[MD] a view

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Jon]
The idea that they just evolved socially is wrong on its 
face.  Social patterns do not arise spontaneously anymore than 
chemistry professors do.  Somebody had to think this stuff up.

[Arlo]
The mythos is dialogically created, it is created over 
social-historical space via a social dialogue. No one "thinks this 
stuff up" in isolation. A feral child surviving in total isolation 
from other social beings will not create a mythos, indeed will not 
have an "intellectual" thought at all. The mythos arises from the 
shared understandings of mutual cognition. And of course they do not 
arise "spontaneously", they evolve and are shaped over historical 
time, they "latch" as others in the dialogue appropriate these 
meanings and pass them on (via a shared symbolic code) to others.

If you try to flip-flop the MOQs upper two levels 
(inorganic-biological-intellectual-social), you propose that a 
biological human, left in isolation from other humans, has the 
potential to develop calculus or pen the Norse Sagas. Pirsig denies 
this, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. In other words, a 
biological being MUST be social (appropriate a collective 
consciousness) before s/he is capable of intellectual abstractions.

Intellectuality arises from the social milieu when the 
dialogic/shared symbols people use to mediate their biological 
existence become areas of inquiry in themselves.

[Jon]
That's intellectual activity, that is.  No other animal does it, only humanity.

[Arlo]
This is where I disagree with Pirsig, and I think such a statement 
becomes very problematic when examined. I would certainly say that 
humans evidence the most robust, complex and sophisticated 
"intellectual activity" of all the species we've observed, but I do 
think that some non-human species evidence very crude, or simplistic, 
or early, signs of intellectual activity. I am thinking of certain 
ape species, and perhaps the rather involved language of dolphins. 
This is not to say I'd expect an ape to develop a new general theory 
of relativity, but if we really zoom in on the distinction we find 
more of a fractal boundary than a hard line.