[MD] A.I.

[david buchanan]

John said to Arlo:
 ... You can call a book an "intellectual pattern", and you'd be right in that it had an intellectual creator.  But the fact of a book or a teaching is a social phenomena, involving publisher acceptance and reader popularity. Even teachers can't be teachers by themselves.  The social game is fundamental.  No writing can be significant until it's been read.

dmb says:

Hmmm. It seems to me that your point is predicated on the assumption that "intellectual patterns" are isolated or by themselves. I don't think it works that way at all. The intellectual and social levels are both co-operative, collective, group efforts. Platt has this tendency to think of the intellectual level as the level of individuality but you don't want to go there. It just confuses things. Actually, the scientific method is the quintessential model of co-operation. That's true within the lab, within the journals, within the universities, within history and across cultures. I mean, values don't have to be "social" just because they're part of a collective effort, a group effort. This discussion group is supposed to be intellectual, for example. But how do you do philosophy all by yourself? What would be the point?

John said:
If intellectual patterns came from social patterns, then the "infinity of possible hypothesis" postulate wouldn't hold.


dmb says:
I think you're talking about two different things at the same time. In terms of evolutionary development, intellectual patterns come from social patterns as a child comes from its mother. In terms of intellectual creativity, the formation of a new hypothesis is an intellectual response to Dynamic Quality. The former is a description of an historical process of development and the latter is a description of the creative process. The first one takes centuries the second one happens in a moment. Taken as separate claims about different thing, which they are, they're not in conflict with each other. But mushing them together doesn't work at all.




 		 	   		  
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