[MD] Individual v Collective

[gav]

i think this contribution should be put into some
kinda MOQ primer or something. and, one day hopefully,
an evolutionary theory textbook.
nice one.

--- ARLO J BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:

> Ian, SA, Squonk, All...
> 
> At the risk of restating SA's caution, I think the
> "individual-collective" split
> is a largely false one. Especially considered as
> somehow (in any way) related
> to the "social-intellectual" level distinction. ALL
> MOQ levels contain
> "individuals", and as those "individuals" engage
> "collectively" the next level
> up emerges.
> 
> Individual biological patterns emerge out of the
> collective activity of
> individual inorganic patterns.
> 
> Individual social patterns emerge out of the
> collective biological activity.
> 
> Individual intellectual patterns emerge out of the
> collective social activity.
> 
> To say that "one level is (more) individual and
> another is (more) collective" is
> a fool's quest to grant power to one half of a
> dialogic pair.
> 
> As for the social-intellectual description, I have
> come to see one problem being
> that we use "intellectual patterns" (symbols) to
> bound social-level activity,
> and as such confuse the intellectual concept from
> the activity it seeks to
> describe. "Family", I believe, is an intellectual
> pattern (as specifically
> formulated) that seeks to conceptualize particular
> social behavioral patterns.
> "The Church", as a symbolic term, is an intellectual
> pattern that describes
> social level patterns of behavior. In the same way
> that an "atom" is an
> intellectual pattern describing particular inorganic
> pattterns. "Business", to
> use a final example, as the "buying and selling of
> things" is an intellectual
> formulation of social level activity.
> 
> The trouble is, that because we are part of the
> collective activity that gives
> rise to intellectual patterns we think we "own"
> them. In the same way the cell
> must feel it "owns" the body. Now, the cell is a
> vital part of the body, but it
> is not the body. "Calculus", an intellectual
> pattern, exists independently of
> any one person. Indeed, it is a pattern that has
> emerged over time from the
> collective activity of many dispersed both
> geographically and temporally. It is
> a GIANT that feeds off collective social activity in
> the same way Pirsig's
> GIANT (the city) was a social pattern that fed off
> collective biological
> activity.
> 
> The power of the emergent system is that it is not
> only bottom-up in generation,
> but top-down in informing. That is, the intellectual
> level manipulates the
> social level to suit its own ends, as a strand of
> DNA manipulates inorganic
> patterns to serve it's ends. This gets close (I
> think) to memetic theory, where
> memes are independent patterns who "use" (to use the
> colorful word) people for
> their own propagation in the same way a gene "uses"
> DNA. (But, I am no expert
> on memes, so I could be wrong).
> 
> More later... of to a BBQ (gotta feed the biological
> patterns...)
> 
> Arlo
> 
> 
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