[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[skutvik at online.no]

DMB, Andre, All.

On 19 July:

dmb to Arlo:
 
> I don't know how to draw the line, exactly, but the social level can
> USE symbols but intellect is more like the ability to manipulate the
> symbols themselves, to do skilled work with the symbols themselves. 

The symbol-manipulation as intellect is untenable. Language itself is 
manipulation of symbols ...from INTELLECT seen ... but ancient pre-
intellect people did not "know" it was symbol-manipulation, thus 
intellect occurred when the symbol/what's symbolized  distinction were 
realized (a variant of SOM's many dichotomies) . Mine is MOQ's meta-
view while you still fumble around inside the intellectual level.      

Andre:
> Hi dmb, Arlo, (Jumping on a fast moving train) but would like to get on
> somewhere...the roddy thing ignores stations...just keeps on going. I
> think Mr. Pirsig implies a line to be drawn between what is social and
> what is intellectual in his letter to Paul Turner in his 'definition'
> of the intellectual level. 
 
You bet Mr. Pirsig draw lines: 

    There has been a tendency to extend the meaning of "social" 
    down into the biological with the assertion that, for example, 
    ants are social, but I have argued that this extends the 
    meaning to a point where it is useless for classification. I said 
    that even atoms can be called societies of electrons and 
    protons. And since everything is thus social, why even have 
    the word? I think the same happens to the term, "intellectual," 
    when one extends it much before the Ancient Greeks.

Extending social into absurdity is Magnus' specialty  (and he has not 
improved much) but then the clue: The Q-intellectual level is useless 
when one extends it much BEFORE THE GREEKS  and in a MOQ 
that means SOM. He then goes on to reject the "thinking intellect" that 
most of this discussion previously has clung to.  

    If one extends the term intellectual to include primitive cultures 
    just because they are thinking about things, why stop there? 
    How about chimpanzees? Don't they think? How about 
    earthworms? Don't they make conscious decisions? How 
    about bacteria responding to light and darkness? How about 
    chemicals responding to light and darkness? Our intellectual 
    level is broadening to a point where it is losing all its meaning.  

But trust Pirsig. He first identifies intellect as arriving with the Greeks - 
meaning SOM - but then proceeds to the nonsensical "manipulation of 
symbols" definitio that DMB now accepts as gospel. Don't you see that 
Pirsig's has migrated from the first mind-intellect towards the S/O-
intellect, but when he lands there he hits the throttles to land at some 
new "auxiliary" definition. What a farce.  

Bodvar