[MD] Social Imposition ?

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
Ants can be said to have a collective consciousness.

[Arlo]
I'm going to remind you of what Pirsig said.

"Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent
responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what
they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and
then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got
to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know.
It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be
anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known
before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues.
These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every
last bit of it."

Can you substitute "ants" in their in place of "men"? Let's see...

"Religion isn’t invented by ants. Ant are invented by religion. Ants invent
responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what
they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and
then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got
to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know.
It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be
anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known
before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues.
These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating antkind. Every
last bit of it."

Nope, sorry, Platt. Its clar that "collective conciousness" refers to
Intellectual patterns. Mind.

[Platt]
A fully developed mind is an attribute of man alone. (See Pirsig's definition of
mind.)

[Arlo]
"What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is
the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the
huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the
body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard
this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of
society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic
nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as
dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological
patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There
is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic
physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual
description of nature is always culturally derived.

The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever."