[MD] Patterns

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ron]
As intellect theory, intellect is not the value of the s/o divide, 
it's the value of the socio/individual divide.

[Arlo]
Hi, Ron. This isn't quite what I was saying. I don't think 
"intellect" has anything to do with "individuals" or "societies" 
other than it is what emerges out of the social dialogue of 
individuals. This is what Pirsig refers to when he points out that 
intellect is always socially mediated,  that it has been a "myth of 
independence" that says the "world of objects imposes itself upon the 
mind" free from social mediation.

There are many sections in LILA that lend support to this, not only 
from the overall MOQ levels themselves (from inorganic we get 
biological, from biological we get social, and from social we get 
intellectual), but also in his support that "what a mind thinks is... 
dominated by social patterns" and the critical observation that "our 
intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived".

This is where the Ham's and Platt's of the world, who envision a 
lone, autonomous agent, skipping among the flowers, valuing or 
devaluing devoid of social "interference". Certainly a lone, 
autonomous agent would be capable of responding to biological 
quality, all we have to do is watch our pets to see evidence of that. 
My dog is keenly aware of when it itches, or hungers, or is 
comfortable, or not. But intellection requires FIRST the individual 
to have assimilated what Pirsig refers to as "the collective 
consciousness". And only after this enculturation, and through this 
enculturation, is the "individual" able to respond to intellectual 
patterns. And this is NOT, as Pirsig cautions, a non-structuring process.

The key argument in sociology (in my humble opinion) over the past 
century has been in articulating this enculturating process. Vygotsky 
examined and theorized about the internalization of culture, what is 
often referred to as assimilation, and spoke of the dialectic between 
the specific, unique micro-genetic experiences of the individual as 
they become represented through this enculturation process. Others, 
as Giddens and Archer have argued respectively, have theorized about 
how "agency" and "structure" are related, arguing that they are 
inverse, mutually-dependent forces (perhaps akin to DQ and SQ). The 
thing to remember with these theories is that they are not positing a 
lone autonomous agent bucking heads with society. For both Giddens 
and Archer (I believe), agency was enabled by structure, just as 
structure is derived from agency.

So when Platt quotes Pirsig, "[intellect] is the collection and 
manipulation of symbols, created in the brain, that stand for 
patterns of experience", one has to recall that for Pirsig this 
"collection" and "manipulation" is socially-mediated. It derives from 
the social level. And with that recollection in mind (pun intended), 
we can see how intellect is the point of confluence between 
individual agents and social activity. It is not about the value of 
the "individual/social divide", but rather about the value of the 
"individual/social merging".