[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to dmb:
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 says:
Well, not exactly. But when kids are learning how to add in the modern classroom they are introduced to the concept in very concrete terms. A math text book at that level might even have a picture of two pairs of sheep, for example, when introducing the concept. This developmental process probably recapitulates the evolutionary process as a whole. So, what I'm saying is just that math was born in a practical, concrete situation and was simply a matter of counting things like sheep, cows, days, slaves, soldiers, taxes and the like. Some of the oldest written records, in fact, calculate portions of beer per slave per day. This takes intelligence and the use of symbols but it is relatively concrete or rather it's not very abstract. 

Arlo said:
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 says:
I agree that dominance happens long after the first appearance and we're talking about the latter. Even there, it seems there must have been highly complex social level patterns that were very close to what we'd call intellectual. There is certainly room for debate about the details of where to draw the line but I think it's reasonable to pick the 5th century BCE. You know, it wasn't just the first pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece but also the time of the Buddha and Lao Tzu. In terms of cultural evolution, it seems something big happened all over. I don't know if magic mushrooms rained down from the sky or what, but something old got tired back in those days. People started asking questions, big questions, probably because the old answers weren't working anymore.

Arlo said:
... 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 says:

Yea, something like that. Maybe they were the direct precursors. I mean, it seems like we still live with both levels and it's easy to see how one grew out of the other. Alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy, numerology and mathematics, ritual calendars and scientific time, the soul and the self, etc.. And I think this general shift has everything to do an increased power of abstraction. The idea that intellectual values only recently came to dominate and are still being resisted by neo-Victorian reactionaries shows, I think, that we are still living with both. I mean, in some sense you can see how ancient Babylonians thought by looking at social level people in our own time. It wasn't that long ago, you know? It must have been something like a fundamentalist's mind.





 		 	   		  
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