[MD] Let Sleeping Dogs Speak Truth

[Arlo Bensinger]

[John]
... whereas my dog simply IS and has no problems with his feelings.

[Arlo]
Basically you are saying that human feelings and dog feelings are the 
same, except that humans get all caught up with that junk in their 
heads, you know metaphor and intellect and the like?

I disagree. Apart from the anthropomorphizing, your dog's feelings 
are not as deep and nuanced and rich as those experienced by humans. 
Or rather, the set of responses to experience your dog is limited to 
is quite less than the range of responses possible to humans (per 
their social and intellectual.. and aesthetic beingness). This 
doesn't translate to "same feeling, different responses", but the 
feeling is richer and more complex. In the same way that social 
animals, such as dogs, possess a richer and more complex set of 
"feelings" than less social (or asocial) animals. I'd wager it also 
has to do with the complexity of the brain in certain animals that 
affords greater experiences (richer, more nuanced, more complex) of 
"feeling" than even social animals with less complex "brains". This 
is why, I'd argue, we see a greater depth of feeling in dogs and 
dolphins than in worms or bees.

[John]
To a dog, this social reality is pretty much everything...

[Arlo]
I disagree. I think that for dogs biological reality is pretty much 
everything. On top of that, I argue against Pirsig, that dogs do 
indeed have a "social reality", but one that is not nearly as 
comprehensive or ubiquitous as "man's".

[John]
... whereas we humans have gone off into intellectually distracting 
modes and don't have as much time for the experience of love.

[Arlo]
But yes, whereas man's rich and complex social reality has afforded 
the emergence of an intellectual reality on top of that, a dog has no 
such intellectual reality.

I kind of agree and kind of disagree with your sentiment here, but 
that's probably because I agree with a conclusion but not the 
premises. We are "too distracted" these days to appreciate 
"frivolities", love, art, riding motorcycles, constructing 
rotisseries... or rather to appreciate "Quality". But we fill this 
with a boatload of biological and low-social experiences of "love"... 
often love of "things". One of the problems is that "love" itself is 
an almost meaningless concept that applies to everything. I love 
burgers. I love watching Seinfeld. I love it when a team from 
Pittsburgh wins a championship game. Maybe the Greeks were right, we 
do need a wider choice of terms to apply to our experiences. Think 
about snow. It makes sense to me that the Inuit would have multiple 
words for "snow", since they have a more varied, and more necessary, 
need to distinguish among variances of snow than 
we-of-the-temperate-zones do. But why do we have but one word for 
"love"? You think we'd have a much better lexicon of words to 
describe a very nuanced set of "feelings".

[John]
Well I'm with you on this one Arlo.  The great author can't be great 
100% of the time, after all.  That's why he needs us to discuss and 
flesh out these ideas.  :)

[Arlo]
I think a few others here have expressed at the least empathy with 
the idea that the levels are progressively complex as they span from 
the previous to the subsequent levels, and that drawing an absolute 
line at "man" with biological-social is problematic in many ways.

[John]
Let me know next time a  blues musician dives into a fight he knows 
he's going to lose, to save your butt, or a painter licks your face.

[Arlo]
I am sure all of these things happened, and they don't sound odd at 
all. I had a painter lick my face once, well she was an art student, 
but she was kinda kinky like that. People enter fights all the time 
against overwhelming odds to protect their loved ones. Even if I knew 
I'd be stomped, I'd take on a biker gang if it meant acting to 
protect my daughter. Wouldn't you?

So while humans can, and do, these things that you see dogs do, it 
still remains to be seen when a dog "write a blues song, or paint a 
picture depicting love lost (or love found) or pen a poem..."

[John]
I meant the basic reality of the social level, not the basis of all 
reality across the levels.  I think.

[Arlo]
And what I am saying is that there is no "basic reality" of the 
social level, the social level is (like all levels) one of increasing 
complexity, and this complexity affords a greater experience of 
"love" among those participating at that particular level.