[MD] Food for Thought

[david buchanan]

Arlo, Case and all MOQers:

Arlo was "thinking out loud":
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 that 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?

dmb says:
Right, that is a problem. Case has been making a case that language is 
intellectual and I think that you have sketched out some of the reasons why 
that formulation doesn't add up. I can see the logic, but I think that 
language originates in the third level. I guess the difference between 
social and intellectual lies in the level of skill and abstraction employed 
in symbolic manipulation. In defining the intellectual level, didn't Pirsig 
use the words "abstract" and "skilled" with respect to the manipulation of 
symbols? Anyway, I'm going to think out loud too and it looks like you've 
extracted the most relevant quotes for that purpose. I appreciate the 
effort...

Arlo quoted da author:
"Ancient Greeks such as Socrates and Pythagoras paved the way for the 
fundamental principle behind
science: that truth stands independently of social opinion." ..."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." ..."Our scientific description of nature is 
always culturally derived."

dmb says:
There is another quote that fits nicely into this batch. Pirsig says that 
Descartes was almost right. The corrected Cartesian tee-shirt wouldn't just 
say, "I think, therefore I am." Instead it would say, "French culture 
exists, therefore I think, therefore I am." In all these cases, he is not 
only pointing out the difference between social and intellectual levels, but 
the confusion and error that results from misunderstanding how these two 
layers are related to each other.

Arlo typed out loud:
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.

dmb says:
This passage is key for me. As I see it, this is a very brief sketch of the 
detailed picture painted in Campbell's "Primitive Mythology", which is the 
first volume of four in the "Masks of God" series. Pirsig's recommendaton of 
Campbell's series might even come from the same page as this passage. In any 
case, please notice how songs, stories, myths and religions are depend on 
the existence of language and precede the first principles. This is the 
stuff that sets the stage for intellect's emergence. This stuff provides the 
conceptual categories which make it possible for things like philosophy to 
then exist. As Pirsig says, the first principles were DERIVED from myth and 
religion.

Arlo cranked up the decibles on his keyboard:
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."

dmb says:
Before we get to your comments about this I'd just like to point out that 
this represents one of the spots where ZAMM differs from LILA. In the first 
book, the distinction between mythos and logos is compared to the difference 
between a bush and a tree. The latter is just a bigger, older version of the 
former, a difference in size but not in kind. But in Lila, as we see in the 
quote above, we have a child-parent metaphor. Now they are related instead 
of identical. Now we have the one seeking independence from the other in an 
evolutionary struggle instead of the relatively steady maturation process of 
a single being. Naturally, I think we gotta go with the newer book on that 
one.

Arlo wondered out loud:
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?

dmb says:
Not that I want to add confusion, but the very idea of having a 
philosophical conversation about language or constucting an evolutionary 
narrative about myth makes my head spin like Linda Blair. Not that I want to 
oversimply it either, but I gotta mention this principle of opposition again 
here. Its not quite enough to answer your question here by saying that 
social and intellectual quality can both be counted as knowledge, but they 
are different kinds of knowledge. But if we add the idea that social level 
values are aimed at controlling biology and intellectual level values are 
aimed at controlling the social level, then the meaning is not quite so 
vague. Then we can see how it makes sense to say that the laws against vice 
are social while the Bill of Rights is intellectual even though they are 
both "on the books" and part of the same culture.

Arlo's loud thoughts made my ears bleed:
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.

dmb says:
I think I see what you're getting at here. The notion that intellect 
involves a higher level of abstraction and requires a more developed skill 
in symbolic manipulations. This doesn't just mean that we can add bigger 
numbers or add them faster, but rather some kind of leap in efficiency. I 
forget where it comes from, but I think its Pirsig who uses the image of a 
boat load of goods compared to a paper invoice that describes the contents 
of that boat load. Or maybe it was a boxcar on rails. Anyway, the idea is 
that abstraction can hold much, much more knowledge because it is in a 
condensed form, so to speak. Imagine a boat load of invoices, you know? And 
then there is something about this capacity that allows for critical thought 
because this increased cognitive capacity allows us to shift things around 
in the imagination, re-arrange the furniture, makes comparisons and 
generally play with the ideas. This is where Socratic inquiry comes in, the 
ability to differ from public opinion, to doubt the existence of the gods, 
to questions the laws, to subject the myths, stories, and religions to 
intellectual scrutiny. In short, to express independence from the parent.

Maybe it would help to think of the intellectual level as if it were a 
rebellious teenager or maybe a young adult who hasn't quite settled down 
yet. He says his parents are stupid and that he wants to be in charge of his 
own life, but judging from the way he acts getting laid and paid is all he 
cares about.

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