[MD] Social Imposition ?

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Arlo begins]
I'm trying to sort things out here, and so am condensing points from Ian,
Khaled, DMB, Case and Mark in this one reply.

[Ian to Khaled]
Khaled, before we digress into supplementary questions, I'd like to get Arlo's
reaction to my paraphrase of what I thought we'd agreed. (any such agreement is
always pragmatic and contingent on the imperfection of language - an
intellectual pattern - or a model like the MoQ - to capture it.)

[Ian's paraphrase]
"The quality of an intellectual pattern is inversley proportional to the level
of effort (needed to be) imposed by society to maintain that pattern, (but is
proportional to how widespread it is believed by free thinkers)."

[Arlo]
I think, keeping in mind your pragmatic qualification, I find nothing really to
disagree with here. There are, likely, many measures we can use to examine the
respective quality of intellectual patterns. Such as Pirsig's "logical
consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation". 

[Khaled]
Ultimately you are looking for ZERO maintenance effort. The Event Quality (EQ)
that ushers you into that realm.

[Arlo]
I'm not sure what you mean by "Event Quality". But yes, I'd say that good ideas
do not need social power to be maintained. But note that they DO need social
patterns. A good idea is meaningless if there is no dissemination network (for
example), and it is impossible for an idea to exist in the total absense of
social patterns.

[Mark objected]
The above question assumes Qualify may be described in intellectual patterns.
Quality cannot be described as intellectual patterns.

[Ian responded]
If we didn't allow ourselves to even "describe" it in our intellectual patterns,
we'd have precious little language or discourse on the suibject. So we / I do
describe it, as pragmatically as we can for the discourse to take place, but
never forget the ineffable nature of the subject we are talking about.

[Arlo]
Agree. I don't think anyone is trying to say "Quality" is an intellectual
pattern. But "some things are better than others", and I think this is one way
ideas can be examined.

[Case offered]
Has anyone one suggested that an easy way to distinguish the social from the
intellectual level is that the intellectual level can be written down? ...
Storytellers spun ideas into legends and created shared culture around a
campfire. This is the beginning of the intellectual level. It wasn't taken very
seriously though, until people started taking notes.

[Arlo]
In ZMM, Pirsig seems to equate the intellectual level with "the logos". "The
term logos, the root word of "logic," refers to the sum total of our rational
understanding of the world." (ZMM) And that the logos is an extension of the
mythos, "the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which
preceded the logos" (ZMM). "There’s no difference in kind or even difference
in identity, only a difference in size." (ZMM)

When "people started taking notes" it appears to be when the intellectual level
began struggling for dominance over the social level, but I think the
intellectual level also contains those "stories spun by the storytellers".

[DMB objected]
The amount of enforcement used to maintain a set of beliefs isn't a good way to
judge the quality of belief. ... On the level of intellect, logic and
empiricial evidence and such are the "forces" to be reckoned with. ... I think
intellectually guided societies will be less authoritarian and a happier place
for free thinkers, but the merit of an idea will be determined by its ability
to comply with intellectual values like rationality and agreement with
experience and NOT by how well it comforms to social traditions or customs.

[Arlo]
Its not a matter of conforming to social traditions, its just an acknowledgement
that low quality ideas tend to require more social force to propulgate
themselves than higher quality ones. Of course, now that I am thinking about it
there have been historically "low quality" ideas, such as the world being flat,
that didn't necessarily require social force to propulgate itself, but it also
seemed to agree with experience and was, at the time, logically consistent. No?
So I'd say that at the time this WAS a high quality idea, and only became a low
quality idea when new experiences and logic sought to change it, and only then
it began requiring social force.

[DMB offers]
Please, gents, consider this principle of oppostion. The details of this basic
idea could be discussed forever, but at this point I'll just ask you to
consider the basic idea itself. I'm only saying that the relationship between
the 3rd and 4th levels is analogous to the relationship between the 2nd and
3rd. (As well as the relationship between the 1st and 2nd.) In each case, the
newer level is discrete in terms of its independence of purpose and rests upon
its parent in a taming, controlling, mollifying way in order to achieve that
new purpose. I think this principle is the best way to get at the distinction
between social and intellectual values.

[Arlo]
I don't see a distinction here, DMB, only a process. Maybe you can expand on
this a bit.

[DMB also stated]
I would defy anyone here to conceive of any thing in the universe that is not
BOTH an individual and 
also part of larger, collective entity. In fact, I hereby nominate that for the
"most useless distinction of the year" award.

[Arlo]
I second that nomination. :-)