[MD] Patterns

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
Spoken like a true politician. If by "Lone Isolated Individual" you 
mean no other people around, you've invented a giant straw man. But, 
I'm glad you agree that individuals like Einstein and Mozart can have 
original ideas.

[Arlo]
No straw man. Ideas are the product of dialectical participation of 
individuals. It takes two. Einstein and Mozart's ideas are the 
product of a shared dialogue of which they participated. They did 
not, nor does anyone, develop an idea outside this shared dialogue. 
Everything we say is in response to, and anticipates, this social dialogue.

And I don't mean "other people around", like Pirsig I mean the 
assimilation of a collective consciousness, social participation that 
gives rise to the formation of ideas.

"Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They 
originate out of society." (Pirsig, LILA)

The myth you continue to propose, that "individuals" somehow come up 
with ideas apart from this social dialogue, is explained by Pirsig.

"The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of 
freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has 
tended to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its 
own benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the 
objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects 
imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever." (Pirsig).

Pirsig goes on. "what a mind thinks is as dominated by social 
patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and 
as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is 
no direct scientific connection between mind and matter." (LILA)

Pirsig describes this "me" you propose as a Cartesian "me", and says 
"This Cartesian "Me," this autonomous little homunculus who sits 
behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass 
judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. 
This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible 
fiction that collapses the moment one examines it." (LILA)

[Arlo had asked]
If the self is NOT a concept, which is it? A biological pattern? 
Substance? Energy? Where does the "self" exist apart from it's being 
a "collection of  ideas"?

[Platt's non-answer]
Again begging the question: Where does anything exist apart from 
being a collection of ideas?

[Arlo]
I think Pirsig is quite clear that the self is a "concept". Consider 
the following.

"This program based on "Me's" and "We's" is the alien. "We" has only 
been here for a few thousand years or so. But these bodies that "We" 
has taken over were around for ten times that long before "We" came 
along." (LILA). Pirsig is saying here that the "me" is only something 
that emerged very recently. It is not biological. And if we consider 
this following excerpt, we can see that it is not social either.

"It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves 
and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed." (LILA)

Here we see articulated clearly that, for Pirsig, the "self" is an 
intellectual construct. That this is mediated socially is also hinted 
at in ZMM.

"Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one 
invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the 
grammar of the old Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of 
subjects and predicates. In cultures such as the Chinese, where 
subject-predicate relationships are not rigidly defined by grammar, 
one finds a corresponding absence of rigid subject-object philosophy." (ZMM)

Finally, Pirsig offers the best critique of your assertion here, 
Platt, and I simply repeat it.

"Everyone seemed to be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of 
life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved 
material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the 
other way around. .... A scientific, intellectual culture had become 
a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little 
cells of psychic solitary confinement..." (LILA).