[MD] Zen

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Chris]
Yes. Arlos reasoning is quite logical I'd say.

[Arlo]
Thanks.

[Chris]
Because I lean towards the interpretation that the split between 
seeing the self and the world as one and the self and the world as 
separate is the emergence of the intellectual level   - however I 
really don't think this can be accredited to the Greeks only, but 
that is my job to prove later on - then this sense of individuality 
would perhaps not be there at all when language etc developed.

[Arlo]
What you read in that post was an extreme condensing of evolution. 
No, I do not think the "self" was immediately present at the onset of 
language. I think (and Pirsig supports this) the "self" is an 
"intellectual idea" that emerged out of the substrata of social 
patterns much later, and only after the social substrata had evolved 
itself sufficient complexity.

[Chris]
I mean, It is impossible for us to think ourselves into a way of 
thinking such as one of not thinking about thinking, but we may 
hypostasise that when events occurred that accelerated the 
development of cultures, then the notion of "self" that later on 
became so near-impossible to get rid of wasn't there. So what would 
this mean if we think about the development of early cultures - the 
social level?

[Arlo]
I veer from Pirsig on what is commonly considered here to be the 
"split" between social and intellectual levels (if any consensus can 
be said to have been reached). I place the use of symbols at the 
advent of the social level, since symbolic interaction co-occurs with 
collaborative behavior and mutual attention. For me, the distinction 
between the two levels (and this is just my present-day thinking) is 
somewhat understood as a "cognition/metacognition" break. That is, 
the intellectual level emerged when people started thinking about 
their symbols as entities-in-themselves. Prior to this point, the 
"self" was not a concept but was likely an unexamined reality of 
bounded biological separateness. We likely had symbols to represent 
identity, I, you, me, her, him, etc., but these symbols were 
more-or-less unexamined aspects of our day to day lives.

At the onset of the intellectual level, that "I" symbol became a 
subject of analysis itself, a "reality" to be examined and 
contemplated. At that moment, the modern notion of "self" was born, 
and along with it other intellectual patterns that were the 
philosophical result of the consideration of symbols as existants themselves.

I place the advent of social pattern emergence (tied to use of 
symbols) at about 90,000 - 110,000 years ago, when the first 
archeological records of symbolic thinking appear in the world (in 
Africa from Oued Djebbana, and near Israel at Skhul Cave). These 
artifacts grow in complexity, but maintain a level of symbolic 
artisanry, up to about 24,000 - 20,000 years ago with the art found 
in the Pech Merle caves in Francem , with a rapid development 
beginning around 40,000 years ago. So considering what early 
cultures, pre-intellect and pre-self, were like, this would seem to 
be a good era to look at.

Interestingly, although the artisans of Pech Merle were sophisticated 
enough to locate and produce materials, paint and sketch a wide array 
of symbolic art depicting people and animals (along with human-animal 
hybrids), they left us no known record of who they were, signatures 
on their art, no historical account of their journeys, only amazingly 
beautiful art. We have no recorded language from this era, no 
hieroglyphs, no Rosetta Stone, nothing. (Indeed, I'd make the 
argument that recorded language (written, pictoral, hieroglyphic, 
etc.) was an outgrowth of the intellectual levels ability to reflect 
on symbols as things-in-themselves. This would make the onset of 
written language (again, of any form) to be correlated with the 
emergence of the intellectual level - maybe not its dominance but its 
point of origin).

What do you think?