[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[ian glendinning]

Gene, (Matt, Arlo, et al)

But now you're really just debating the meaning of the word "language".
I tend to use the word "meme" as you may have noticed - means of
communication through culture. The particular words are just
approximate short hand (so we can pragmatically write e-mails).

Ian

Ian
On 6/2/06, Gene M <boredandunstable at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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