[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Individual level)

[Platt Holden]

> Platt wrote:
> >
> >
> > Laws are introduced by a single individual and later adopted by
> > others. "Someone has to be first."
 
[Gene M]
> I agree that intellectual patterns begin in an individual At First. But
> as soon as they stat spreading those ideas, then a collective has that
> idea. It seems clear that Intellect  isn't purely individual. I
> generally need someone else to bounce my ideas off of to really be able
> to refine them. If I were alone, my ideas would be very weak.
> Intellectual patterns exist in both individuals and the collective at
> once.

I think you are agreeing with Arlo that neither he nor anyone else one can
possibly have an original idea. So why do we identify and celebrate 
Plato, Aristotle, Kant, James, Pirsig, Kepler, Galileo, Einstein and 
other great individual thinkers? To say that other people are involved 
is to say nothing more than you had to have a mother and father to be 
have a thought at all. 

[Platt] 
> Animals don't think, societies don't think, only human individuals
> > think.
> 
[Gene M] 
> Well, this strikes me as a silly thing to say. First off, humans are
> animals. So clearly some animals think. Secondly it doesn't seems
> justifiable. There are a lot of other animals that think. Easiest
> examples being primates and dolphins. I recently read an article in
> which it is stated that researchers have discovered that dolphins
> actually give each other names. Certain patterns of sound indicate
> single individuals in the group, that's pretty amazing. That's heading
> towards showing self-awareness. And of course all the primates who know
> sign language, are able to manipulate symbols, they even created a
> primitive economy where chimps were given tokens for tasks completed,
> which they could exchange at a machine for bananas. Some tokens gave
> more bananas than others, and monkeys soon learned to do the jobs that
> paid the most.
> 
> You're assertion that "animals don't think" seems weak to me.

Maybe weak and silly, but Pirsig doesn't think so. From a letter to 
Paul he wrote:

"There has been a tendency to extend the meaning of "social" down into 
the biological with the assertion that, for example, ants are social, 
but I have argued that this extends the meaning to a point where it is 
useless for classification. I said that even atoms can be called 
societies of electrons and protons. And since everything is thus 
social, why even have the word? I think the same happens to the term, 
"intellectual," when one extends it much before the Ancient Greeks.* If 
one extends the term intellectual to include primitive cultures just 
because they are thinking  about things, why stop there? How about 
chimpanzees? Don't they think.? How about earthworms? Don't they make 
conscious decisions? How about bacteria responding to light and 
darkness? How about chemicals responding to light and darkness? Our 
intellectual level is broadening to a point where it is losing all its 
meaning. You have to cut it off somewhere, and it seems to me the 
greatest meaning can be given to the intellectual level if it is 
confined to the skilled manipulation of abstract symbols that have no 
corresponding particular experience and which behave according to rules 
of their own."

Platt