[MD] Regarding The Fundamental Nature of The Intellectual Level

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
It's an interesting story, isn't it?

[Arlo]
Yes, the socio-cultural evolution of humans is fascinating. I try to 
re-read parts of the Columbia History of the World every so often if 
for no other reason that to place in perspective "modern life".

[Marsha]
Please describe and explain the deliberation and purposefulness of 
each level?  If you would enjoy adding 'freedom', be my guest.

[Arlo]
Patterns on every level have an agency of action that is both enabled 
and constrained by the particular level of that pattern. Atoms can 
only "act" inorganically. Possums can only "act" biologically. But a 
possum has a far wider range of agency that an atom. A possum's 
movements and actions to, say, satiate hunger are deliberate and 
purposeful towards those ends. While the possum cannot "act" socially 
(say formulate a plan to purchase some apples from the local grocer, 
or decide to accept his hunger in lieu of a larger meal "later"), 
when the possum is hungry it will move deliberately and purposefully 
to act on its hunger. When it rummages, it does so with the 
deliberate intent of finding something edible. When it catches the 
scent of food, it moves deliberately to find the source of the smell.

Obviously, these deliberations appear unsophisticated to the human 
who can act socially. Human can use language (social), the possum 
cannot. Humans can plan and deliberate a course of action beforehand, 
the possum cannot. But along the way, neither the social human or the 
biological possum is "automated". The possum is responding in 
immediate dynamic ways to changes and experiences it encounters along 
the way. The point is that both the possum and the human are acting 
"deliberately" and "purposefully", even though the possum's actions 
are not nearly as sophisticated as the humans.

"Freedom" is simply a word to describe the range of agency open to 
the "individual", whether its an individual possum, an individual 
human or an individual atom. Obviously, the range of agency increases 
as one moves up the MOQ scale, that's the point to the evolutionary 
hierarchy, to engender greater and greater ranges of agency, of 
freedom. But there is freedom on all the levels, and that is 
important. Again, it is not "freedom/no-freedom" when comparing 
levels but "freedom/greater-freedom", or better "agency/greater-agency".

[Marsha]
Are you equating 'intellect' with the Intellectual Level?  But more 
to the point, I'm more interested in the fact that intellect invents 
the concepts.

[Arlo]
No. And maybe I break from Pirsig on this point, but again I see 
"intellectual patterns" as a sort of "meta-intellect", as patterns 
that emerge as social symbols become objects of inquiry themselves. 
And this is a matter of word confusion as well. If we use the term 
"intellect" to refer to the manipulation of symbols in the mind, then 
this intellect is both a social and "intellectual" level feature. The 
difference (for me) is that while the manipulation of symbols on the 
social level involved using abstract symbols to enable social 
activity, the manipulation of symbols on the intellectual level 
involves the examination of symbols themselves. Thus, coming up with 
quantification descriptors to describe variances in amount of apples 
"one", "two" and "seven" was a social level symbolic manipulation. 
However, "mathematics", that became interested in the symbols "one", 
"two" and "seven" as objects of inquiry themselves is an intellectual 
level of symbolic manipulation.

[Marsha]
What do you mean by the expression "its just that the range of agency 
increasing exponentially as one moves up the levels".  What exactly 
does this mean?

[Arlo]
I think I may have answered this above (or tried to), but simply that 
the repertoire of options any "thing" has open to it depends on the 
level that "thing" is on. A possum has a much narrower range of 
agency (repertoire of actions) than a human, but it also has a 
considerably wider range of agency than at atom.

[Marsha]
You're discussing exerting power and influence.  I'm after 
how it's all a wisp of momentary mental illusion which can represent 
any number of different points-of-view.

[Arlo]
What I was trying to show is that "conformity" is not a feature of 
any one level, it is a feature of them all. Those who say "the social 
level is conformity, the intellectual level is freedom" are simply 
wrong. As I said, the thrust of ZMM was about the conformity of 
western intellectual patterns. Both the social level and the 
intellectual level afford the "individual" with certain freedoms, and 
both bring with it a force of conformity.

[Marsha]
To me the individual is one of those illusions.  Then a collective 
could only be???

[Arlo]
An illusion, of course.

[Marsha]
No individual.  No collective.  For me, ever-changing, collections of 
overlapping, interrelated, inorganic, biological, social and 
intellectual, static patterns of value.

[Arlo]
Absolutely. What I was pointing, what I said was, "depending on the 
context of one's focus". One can zoom in an conceptually identify "an 
individual biological pattern", but this "individual pattern" is not 
only made of smaller individual patterns acting collectively, but 
it's collective activity creates higher patterns. But, yes, I agree, 
the act of "zooming" could also be seen as the act of creating 
illusions. I am reminded of the motorcycle analysis in ZMM. You can 
divide the motorcycle into any number of different "patterns", but 
none of these patterns are "primary", that is none exist before the 
analytic knife creates them.