[MD] A.I.

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[John]
What I'm trying to get to, is that existing social patterns at the simple and
primitive levels, do not evolve or produce or create intellectual patterns or
patterning.

[Arlo]
Agree. Just like "biological patterns" had to evolve to a certain level of
complexity before the potential emergence of "social patterns" was possible, so
too a certain complexity in social patterns is required before the emergence of
intellectual patterns was possible.

[John]
If the principle of top-down creation carries through-out the level
understandings, then social patterns are creative and protective of biological
patterns - and this is certainly true.

[Arlo]
I see two separate things here. I don't think many say that newly emergent
levels do not inform the level(s) from which they emerge, but according to this
it sounds like you are saying "intellectual patterns" came first. Is that right?

[John]
So this medium we are using right now, represents the potential for  freeing
intellect as never realized in history.  Freeing it from the sq weight of
social acceptance, publishing costs, etc.

[Arlo]
This has been widely suggested, yes. But I see old forms of power trying to
devour this space, and large collections of the worlds' population do not even
connect, yet alone use it on any regular basis. 

[Arlo previously]
We got lucky with ZMM (or maybe Qualigod manipulated the cosmos to ensure His
Gospel would be told! - sarcasm)

[John]
Actually the second premise makes more sense to me than the first.  What is
"luck" anyway?  Sounds like a moronist notion.

[Arlo]
I am saying it was never "predetermined" in any way, shape or form that ZMM
would be published. The cosmos was not manipulated by a Qualigod to ensure its
publication. For every great book we think was Divinely orchestrated to reach
our hands, how many have slipped into dust without ever being read? 

[John had said]
But DQ is where the ideas come from.

[Arlo replied]
The key here is to ask if ideas are formed ahead of time and "given" to the
lucky recipient? Or is the idea an act of creation, of bringing into being
something that did not exist before, not even in some conceptualized "mind" of
an agenic "DQ".

[John]
Eww.  I see what you're saying.  No.  The idea is an act of creation, through
an individual intellectually responding to some  social pattern or some
socially accepted or presented ideas.

[Arlo]
Yes, the idea is an act of "creation", not by something apart from us, but BY
us responding to Quality. 

The troubling word here is "from". Ideas do not come "from" anywhere in some
sense that they existed elsewhere and are then delivered to us. Ideas come from
the response to Quality, the moment of pure experience. 

What we have to keep in mind is that "creation" does not occur BY something
else, it occurs IN RESPONSE to Quality. "Creation" is what WE do, what PATTERNS
do, in response to the ongoing Quality event.

For example. We say "Pirsig created ZMM". ZMM did not exist in any way in some
plan or "mind" or "intention" of some Qualigod, which was they pushed into
Pirsig's brain to fulfill some pre-orchestrated divine plan. The act of
creation belongs to Pirsig (via the socio-historic context, as Pirsig reminds
us), not to DQ. Quality is "simply" the force of value, that some things are
better than others, but what those things are, and what gets created and what
gets destroyed is entirely acts by the patterns.

[John]
I agree with Pirsig's earliest realization, that hypothesis come from
somewhere, but they don't come ready-made or handed down.

[Arlo]
This is, I think, the key, and I think its the "from" that traps Platt in his
Qualigod concept. 

No, they are not ready made or handed-down. Peirce called abduction "a flash of
insight", and this flash was used a metaphor by Pirsig as well. "From" implies
(to the literalists) a place or a "mind" apart from the immediate moment, where
the idea exists BEFORE it gets to us. 

This is my point. The idea DOES NOT exist before WE create it! The "flash" is
the immediate moment of Quality, and saying the idea comes "from" this is,
apparently, misleading to some. I'd say instead the ideas are made possible by
the Quality moment. It enables creation. It is the force with which creation is
a response to. But IT does not create. 

[John]
But James and Royce were both fierce advocates of his thought and as it turns
out, those three, Peirce, James and Royce, made a most interesting
philosophical trio and I agree, from what I've discovered so far, Pirsig fits
in with their metaphysical wanderings quite companionably.

[Arlo]
I don't know anything about Royce, except for bits from your posts, and I am
not a scholar of James' work either. Peirce is fascinating, and I think much of
what he said can flesh out some of Pirsig's ideas. "Abduction" is most
interesting in this regard, and it is a concept Umberto Eco has written
extensively on as well.