[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
Their calculations were impressive and remarkably accurate but I still think
there is a difference between Egyptian mathematicians and what we'd call
intellectual. Those mathematicians were priests, actually, and math was
something like an elite form of spiritual knowledge.

[Arlo]
Are you suggesting that should a priest use mathematics, the calculations are
"social"? Is "2+2=4" a social pattern if it is used to count sheep in the
field, but an intellectual pattern in a modern classroom?

[DMB]
Their calculations were not about scientific accuracy but ritualistic precision
and a good harvest. 

[Arlo]
This would make the field of engineering a social pattern, no?

[DMB]
Not that we're any smarter, but we live with a much greater degree of
abstraction. I can see how it could be tempting to project that onto them...

[Arlo]
My point is that I think "intellectual patterns" appear long before the achieve
"dominance" over the social world, and drawing an abstract line at the Greeks
and saying "this is when intellect appears" is unsustainable.

[DMB]
... especially when their mathematical achievements are taken out of their
religious context...

[Arlo]
Again, I'm not sure the fact that it was a priest calculating precession makes
that particular pattern of though (the calculation itself) any less
"intellectual". When a priest solves a calculus equation, the mathematical
activity is still an intellectual pattern.

I am not suggesting that intellect dominated the social worlds of these ancient
cultures, far from it. Its obvious that social patterns were in control, but I
think in these calculations we see the appearance of newly emerging
intellectual patterns. 

[DMB]
... but their highest priest probably didn't know much more than a fifth
grader. Well okay, let's say a really, really smart fifth grader.

[Arlo]
How many fifth graders do you know that could deduce abstract formulas for
predicting and describing precession based on observing a pattern in the sky
that repeats only ever 3000 years or so?

Again, though, my point is that the appearance of intellectual patterns on the
evolutionary trajectory occurs before the Greeks, even if in the Greeks we can
see their eventual placement in domination of social patterns.

In the same way simple human social groups appeared long before the complex
social structures that would dominate man's biological existence.