[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Gene M]

Matt wrote:
>
>
> Gene, I think, points out fairly that the intellectual level may still be
> struggling to existence.  And this strikes me as parallel (for good
> historical reasons) to the idea that metaphysics, while as yet
> unsuccessful
> in cutting past appearances to reality, may someday yet still do it.  Who
> knows, maybe it will.  With metaphysics, we can't even imagine what it
> would
> be like to know if we were successful.  We just have no idea what the
> criteria would look like.  With the intellectual, Pirsig has pointed out
> to
> us that a higher level will be radically different from the lower (so as
> to
> fit in that word "discrete") and that those "things" existing at the lower
> levels will be ignorant of the higher levels.  We can understand what this
> means for atoms being ignorant of the cells they make up, cells ignorant
> of
> the mammals they make up, and human bodies being ignorant of the societies
> they make up (this one's a little harder to imagine, but I'm thinking of a
> difference between our physical bodies and the language that our bodies
> employ).  But I'm not sure what the difference is supposed to be between
> two
> different types of linguistic performance where some people in the world
> are
> ignorant of it and we (who are supposedly intellectual) aren't.
>

Society is not completely dependant on language for transmission of
information actually. Things like Celebrity and Money play a huge role in
Society as a whole. I think of Language as more a bridge between
Intellectual and Social levels. It allows them to interact in a very close
way, which probably causes some of the confusion between them. However it
seems clear that Social patterns aren't Dependent on language, at this point
I think a society could be built that wouldn't even require it. It'd be an
absolutely despicable society for the individuals involved in it, and would
result in an end to DQ, but it might be possible.
In a similar vein, I don't think Intellectual Patterns are Language
dependent either. I have plenty of good ideas, but then have difficulty
expressing them using words. Words are very imprecise, which causes a lot of
grief when working on extremely abstract ideas. If Intellectual Quality is
still in the process of extricating itself from Social Quality, then I think
language is there to help, but eventually the Intellectual Patterns will
shed it for something more useful.

-Gene