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

[skutvik at online.no]

Steve my friend (and foe)

4 Nov. :

Bo before:
> > 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.

What do you know about paleolithic language, me neither for that 
matter, but that it had some term indicating "why" I'm fairly sure. You 
sounded as if the word "why" was some sesam -sesam that would 
trigger "intellect" whenever or wherever and that's plain nonsense. 

> 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. 

I see nothing about the interrogatory term "why" missing or present.

> 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. " 

"Intellectual principles" see! The SOM began with the search for 
eternal (immortal) principles transcending the ancient mythological 
immortality, all this fits the SOL interpretation like the proverbial hand 
and glove. Why didn't Pirsig put together two and two, but leave this 
opportunity for all you obfuscators?     

> 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.

The Bison surely had its quirks and did not always follow the seasonal  
treks so the hunters surely often had to wonder why it was missing, 
and he may also have asked the squaw WHY she refused his 
advances, and she replied: BECAUSE you did not bring back any 
bison. You slander the ancient people (that Pirsig warns against) by 
talking about "ritual behavior" barely above instincts.

"Unconscious copying" My foot! If Wim Nusselder's social level 
definition is your guiding line no wonder, he was the greatest hogwash 
producer. 

Pirsig says in ZAMM:

    But before the Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a 
    period of at least five times all our recorded history since the 
    Greek philosophers, there existed civilizations in an advanced 
    state of development. They had villages and cities, vehicles, 
    houses, marketplaces, bounded fields, agricultural implements 
    and domestic animals, and led a life quite as rich and varied as 
    that in most rural areas of the world today. And like people in 
    those areas today they saw no reason to write it all down, or if 
    they did, they wrote it on materials that have never been found. 
    Thus we know nothing about them. The ``Dark Ages'' were 
    merely the resumption of a natural way of life that had been 
    momentarily interrupted by the Greeks. :  

"..they led a life as rich and varied  as of the world today, i.e: Ancient 
people were as INTELLIGENT as you and me  ..no great feat.
 

Bodvar