[MD] QRE: The 4th. level's two interpretations. Par

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Bo:

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 2:36 AM,  <skutvik at online.no> wrote:
> Steve and Group.
>
> 2 Nov.you wrote:
>
>> Intellect comes into play when we start asking "why?"

Bo:
> Was it intellect coming into play when a Stone Age man asked: "Why
> don't the bison come to our hunting grounds anymore?

Steve:
If intellectual patterns did not exist at this time, then this is not
the sort of thing that a stone age man would ever say. "Why?" was not
in their repertoire of responses to their environment.

Pirsig explain is Lila: "Cave men are usually depicted as hairy,
stupid creatures who don't do much, but anthropological studies of
contemporary primitive tribes suggest that stone age people were
probably bound by ritual all day long.  There's a ritual for washing,
for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so on-so much so
that the division between "ritual" and "knowledge" becomes indistinct.
 In cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library for
teaching the young and preserving common values and information. These
rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual
levels of evolution.  One can imagine primitive song-rituals and
dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which
generated the first primitive religions.  From these the first
intellectual truths could have been derived.  If ritual always comes
first and intellectual principles always come later, then ritual
cannot always be a decadent corruption of intellect.  Their sequence
in history suggests that
principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around. "

The stone age man doesn't pack up camp and move south *because* the
bison have gone. Everyone in the tribe just seems to "know" that it is
time to move on the way the birds in a flock all seem to
simultaneously realize that it is better in the tree over there, but
it is not a genetically programmed response as it is for the birds. It
is ritual behavior that was latched not by DNA but by unconscious
copying from one human to the next. Intentions and rationales were
later inventions. We tack these on later when we try to explain the
stone age man's behavior in the way that we say the purpose of a heart
is to pump blood. The heart has no such rationale for its behavior.

Best,
Steve