[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
You cannot have those intellectual patterns without individuals creating them...

[Arlo]
Collectively.

[Platt]
The brujo had an idea that changed society. Innovative ideas are intellectual
level patterns.

[Arlo]
What was the brujo's intellectual idea? The brujo story evidences the tension
between static and Dynamic forces. In it, the static social forces of the
brujos society are able to adapt to the static social forces of the colonizing
whites.

[Platt]
Only significant, evolutionary-changing ideas belong at the intellectual  and
artistic levels ...

[Arlo]
Such as public drunkedness and peeping in windows?

[Platt]
-- the breakthoughs conceived by individuals who carry the bulk of mankind on
their shoulders.

[Arlo]
Ah, yes, the "Atlas" tomfoolery. But it is the mythos that carries mankind, and
enables individuals to achieve and by virtue of collective activity for
evolutionary change to occur.

[Platt]
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"...

[Arlo]
They are working collectively. If not, Lila's body would fall into pieces,
wonderous "individual" cells all sitting about being wonderfully individual
rather than working collectively. And Lila's "mind", then, would simply not
exist.

[Platt]
Anyway, quarks, cells, ants and sheep are not social patterned "collectives"
anyway.

[Arlo]
You're continuing to confuse "collective" with "social". The collective activity
of individual inorganic patterns (atoms) from which individual biological
patterns (cells) emerge, or the increase in complexity intralevel, where
individual bodies emerge from the collectivization of individual cells, does
not mean at all that cells or atoms are "social patterns". 

[Platt]
I don't see the levels emerging from collectives in these examples.

[Arlo]
No, of course you don't.

[Platt]
In the example of NYC, every part was created in the mind of an individual
person, not simply the biological person.

[Arlo]
Really. "The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant. It
makes it customary to think of a city like New York as a "work of man," but
what man invented it? What group of men invented it? Who sat around and thought
up how it should all go together?" ... "A social pattern is a higher form of
evolution. This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating
something better than any biological organism could by itself achieve."

NYC is an example of a social pattern that arises from the collective activity
of individual people. Yes, this is true. But like an ant colony emerging as a
organism itself, consisting of distributed parts (a la Godel, Escher, Bach) so
to does Pirsig see the city emerge as a organism in its own right. 

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

[Arlo]
Its implied in his analogies and descriptions. But let's say I am wrong. The
process of emergence as it applies to the MOQ, where upper levels arise from
collective activity of individuals on the level beneath it, instead of this,
what process do you propose?

Aren't cells made up of collectivizing atoms? Aren't cities made up of
collectivizing people? Aren't ideas the result of collective socio-historical
discourse? If not, praytell, how do the new levels form, if not from
individuals on the level beneath it behaving collectively?

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

[Arlo]
If I fall back on anything, its the acknowledgement that both individuals and
the mythos are dialectially intertwined, and from their engagement we move
forward. Not one without the other, as you always insist.

[Platt]
Free as defined by you -- cheering for women to go topless on the streets..

[Arlo]
If they want to, why is that not "freedom" for you?

[Platt]
... but ignoring the debasement of women by rigid Muslim social patterns.

[Arlo]
Can you tell me where, anywhere, I said I supporting forcing women TO wear
veils? If someone wants to freely wear a veil, or the dress of a catholic nun,
or a jewish cap, or any number of garments, can you tell me why revoking
her/his freedom to do so is important to you?

[Platt]
"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.

[Arlo]
First is not the key. Together is the key. The individual and the collective. As
with the individual who was first to solve Fermat's Last Theorum, it didn't
matter one bit without the collective, did it?