[MD] Patterns At War

[skutvik at online.no]

Chris and Magnus

15 March.

Magnus earlier:
> > Sure it is. It's in direct conflict with your (and Bo's) claim
> > that symbols are only social value.

Chris: 
> Oh, come now. This is just nonsense. It still isn't in conflict with
> anything within a MOQ context. We will keep getting back to this.

I have no intention of being drawn into Magnus' distortion 
machinery, how he sees us claiming "Symbols as social value"? 
is beyond me.    

> > Chris:
> >> In a way even, we could say that the wolfs reaction to a certain
> >> scent is the same thing as someone recognizing an arrow symbol.
> >> Or, take tigers (or whatever) who claw marks into trees, when
> >> other tigers see the marks they recognize that there is another
> >> tiger about who claims the area. How is that really different
> >> from symbol manipulation? At the base I mean.

Scent as information conveyor is a mightily basic and important  
biological value pattern. The so-called "olfactory" brain is the 
bottom layer of the brain hierarchy (the reptilian brain) and even 
for humans a smell can evoke the most vivid memories (ref. 
Marcel Proust's "Au reserche du Temps Perdu). Now if "claw 
marks" conveys any information to tigers I'm not sure of, but 
Chris may know. Likewise I'm unsure if this is "symbol 
manipulation" proper. IMO only language is the real thing, but the 
social level has no S/O, only with intellect did language become a 
manipulation of symbols.  

To harp on this some more and the starting with biology this level 
does not know that a scent is just a signal that signify something 
else, nor does the social level know that a world is just a sound 
symbolizing something else (the written word likewise). This 
distinction belongs solely to intellect, however - and here is the 
clue -  intellect (as SOM) does not see this divide as its "value",  
it believes that the manipulation itself is the great thing, this it 
calls "thinking" and that this process takes pace in a mind 
compartment. 

This my insistence may sound obsessive, but the "intellect as 
SOM vs intellect as MOQ's 4th level" is crucial.   

The rest is Magnus' suffocating complexity. Before it was the 
social level he saw stretching down into biology, now it's intellect 
he wants to make meaningless. OK, intellect HAS social roots  - 
all levels dissolve into its parent level if examined closely enough 
- that's what is meant by being static - the only permanent thing in 
the MOQ is its DQ/SQ chasm.  

Chris:
> About all of this. Evolution happens within each level as well -
> indeed, that's mostly where it happens. New levels develop very
> rarely, and the fact that the static biological patterns evolve to
> such a sophisticated level that they (within a social level frame
> perhaps)  can handle advanced symbol manipulation doesn't say
> anything about the big picture. There still isn't a trace of a 
> level conflict, and that needs to be there for it to be a MOQ level.

Agree about evolution inside each level, yet it's an evolution of 
some basic value. Also about levels seldom develop, IMO there 
can't be any new level, but that's another discussion.  You are 
right, THIS isn't the necessary level conflict  


Bo