[MD] Food for Thought

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[SA]
Why is idea, consciousness, awareness, manipulated symbols (as I believe Pirsig
said it), not clearly distinguishing these two levels from each other?

[Arlo]
One of the problems I've been having is this. Bear with me, again, I am
"thinking out loud". (Part of this was from an email from earlier this
morning).

If we take the comment that the intellectual level involves "symbolic
manipulations" what is left for the social? Human physical interactivity. 

Now this presents a new problem. We must include only interactivity that rests
on non-communicative, non-semiotic foundations, perhaps instinctual, as
interactivity the relies on some form of communicative behavior (organizing
roles, for example) must by definition use symbolic manipulations, even if they
are physical, gestural, etc. And since Pirsig excludes non-human life from the
social level, I'd have to ask what distinguishes these non-communicative,
instinctual human social patterns from, say, herd behavior?

If some forms of symbolic manipulations occur on the social level, this would
mean that intellectual patterns are a special form of symbolic manipulations,
not simply symbolic manipulations. Using Pirsig's placement of intellect with
the Greeks, then, it would seem that intellectual patterns are symbolic
manipulations that result from an attempt to deculturize descriptive
experience. 

This would seem to be supported by Pirsig's suggestion that "Ancient Greeks such
as Socrates and Pythagoras paved the way for the fundamental principle behind
science: that truth stands independently of social opinion."

But one cannot deculturized descriptive experience, as Pirsig himself noted.
"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." And, "Our scientific description of nature is always
culturally derived."

Perhaps a better word would be "decontextualize". That is, intellectual patterns
are symbolic manipulations that result from an attempt to decontextualize
descriptive experience. The trouble with this is, symbolic manipulations are by
definition "decontextual" (the word "apple" is not an apple), so this leads to
some redundancy.

Pirsig also says, "One can imagine primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals
associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first
primitive religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have been
derived. ... Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerge from
ritual, not the other way around." Here he seems to set the mythos as the
social level and the logos as the intellectual level.

He makes this exact point when he says, "The logical order of things which the
philosophers study is derived from the "mythos." The mythos is the social
culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy
becomes possible. Most of this old religious talk is nonsense, of course, but
nonsense or not, it is the parent of our modern scientific talk. This "mythos
over logos" thesis agreed with the Metaphysics of Quality's assertion that
intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of social static
patterns of quality."

But he moves away from this saying, "Elementary static distinctions between such
entities as "before" and "after" and between "like" and "unlike" grow into
enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation
to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live." Here it is seems,
as it is in ZMM, that the "mythos" as a "complex pattern of knowledge" suggests
it is part of the intellectual level. Or, that the social and intellectual
levels are both complex patterns of knowledge. Which brings us back to what
differentiates them?

Science? This would validate the supposition that "intellectual patterns" are
those that strive for either deculturized or decontextualized descriptions of
experience. But again, Pirsig argues against the idea that intellectual
patterns can be deculturized (as do I), and decontextualized applies to the
very nature of symbolic mediation.

Anyways, just some thoughts.