[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
Oh? Where in society does an idea reside before an individual discovers it?

[Gene]
That's like asking where in inorganic patterns an entire human being is
contained! All the parts of the idea are already existing in the social mythos.
Notice that in ZMM after Phaedrus came to the knowledge of Quality, he looked
back and found all sorts of historical documents that he saw as referencing the
very idea he had just come up with. Like pieces of the puzzle had been staring
at us all, until someone finally put them together. Intellectual Patterns come
from the Society. It's a basic principle of the MOQ.

[Arlo]
Amen, brother. If Platt would read ZMM, and the rest of Pirsig he conveniently
ignores to warp the MOQ to serve the Party, he'd know this. (Now, in good radio
talk show fashion, this is where Platt plays dumb and asks me to provide these
passages, pretending I have never done so in the past.)

When one understands the dialogic role between the mythos (or collective
consciousness) and the individual, one finds no contradiction is saying
"intellectual patterns emerge from the collective activity of social
individuals".

Indeed, this is the fundamental emergentist principle of the MOQ. On all levels,
one finds "individuals", whose collective activity on that level give rise to
an emerging higher level.

Collective activity of inorganic individuals (atoms) give rise to biological
individuals (cells), from whose collective activity emerge social individuals,
and then from whose collective activity emerge intellectual individuals (which
Pirsig identifies as such things as The Law of Gravity, freedom of the press,
etc.)

[Gene]
Just like Inorganic Patterns wanted to get free of the forces controlling them,
this same drive for freedom applies to Intellectual Patterns. Ideas want to be
free, they're trying to escape out into the world to thrive. The idea is as
much an individual as the person who thought it up. Respect it.

[Arlo]
This parallels Pirsig's talk on social patterns usurping control of biological
patterns.

"He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same thing to
people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and thought of as
beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from enemies, but an
organism that secretly was raising these people for its own sustenance, feeding
upon them and using their accumulated energy for its own independent purposes.
Later he saw there was: this Giant. People look upon the social patterns of the
Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from
themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social
pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as
farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a
lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can
accomplish alone."

[Gene]
I think to ignore the static levels is folly. The DQ tells us an immense amount
about how the world works, but to interpret and understand that we Need static
patterns to fit it all into. Otherwise we would go crazy, clearly. The MOQ
isn't about the rise of Individuals, it's about the rise of Intellectual
Patterns. For the time being we're the best source of them, but who knows! In a
thousand years, maybe ideas will be completely divorced from humanity, living
on all on their own. Intellectual Patterns are Not our creation, they are
Quality! We are partly Their creation. We don't own them, they own Us!

[Arlo]
(just nodding my head here...)

Arlo