[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[skutvik at online.no]

Steve

25 Apr. you wrote

> Hi John, Ron, Mary, all,

I see you avoids addressing me. But you tactics of declaring the 
intellectual issue "out" does not work, it will haunt the MOQ until the 
SOL has percolated to the top. The MOQ is dead, lame and bland 
without it. 

> I think intellectual quality is is like every other sort of quality,
> isn't it? 

Intellect is a static quality level in that capacity it is ... like every other 
...etc, but otherwise the levels are worlds apart.  

> It is just the usual undefined betterness of Quality. 

"Undefined"!? The static levels are defined. 

> When we say an idea is good we mean "good" in the same way we do when
> we say a chocolate cake is good. 

Intellectual patterns aren't "ideas" if you mean concepts, this is the 
Buchanan pit-fall. They are concepts patterned along  the Saint SOM 
fault line.  

> What distinguishes intellectual quality from other sorts of quality is
> only the sorts of patterns we are referring to with this general
> undefined betterness. 

"General undefined", my foot. The difference between f.ex. inorganic 
value patterns and intellectual are several worlds apart. 

> Intellectual patterns are patterns of manipulations of symbols. 

Manipulation of symbols is a definition of language and is clearly not 
what characterizes the intellectual level "... intellect had not been 
arrived at in Homer's time" as Pirsig inadvertently - but correctly - said 
in LILA and language is at leat 50 000 years old.

> What emerged in the evolution of the intellectual level was not a new
> Quality but a new sort of way of having quality. 

"No new Quality"? Intellect is a new STATIC quality level.    

> What makes one pattern of manipulation better than another? We can
> only say after the fact by inferring from the sorts of patterns which
> have risen to the top as recognized for their high quality. Ones that
> cohere with out other high quality patterns of symbol manipulation are
> generally seen as good as are ones which follow the laws of logic
> (which is again a sort of coherence with other patterns deemed to be
> of high quality). 

The "manipulation" definition is nonsense, but the issue of what makes 
any recent pattern inside any level better is an interesting topic. IMO 
the basic matrix for any level is laid down from the start, thus the early 
patterns are "best" in a stability sense. Bacteria is a more resilient life 
form than the mammal organism, they are immortal, but DQ pressed 
on relentlessly towards more complexity and (all levels) eventually 
reached a "level" that could not be contained by the parent value and 
one such complex - unstable - pattern became the building block for 
the next level. The first intellectual S/O-patterned were most stable 
(see how Socrates' (objective)Truth/(subjective) Appearence has 
survived as intellect's "bacteria" ;-) but - fast forward - S/O-intellectual 
complexity grew and young Phaedrus S/O-based deep-dive into 
intellect's absurdities may be regarded the unstable S/O-pattern that 
DQ "rode" to the realization of the Quality Reality.           

> Simple explanations are favored over complex ones.
> Ones which explain a broad range of experience are favored over ones
> which only explain a narrow range of experience. We favor dynamic ones
> that say something new, yet not so new as to be incoherent with our
> existing patterns. Some intellectual patterns such as a Beethoven
> symphony are generally thought of as good, but we still haven't come
> up with ways of describing what is good about them since coherence,
> logic, and parsimony don't seem to fit (though musicologists can come
> up with other ways of describing their quality).
 
> Notice that nowhere in here did I need to appeal to a metaphysical
> subject-object dichotomy. 

Yes I noticed it, big applause, exercise makes master as we say. 


Bodvar