[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[david buchanan]

Ham, Platt, Arlo and all:

Ham said:
You are absolutely right, Platt.  Arlo knows this, but is bound by Pirsig's 
doctrine to reject a dichotomous reality.  So he rationalizes Intellect as 
the "collective" that includes cognizant awareness, intelligence, ideas, 
value-sensibility, creativity, desire, and motivation -- in short, all the
faculties that are proprietary to the individual.

Arlo replied:
Um, no. I reject that the dichotomy that purports that the "individual" and 
the "collective" are oppositional, polar, or even wholly distinct entities. 
I unite the "individual" and the "collective" as dialogical co-constructs on 
the social level.

dmb says:
Just like everybody else, I've been watching this debate go round and round. 
As I understand it, there is a tendency to equate the individual with the 
intellectual level and the collective with the social level. This leads to 
all kinds of confusion about how to distinquish the 3rd and 4th levels. It 
has become THEE monkey wrench in this debate.

It seems to me that one of the main reasons why its so easy to make this 
mistake is that individuality is a feature of the intellectual level. 
Individuality emerges as the intellectual level emerges. As Wilber explains 
it, the historical process entails the differentiation of "the big three"; 
which are nicely summed up as the domains of I, we and it. And these three 
domains or dimensions correspond to Art, Morals and Science. In pre-Modern, 
social-level cultures these three domains are not yet made distinct from 
each other. We can see this in the Christian culture of medieval Europe, 
where the church controlled everything, art, morals and science. Modernity 
is the process of letting these three things leave the nest and go off on 
their own, to take control of their respective domains. This is a more 
detailed picture of the emergence of the intellectual level out of the 
social level. The differentiation between "I" and "we" is a good thing. Its 
one of the evolutionary steps that ought to be preserved. The same thing 
goes for the distinction between "we" and "it", between morals and science. 
The problem with SOM, the disaster of Modernity, is that this process has 
gone too far. The domains are not just distinct from each other, they are 
hostile to each other. The three domains have become dis-associated. This is 
where we get all the conflicts between science and religion (IT and WE), the 
alienation of the individual with respect to society and nature, and the 
confused political ideologies that have absurdly left "we" out of the 
equation.

Here I want to emphasize a point that seems quite important in sorting out 
this mess. These three domains DO NOT correspond to the levels. Its NOT that 
"I" is at the intellectual level, its just that "I" at the social level is 
different than the "I" at the intellectual level. The social and 
intellectual levels BOTH have "I", "WE" and "IT". In some sense, these 
domains go all the way up and down. You know, there are social level morals 
and there are intellectual level morals. Both levels have a "collective" 
dimension. Or more broadly, there are the laws of physics, there is the law 
of the jungle, there is the mosaic law and there are democratic legal 
principles, which gives us some of moral code at all levels of reality. They 
are different of course, but they all basically express what is right in the 
way of collective behaviour. Scientists shouldn't fake their data and 
Priests shouldn't molest children.

The same goes for individuality. I mean, try to imagine anything - anything 
at all - that is NOT BOTH and individal entity AND part of a larger system. 
As Arlo has pointed out, even single celled organisms are composed of 
individual atoms and molecules. Even atoms are composed of individual 
sub-atomic particles/waves. The whole earth is part of a galaxie and the 
whole Milky Way is part of a cluster of galaxies. I mean, its really quite 
hard to think of anything that only has one dimension or the other. It seems 
to make sense all by itself, plus it clears up lots of confusion in this old 
debate, don't you think? Is this making sense?

Ham said:
The only human attributes that he allows are "behavior" and "response".  
These are acceptable because they can be understood as objective patterns.

dmb says:
YI think you've confused R.M. Pirsig with B.F. Skinner here. And nobody is 
buying Skinner anymore, not even the few remaining behaviorists. Or so I've 
heard. But what really troubles me is that its pretty much impossible for 
anyone who has read ZAMM or LILA to make these assertions. Objectivity and 
behaviorism is about as far away from the MOQ as one can get. Objectivity is 
one of those problems of dis-associtation and is part of Modern Man's 
alienation from nature and society. Pirsig is not push objectivity. He's 
pushing it AWAY!

Ham said:
Only by ridiculing individuality as a myth of religious origin can the MoQ 
acolytes effectively claim to have resolved duality.  The empirical fact 
that experience is an individual function...

Arlo replied:
Yes, albeit it requires both the "biological individual" and "the mythos" 
for this to happen.

dmb says:
Exactly. The idea that individuals are independent from society, that the 
mind emerges directly out of the mind, is a feature of this same 
dis-association and confusion. One of the biggest problems with 
Representationalism is that the internal subjective self was supposed to 
directly mirror an objective reality without anything in between. There is 
only mind and matter. But the MOQ. along with postmodernity in general, adds 
the notion that we are suspended in langauage, that the mythos is an 
evolutionary legacy we all inherit and which furnishes the mind with the 
conceptual categories, the static interpretations, with which we interpret 
experience. I mean, its not just that DesCartes can only think because 
French culture and language provided him with the means to think, its that 
all of us ARE composed of static patterns that have shaped our perceptions 
for tens or hundreds of thousands of years. And of course the organism has 
even evolved such things as a more articulate tongue and the language 
centers of the brains. And Descatres couldn't have thought or existed with 
the cells of his body or the atoms that composed them either.

dmb

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