[MD] a view

[Platt Holden]

Arlo can rave on about "social-historical space" and other pompous
abstractions, but Jon is right.  "A tribe can change its values only person
by person and someone has to be first". (Lila, 9)

On Mon, Apr 5, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:

> [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.
>
>
>
>