[MD] Food for Thought

[Platt Holden]

> [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. 

You cannot have those intellectual patterns without individuals 
creating them.  The brujo had an idea that changed society. Innovative 
ideas are intellectual level patterns. Most people recirculate old 
ideas, swishing old tea -- regurgitating stale, socially patterned 
thoughts.. Only significant, evolutionary-changing ideas belong at the 
intellectual  and artistic levels -- the breakthoughs conceived by  
individuals who carry the bulk of mankind on their shoulders. 

> [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.

As Pirsig pointed out, Lila's cell's "have a mind and will of their 
own" and are often at odds with her mind. Hardly what you would call 
"working collectively" Anyway, quarks, cells, ants and sheep are not 
social patterned "collectives" anyway. 

> [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."

I don't see the levels emerging from collectives in these examples. Of 
course there is an interrelationship of the different levels. The 
higher depend on the lower for survival. In the example of NYC, every 
part was created in the mind of an individual person, not simply the 
biological person. In fact, everything around us besides the free gifts 
of nature are the result of man's mind. A road, a subway, a skyscraper 
is solidified thought. A "city" as a collective is a helpful abstract 
symbolic stereotype, used as a convenience of thought so we can get on 
with life and living.

> [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. 

Where is that "clearly said." I can't find any reference to "collective 
activity."

 > [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. 

You do nothing but fall back on your insipid "collective activity." 
 
> [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.

Free as defined by you -- cheering for women to go topless on the 
streets, but ignoring the debasement of women by rigid Muslim social 
patterns.   

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

"First" is the key. Without the first individual who had the idea of 
how to start, control and preserve fire, your mythos would still be 
biological and brutish.