[MD] Distinguishing Levels

[Platt Holden]

Arlo admits to never having an original thought in his life.

I agree. :-)

Platt

> [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