[MD] concerning SOL??

[skutvik at online.no]

Hello Steve

Sep 2. you wrote to Marsha

> You mentioned that the only opinion you cared about with regard to Bo's
> SOL interpretation is RMP's. In fact, as Bo well knows, Pirsig did "rule"
> on the issue and not at all favorably to Bo's interpretation.

Pirsig (in Lila's Child:) 
    I don¢t think the subject-object level is identical with intellect. 
    Intellect is simply thinking, and one can think without involving 
    the subject-object relationship. Computer language is not 
    primarily structured into subjects and objects. Algebra has no 
    subjects and objects.  

Steve:
> Case closed? Of course Bo is welcome to come up with his own 
> philosophy, but a subject/object level is clearly not what Pirsig means by
> the intellectual level in his MOQ. What do you think?

I guess nothing I say will make any difference to your dour devotion to 
Pirsig (disregarding the MOQ) but there is something wrong with RMP 
of LC. "Intellect is simply thinking" ... he says something that makes 
Stone Age's contemplation of how to make flint tools into an 
intellectual endeavor. Even some animals become "intellectuals" by 
this token.

You Steve was fair enough to admit that Pirsig's about (I summarize: 
In the PT letter Pirsig said that the old books of the Bible displayed no 
intellectual content which is spot on, but when I said that they clearly 
displayed no SOM, he started about SOM being cries like "Beware of 
crocodiles" and statements like"Javeh will protect you") that this was 
nonsense. Can't you be fair enough to see the nonsense about the 
"intellect is simply thinking". And for good measure admit that 
intellectual thinking is S/O-bound!      

Then the 

    " Computer language is not primarily structured into subjects 
    and objects. Algebra has no subjects and objects.   

Computer language is not different from other languages, it's 
"manipulation of symbols" and something mankind has done since 
language was "invented" sometime in the social age. Algebra is just 
"calculation with symbols" and calculation is also something from 
times immemorial, whether the symbols were pebbles on the ground, 
beads on an "abacus", signs on paper, writing in sand or  ... etc. 
doesn't matter. Mathematical proofs and/or geometrical theorems are 
another matter and very much intellectual by their showing how 
certain contexts are objectively true always and everywhere.

It's symptomatic, all who try to disprove the SOL end up in self-
contradiction and a twisted and misshaped MOQ. However Pirsig has 
said many things particularly in the Paul Turner letter where he 
ridiculed the "thinking intellect" but this you did not find I guess.

Bodvar