[MD] Consciousness

[Krimel]

[Krimel]to Platt:
No, we always live and breathe in the context of others. We are the product
of our culture and culture provides the context and the raw material for
every advancement made by every individual. The advance of any individual is
not an advance at all unless it is appreciated and adopted by others. An
advancement only has meaning in the context of culture.

Andre:
Hi Krimel, if we always live and breathe in the context of others no change
will ever be possible. I happen to live and breathe in a society at present
where people are forced to 'live and breathe in the context of others'. (it
is at times suffocating!)

[Krimel]
I don't see how it follows that living in a social context means that change
is not possible. Change is variations on themes, modifying and extending
existing knowledge. Societies like species and knowledge go through the
process of evolution. I would suggest that the success of a society can be
measured in terms of the amount of force required to secure stability. If
everyone has to be "forced" to act in certain ways that is inefficient and
corrosive. 

[Andre]
How to explain a Gautama Buddha, Lao Tsu, Leonardo Di Vinci, Michael Angelo,
Newton, Jesus, Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninov,van Gogh, Drake, Callas, Proust,
Durrell, Einstein, King, Lennon, and many others. Their genius was an
opennes to DQ,and doing something with this, each within their own fields.
Of course you are correct when you say that somewhere along the line their
'products' will have to be appreciated 'by others'. But this isn't really
the point. Point is that any advance is usually apprehended by one
individual only. It is the starting point.
If it is conceived to be 'better' by enough 'others' then it will be
adopted.

[Krimel]
In any society people operate within a certain range of behavior. Like
nearly any measurement taken on a population you will find a normal
distribution of everything from height, to income to intelligence to
creativity. Certain individuals will always excel just as some will fail.
The point of a society is to affect the shape of that Gaussian distribution.
For Platt and Ham and to a large extent Craig society has almost no right to
impose on the individual. Platt and Craig especially have argued that
taxation is theft for example. Others myself included have argued that
society supports its individual members, providing them with opportunity,
creating and maintaining public infrastructure and laying down the rules
that reduce uncertainty in social interactions.

Pirsig mentions Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture in Lila. He borrows her
account of the Zuni brujo completely from her. Benedict's whole point is
that cultures have personalities or rather that individual cultures tend to
favor certain personality types and people with those personalities succeed
better within those cultures. This is entirely about the normal distribution
of specific individual traits within a particular culture. 

I saw another example of this recently in the work of Robert Sapolsky, a
neuroscientist studying the stress response. He collected blood samples from
a troop of baboons over a period of years. He noted that the alpha males of
the troops were aggressive and violent and imbued the troop with a kind of
totalitarian culture and that members of the troop were highly stressed. One
year when he arrived to collect samples he found that the troop had been
stricken with a disease and most of them had died. As the population rebuilt
itself over a period of years a different kind of culture emerged that was
more cooperative and supportive of the individual members and far less
stressful. Furthermore the troop now resisted the attempts of aggressive
members to assert themselves into dominant roles. 

The point I guess is that the role of individuals within cultures and of
cultures toward individuals is highly variable and complex. It is not a
matter of all or none. But Platt almost never seems willing to acknowledge
this so in responding to him I have a tendency to overstate a case that
might otherwise seem obvious. 

[Andre]
Neither of these worked in isolation but they created something from all the
foregoing, plus their own apprehension of DQ and created something new and
original.

[Krimel]
I should also point out that the names you list fall on one tail of the
Gaussian curve. Bundy, Bush, Gacy, Hitler, Reagan, Stalin, Genghis Kahn, Pol
Pot and Idi Amin fall on the opposite tail and they too followed DQ as they
understood it. 

[Andre]
In the same way did weak Dynamic subatomic forces seize carbon as their
primary vehicle. Here was an opportunity to create variety out of 'life and
breath in the context of others' (bear with me, this is pulling your analogy
to the sub-atomic level). And what a variety has been chosen.(Lila p149-50).
It 'worked' because it was better...simple and easy and that's  why it
survived and 'we' are here.

[Krimel]
I think it is a gross error to talk about DQ as a force. It is a description
of how things act and respond but it is not a causal agent. It is an
adjective not a noun. The example you give comes from what I consider to be
Pirsig's unforgivably poor account of evolution. Things don't survive
because they are "better." Things don't work because they are "better". They
are "better" because they work. Things that don't work, don't survive. What
persists is what is left, which is "better" than nothing.