[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
Agree. Reason is intellectual and individual. Societies don't reason.  All the
more reason for identifying the intellectual level as the  individual level.
:-)

[Arlo]
Half right. Intellectual patterns emerge from the collective activities of
individuals on the social level. This is true of all the levels (the biological
level emerges from the collective activity of individuals on the inorganic
level).

Platt succombs to the "myth" Pirsig describes as such.

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of
society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic
nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as
dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological
patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There
is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic
physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual
description of nature is always culturally derived.

The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself
from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of
independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason,
this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social
world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social
mediation whatsoever."

Arlo