[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Khoo

20 July you wrote:

> One of my observations previously has been the scant work done by
> Western philosophers on Eastern civilisations. Even then those few
> tend to see it from the Western worldview, invariably the SOM
> perspective. ....

I see you toe the weak interpretation where intellect = mind and SOM 
dominates Western mind and a "non-S/O" something dominates 
Eastern mind, but if we stick to intellect as a static level and you 
remove SOM there is nothing left - unless one starts about 
mathematics ... etc.  as intellectual pattern", but even DMB pointed out 
that calculation isn't intellect per se. No, the East is a culture that had 
its intellectual bout with the Upanishads philosophy era (correctly 
suggested by Pirsig) but didn't let it grow into a SOM-like state - as in 
the West - before proceeding to some Quality-like stage (not MOQ 
because the level system was not "invented")      

> In this view it is difficult to understand and even accept that other
> cultures and civilisations had evolve their own versions of intellect
> and arrived at an intellectual level quite different from the
> SOM-dominated Western version. 

Yes, SOM has difficulties accepting cultures like the Eastern and that's 
because the East is at a higher Quality-like (meta-) level. If SOM 
merely was one intellectual pattern and Orientalism another there 
would not be the least problems for the West to understand the East, 
but as Kipling's "... the twain shall never meet." conveys the chasm is 
bottomless. And it IS bottomless seen from SOM-as-intellect, it truly  
was for me before I came across Pirsig's ideas. I read all kinds of 
books in wain, but only with MOQ as a metaphysical system which has 
SOM as its static intellectual level did all puzzle pieces fall into place       

I will not press this matter I know you have committed yourself to the 
cause of intellect corresponding to mind and that intellectual patterns 
are any ideas that "comes to mind" from the least notion to 
metaphysics like SOM and MOQ. The fact that this makes 
EVERYTHING into intellect-as-mental patterns and the MOQ becomes 
an idealist philosophy, where ALL levels - social, biological, and 
inorganic - are "intellectual" patterns", are camels swallowed to avoid 
the strong SOL interpretation.   

Bodvar