[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
Are you suggesting individual criminals can't inhabit the intellectual level?

[Arlo]
Let's recap. You said "some people inhabit the social level" and "some people
inhabit the intellectual level". You used the brujo as an example of someone
"who inhabited the intellectual level".

The evidence you use to justify the "intellectual level" inhabiting by the brujo
is that he ushered in social change by virtue of recognizing a greater social
power that would assimilate his tribe. Other than that he was a drunkard and a
peeping tom. He was, therefore, a catalyst for DQ on the social level. I don't
see any "intellectual principle" he advanced. Unless you feel "conformity to
invading social power" as an "intellectual principle".

At any rate, no, I don't think "people inhabit the intellectual level", criminal
or otherwise. I believe, with Pirsig, that the intellectual level consists of
patterns such as "the law of gravity", "free speech", etc. 

[Arlo previously]
Every level contains "individual patterns". Can you name one that does not? 

[Platt]
Every individual pattern contains a myriad of other individual patterns. Can you
name one that doesn't? Anyway, the individuals I talk about are humans, not
cells.

[Arlo]
Keep going with that thought, you're almost there. Yes, individual patterns ARE
made up of other individual patterns, but are so BECAUSE those other individual
patterns are working collectively. Your body (an individual pattern) is made up
of many cells, but it takes more than a bunch of individual cells to make a
body, they have to function collectively.

[Arlo previously]
>From the collective activity of those individual patterns, the next higher level
emerges? Can you name one level that does not arise from the collective
activity of individuals on the level below it? 

[Platt]
Where do you get this "collective activity" bit? Not from Lila where the
principles of the MOQ are detailed.

[Arlo]
I think its quite obvious in LILA that biological patterns are the result of
collective activity of individual inorganic patters. And so on, a
process-description that accounts for the entire MOQ hierarchy. Pirsig, for
example, refers to NYC as a "social pattern". What is NYC if not the result of
the collective activity of biological individuals? Pirsig says, "It's composed
of substance but substance didn't create it all by itself. Neither did a
biological organism called "man" create it all by himself." Nope, not "all by
himself". It emerges from the collective activity of biological man. And as
such, they are "higher organisms". "When societies and cultures and cities are
seen not as inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological
man...". 

Pirsig also gives us this. "An excellent analogy to the independence of the
levels, Phaedrus thought, is the relation of hardware to software in a
computer." He then goes on to describe the relation of a novel to the voltages
in the circuits. He says, "Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer
without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it". What is a "parallel
pattern of voltages" if not the collective activity of individual electrical
signals. This analogy, Pirsig adds, describes the interrelatedness of ALL MOQ
levels. "What makes all this significant to the Metaphysics of Quality is its
striking parallelism to the interrelationship of different levels of static
patterns of quality."

[Platt]
Show where in Lila this is "emergent nature" described? ZMM doesn't explicate
the the levels of the MOQ. The MOQ wasn't created until after ZMM was
published, then explained in Lila.

[Arlo]
Pirsig clearly says each level is a "higher organism" than the one beneath it,
but also made up of the collective activity of individual patterns on the next
level down. 

[Arlo previously]
So the MOQ levels are personality descriptors? 

[Platt]
They can be. Pirsig cites murderous criminals as biologically motivated. 

[Arlo]
Okay, the MOQ levels are personality descriptors. Whatever you say.

[Platt]
All you are saying humans are dependent on society. Duh. But as Pirsig showed in
the story of the Brujo, society doesn't evolve without the catalyst of a
individual.

[Arlo]
No, Platt, time and time again you do nothing but fall back on this insipid
dichotomy. Evolution requires both "individuals" and "collective activity".
Unless you want to explain to me how that first person to solve Fermat's
Theorum effected evolution? Oops. You can't, because he didn't, because he died
before telling anyone. 

[Platt]
I force others at the barrel of a gun to allow people to go free. Interesting
you don't agree.

[Arlo]
Free as defined by "like you", since you have taken away their freedom to wear a
veil or go topless if they so freely choose.

[Platt]
Without the "someone first," you get nothing.

[Arlo]
Without the mythos you get nothing. Both, not "either or".