Mary]
> > But geez, Mary, didn't anybody ever tell you how you're supposed to
> > consider your audience when you write stuff?  "Gone With the Wind"
> was
> > the ultimate chick-flick and when my wife/girlfriend/significant-
> other
> > made me watch it I discovered much too late that the sum-bitch was 4
> > hours long!  When am I supposed to take a leak or get another beer?
> > Missed half the Lakers game and there were no boobs and only ONE cuss
> > word.  Was that some Hollywood idea of a joke?
> 
[Bo] 
> Who is this speaking? Dad Ken?
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Nope.  Just me talking to myself. ;)  

[Mary]
> > Ok, so that counts as aside number three and I almost took it out,
> but
> > hey, don't tell me you didn't think it too. I'm just saying that if
> you
> > make a sweep with your binoculars back over the billenia of biology
> you
> > can see how subject object logic brought us all the way to Atlanta
> > without a hitch.  But that's not the Intellectual Level.  It just has
> > plenty to say about where it came from.
> 
[Bo] 
> You become a bit too colloquial here for my capacity,  but as said,
> postulating S/O's to the levels below/before intellect sort of dilutes
> the
> term to uselessness.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Postulating Subject-Object-Metaphysics to levels below the Intellectual
destroys it, but tracing the evolutionary origins of the self/other
dichotomy can help show us where the SO metaphysics came from.  You're
absolutely right, there is no way you can get from biological self/other
distinctions directly to SOM.  You must pass it through a 100,000 years of
social squabbling first.

[Mary]
> > Look, the Intellectual Level is just the next logical step.  If the
> > Social Level was man's response to the problem of competition for
> > limited resources in the Biological world,
> 
[Bo] 
> The levels - all levels - came to be as a result of  DQ not standing
> the
> static values of the former level, but always resulting in a new static
> level. This is the Q "catechism" at least where there is no "man"
> except that the organism known as  Homo Sapiens becoming the
> biological "building block" of the social level. Maybe this is what you
> say, but we must watch out for the "besserwisser" Krimels of this
> world. ;-)
> 
[Mary Replies] 
I don't think we part company here, but I would put it a different way.
Let's say I was a stone-age person living 100,000 years ago.  I walk out of
my cave one morning to discover that in the night Dynamic Quality deposited
a Camaro at my cave opening.  This is a bizarre analogy, I know, but one
designed to show what I think about DQ's relationship to SQ.  You can't
expect DQ to 'deliver' what you are not ready to appreciate.

In the instant of pre-conceptual awareness all things are possible, as far
as I know.  From the vast array of new possibilities DQ could present, you
become aware of only a few.  In that instant of your awareness the DQ
becomes SQ.  Thing is, I think you have to be somewhat prepared for what DQ
presents.  If you've not 'done your homework' so to speak, you probably
won't be capable of appreciating what DQ deposits.  Sort of a pearls before
swine analogy.  All analogies are really inadequate here, but I'm hoping you
see what I mean.  I'm not saying there's an intelligence deciding what bit
of DQ to present to us.  I see it more like a pull analogy rather than a
push.  DQ is not pushed out to us.  Instead, we are made capable of
perceiving certain possibilities of DQ only because of the DQ we've latched
to before.  The DQ is there all the time.  Was the concept of "Camaro" out
there floating in the DQ 100,000 years ago just waiting for us to be able to
appreciate it, or did it only become SQ 100,000 years later because our path
of historical SQ made it a possibility?  If you're in the free-will camp and
not the "there must be a higher intelligence, determinism" camp, I think you
have to say we 'pull' the DQ we are ready for rather than that it is
'pushed' upon us.  I think you do too.

[Mary]
> > then the Intellectual is just man's response to the problems of
> > oppressive beliefs imposed in the Social one.  The Intellectual Level
> > took the "metaphysical sock" of Social Level restrictions and turned
> it
> > inside out and used the whole Social Level concept of belief systems
> > against itself.
> 
[Bo] 
> Agree completely, however the "problems of ...etc" weren't obvious
> from inside the social level, there must be a dynamic something that
> exploited the Greek thinkers to escape the social strictures. The lower
> level looks upon efforts to escape it as undermining values as such. I
> maintain that the Islamist's hatred of Western value is a re-enactment
> of the social/intellectual struggle. They see no problems with
> despotism if only the despot is a devout Muslim.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Here I think we do disagree.  I think the problems of the Social Level
_were_ obvious from inside the Social Level.  Certainly not to everyone, but
obvious to enough people to generate the impetus for change.  Pirsig talks
about how all is Quality and hints at a 'drive for betterness' in the
Universe.  If you combine this idea with the feeling that we can only access
the DQ we are 'primed' for, you can say that at a certain point in the
Social, the right latches had finally been made to allow some people to put
them all together and make the next leap.

[Mary]
> > The Intellectual Level became separated from the Social at the point
> > where it took the Biological/Social assumption of discreteness and
> > proclaimed it to be all there is.
> 
[Bo] 
> Here I object Mary. The socio/bio - or the human/animal difference
> (the levels know no levels) has been from time immemorial without
> leading to any intellectual development, and as SOM's (intellect's)
> emergence is describe in ZAMM there are no references to any such
> "s/o" it was the search for principles that transcends the Mythic
> principles- Then the master-principle TRUTH (eventually 'objectivity')
> that had "what appears as true" (eventual 'subjectivity') as its
> counterpoint and here the true 4th level's S/O  was born.
> 
[Mary Replies] 
I think the long, slow-burning fuse on the SOM bomb was lit way back in the
Biological Level and wound its way through all the various to-ing and
fro-ing of Social Level machinations until it finally reached the point
where enough doubt had been raised at the wisdom of Social Level truisms
that it exploded with incredible force.  Enough people became fed up to
reach critical mass.  But it was not a 180 degree about-face to the Social
Level, instead, it was a 90 degree course correction.  It kept a lot of the
original Social Level practices intact while at the same time making it
possible to call all of the Social Level assumptions into question, and
saying we should keep those which are 'reasonable' and discard those which
are not.

The concept of 'having belief systems' is a Social Level construct.  The 90
degree turn was to create a new 'belief system' that 'believed' it was
better to question the belief systems the Social Level revered.  Pretty
cool, pretty subtle, pretty abstract.
 
[Mary]
> > it was the new metaphysical twist that said the subject-object world
> we
> > perceive really IS all there is and it is good - and not just good,
> but
> > the only good.
> 
[Bo]
> Again agreement, only a small "objections" it was really the TRUE
> (what became objective) which was good, the negative deceptive
> (what became subjective) was heaped on the past as superstition and
> ignorance ... believing in gods and an alive nature Bah!!!. But as we
> know the Sophist claimed that everything was "man-made" and as
> intellect evolved and the past was throughly subdued the sophists
> returned as idealism ... OK can't go through the whole history.
>
[Mary Replies] 
And what is 'true', Bodvar, and what is not?  If you no longer have the
anchor of omniscient certitude behind you, then you yourself become the
measure of all things.

[Mary] 
> > And if any group before had ever said, "no it's not"
> > (which Pirsig says there were and they did), then they were
> proclaimed
> > wrong by this new Intellectual "freedom" which shifted the world
> under
> > our feet and declared boldly otherwise
> 
[Bo] 
> UNCONDITIONAL AGREEMENT!!!
> 
> End of part one.
> 
> Bodvar
> 
[Mary Replies] 
Thanks so much for a thoroughly enjoyable conversation!  Looking forward to
your part 2.

Best,
Mary