[MD] Intellectual activity

[Ham Priday]

David --

You and Arlo have painstakingly mounted a rebuttal to SA's appeal for
recognition of the individual.  While your explanations may conform to the
MoQ's evolutionary ontology, I feel obliged to point out several
questionable assertions.

For example, you said (to Arlo):
> I might say that society enables SQ to be
> retained or to endure [?] (culture), individuals are a source of
> DQ and enable new SQ to emerge, society is not a
> source of DQ, only a means to retain SQ ...

Earlier Arlo stated (to SA):
> I do agree that it is from the social level that the individual you
> consider "you" emerges.  Your "identity", as it were, is a
> social construction, based on assimilations of the linguaculture
> ... and micro-cultural patterns in every decreasing circles
> down to local negotiations.

If the individual emerges from social and cultural patterns, which I
understand to be SQ, how can individuals be a source of DQ?   Perhaps Arlo's
next comment is an attempt to answer this question:

> However, this "identity" represents the point of contact
> between social and intellectual patterns. Intellectual patterns,
> then, infiltrate social patterns through the "individual" (identity),
> and collective activity of these "individuals" gives rise to
> intellectual patterns over historical time.

Here he defines individual "identity" as a "point of contact between social
[SQ] and intellectual [DQ] patterns", and the latter, he says, "infiltrate"
through the individual.  Here, again, we have a contrived collective pattern
being absorbed by the individual.  But if the individual receives DQ by
infiltration, he or she cannot be its source.  So this explanation doesn't
work.

I think SA offers a far more plausible (and understandable) rationale.

SA's explanation:
> The individual depends on the societal mythos to gain [give?]
> static definition to the intellectual level of each individual person.

Arlo's definition and explanation:
> I define [individual] as the negotiated symbolic-metaphorical
> relations that emerge over historical time by individuals engaged
> in collective activity. If you define an intellectual pattern as
> "the identity that is SA", then we have different starting points.

He goes on to say:
> "Intellectual patterns" emerge over historical time out of collective
> activity on the social level. The Law of Gravity, for example, has
> emerged out of the historical-physics dialogue dating back centuries,
> with new voices adding, mutating, shaping and reforming the pattern
> as it exists at any one "snapshot" in time.

Isaac Newton would be crestfallen to hear that the Law of Gravity was
actually an emergence of "collective activity on the social level".  Isn't
it amazing how nothing of intellectual significance can ever be credited to
the genius of an individual?  Such things just "emerge" out of nowhere, and
are augmented, shaped and reformed by the collective intellect, ready to be
harvested by some "negotiated symbolic-metaphorical identity" named Newton
who happened to be napping under a tree when the apple made its point of
contact.

Is there any limit to the patterns you folks will spin to avoid
acknowledging intellect as the exclusive property of the individual?

--Ham