[MD] What's missing?

[Case]

[Bo]
Your premises - that intellect ISN'T missing from the ancient texts and
existence shows what's missing from your understanding of the 4th. static
level and makes discussion difficult. Your "intellect" is simply SOM's
"mind": The ability to think, to visualize a past and a future.     

[Case]
So what is it that you think is missing from these texts?

[Bo]
Sure, from your premises, Torah, the Old Testament and the Koran are
intellectual to the core. 

[Case]
No I said that intellect was not missing from them not that intellect was
their primary concern.

[Bo]
>From the viewpoint of a mind arising from matter (or by divine intervention)
history has been an "exponential growth" of mental prowess. 

[Case]
Exponential growth of human knowledge began with the invention of writing.
Prior to that, humans were in a fairly steady state with their environment.
Populations do not grow beyond what the environment could sustain. Knowledge
was passed directly from one individual to the next. Oral traditions were
remarkably robust but still unreliable over long periods of time.

[Bo]
But the MOQ introduces a totally different premises, its social level is not
sociology and its intellect isn't speculations about "meaning of life" or
"vision quests" rather the value that struggles to subdue (what it calls)
superstition and ignorance. The "astronomical observation" you mention were
hardly more than "astrology". 

[Case]
Who said anything about sociology? My main beef with the social level is
that by including only human society it ignores the evolutionary
significance of social systems. A human city and a beehive are parallel
examples of a particular survival strategy. Isolating human society to its
own level it artificial and misleading.

[Bo]
The difference between Q-society and Q-intellect is most clearly outlined in
the absence of the "skeptical" attitude in the former. There were no one
that said: Look these visions and revelations that the prophets claim must
have some objective explanation. THIS is SOM and THIS is what's missing from
the said texts. But when I pointed to the obvious Pirsig said 

    "I suspect you want to hear that what is "conspicuously 
    absent" is SOM, but I am not sure that SOM was absent 
    in early Biblical times since early social statements such 
    as "Beware of the crocodile!" or "Javeh will reward you", 
    are SOM but are not intellectual in the MOQ sense. 

After describing so convincingly how SOM emerged with the Greek philosopher
(in ZMM), then this. To avoid the SOL-ution nothing seems below par. 

[Case]
I will not even try to make sense out of what you are saying above but it
seems to me that what distinguishes thought before the Greeks from thought
after the Greeks is the application of formal reasoning. The Greek
philosophers seem to have picked this up from the Greek mathematicians. But
if you asked an Israelite how many sheep he had he could probably tell you
and if you asked him how many he expected to have next year or how many he
would have if he acquired his neighbor's flock he could probably tell you.
He might have to go out and count them but it hardly seems fair to claim he
has no intellectual level because he does not use modern techniques of
addition.

If all that is being assert is that the rules changed around 300 B.C. that
really doesn't seem like much to get worked up over.

[Bo]
Have you read LILA at all? 

[Case]
Many times.

[Bo]
The subduction of social value is intellect's primary purpose, not that it
knows anything about levels and/or purposes - but because the level below
itself are all levels' "natural born enemy". Biological life struggles
against inorganic death and social value abhors the biological "dog eats
dog". Thus intellect despises social value which in its view is the cause of
all evil. Inside an intellect-steeped culture like the USA the penitentiary
system and police becomes the hate objects of the intellectuals who by some
knee-jerk reflexes see it as the CAUSE of crime.  This is how LILA describes
the level-struggle and level alliances. So intellect is very much concerned
with social and biological matters, but again, this is only visible from the
MOQ's meta-level.

[Case]
You read Lila? And you came away with this drivel? Intellect's primary
purpose? Levels despising each other? Levels forming alliances? You take
from your reading that the MoQ is all about the personification of
abstractions. And you wonder why I stay away from this rubbish?