[MD] A.I.

[Platt Holden]

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 3:24 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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?
>
> [Platt}
To say ideas in isolation are useless is the height of banality. Like saying
fish need water. Duh.


> 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.
>

[Platt]
Right. The creative process, responses to DQ, are strictly individual.
Collectives create nothing. There was a big fad for brainstorming in the
60"s and 70"s when groupies were all the rage. But they never amounted to
anything. History is the story of individuals coming up with new
intellectual patterns. That's why the intellectual level insists on
individual rights. And lest we forget, once in a great while an individual
comes up with a whole new reality, like Copernicus and Pirsig.