[MD] Food for Thought

[Laird Bedore]

Hi Joe,

>> [Joe, previously]
>> IMO the intellect as a knife is a difficult analogy to understand. The
>> intellect evolving from the social level as a law-giver, seems more 
>> fitting
>> to the intellect's role, rather than as an independent butcher of all
>> levels.
>>
>>
>>     
> [Laird, previously]
> I don't think the two analogies are exclusive - it's not a "pick just
> one" type thing... One analogy describes intellect's 'behaviour' (awful
> term for it though) while the other describes its origins. Two
> orthogonal viewpoints of the same thing.
>
> The "intellect as a knife" analogy isn't complete, though. The knife
> just cuts experience/reality into pieces. Intellect then treats each
> piece as a symbol. It can manipulate those symbols, shuffling them
> around, comparing one to another, stacking them up in hierarchies of
> symbols - symbols of symbols, recursive-like, putting them into more
> complex relationships. Putting the 'knife' along with symbol
> manipulation makes for a very powerful analogy.
>
> -Laird
>
> [Joe]
> Hi Laird and all,
>
> As you describe the analogy "intellect as a knife" it seems you are back 
> into knowledge as abstraction.
>
> [Joe]
> Once abstraction occurs you then have a symbol which you can manipulate. 
>
>   
[Laird]
Rather than abstraction, I think it's the "you" in the "you can 
manipulate" above which starts that body/soul split.


> [Joe]
> The difficulty I see is that in no way can 
> the body do the abstraction. So you have a body/soul split and the mind/will 
> are faculties of the soul.
>
>   
[Laird]
There's no mind doing the manipulation at all. What you say next is very 
much on-the-mark and leads me into explaining the "no mind" part:

> [Joe]
> In experience instead of abstraction for knowledge the symbol becomes a 
> pattern. 
>
>   
[Laird]
Our language makes this hard to say in a non-causal way... but here 
goes. DQ and static patterns manipulate symbols, which are patterns 
representative of static patterns. Sometimes these manipulations are 
like "soft links" by which the symbol-pattern changes but not the 
source-pattern... at other times they are like "hard links" by which a 
source-pattern changes through manipulation of a symbol-pattern. This is 
the ground-stuff of recursive symbol manipulation and all the magic 
which drives us to create concepts such as "mind".


> [Joe]
> For a pattern to have a moral excellence over a lower pattern IMO 
> it must exist differently-dimensions in existence not dimensions in the mind 
> or intellect. An enlightened person exists differently than a 
> rock-evolution. I prefer to see the experience of evolution as an experience 
> of laws in existence which are accepted as 'givens', so we can get on with 
> the conversation.
>
>   
[Laird]
You're jumping between empiricism above to existentialism and then 
empiricism again, and these sentences just aren't fitting comfortably 
together in my head. I'll wait for you to take another shot at the idea 
if you want to discuss it further.

Cheers,
-Laird