[MD] Stacks
skutvik at online.no
skutvik at online.no
Sat Jul 31 01:01:28 PDT 2010
Hi Platt
On 30 July you wrote:
> It may be gibberish for some to understand your clipped phrase, "from
> intellect seen." Also it may be hard for some to comprehend your
> sentence, "At the social level - and I mean from within that level,
> not from intellect's view - there is no gravity, the fact that things
> fell to the ground was part of the overall order." At least these
> sorts of phrases and descriptions were a stumbling block for me for a
> long time. But, at some moment, exactly when I don't recall, the light
> came on. I remembered Pirsig's own description of the conflict between
> what the biological level "sees" contrasted with the intellect level's
> perspective.
Yes, you put it right in you excellent prose (wish I would learn from it).
It IS a radical shift of perspective, not merely off to another angle but
the much referred to "inside-out turn ". I have been so long in MOQ-
land now that I have problems seeing things from SOM's perspective.
And I mean SOM, not merely intellect's subject/object stance, but
going back to my days of struggle with the mind/matter paradoxes.
"That explained what had happened tonight. The first
intelligence out there in the cabin disliked him and still did.. It
was this second intelligence that had come in and made love.
The first Lila had nothing to do with it. These cellular patterns
have been lovers for millions of years and they aren't about to
be put off by these recent little intellectual patterns that know
almost nothing about what is going on. The cells want
immortality. They know their days are numbered. That is why
they make such a commotion. They're so old. They began to
distinguish this-body on the left from this body on the right
more than a billion years ago. Beyond comprehension. Of
course they pay no attention to mind patterns. In their scale of
time, mind is just some ephemera that arrived a few moments
ago, and will probably pass away in a few moments more.
"That was what he had seen that he was trying to hang on to
now, this confluence where the mental and the biological
patterns are both awake and aware of each other and in
conflict." (Lila,15)
The above passage from LILA about the biological reality as different
from the other levels' is a telling example of Pirsig seeing these inter-
level perspectives (no wonder, he's the instigator!) the only odd thing
here is the sudden use of "intelligence". Is the first intelligence =
intellect? That doesn't really fit if the second = biology. Anyway it's not
the intellectual level that scoffs at biology, it is the social that wants to
organize biology's proliferration, consummation ..etc. into socially
approved institutions.
> Biological patterns aware? A foreign concept. Yet, it's a premise we
> can adopt to better interpret MOQ -- imagining how values appear to
> patterns at different levels. While we may highly value " thinking"
> our cells could care less and our atoms even less so. Not your
> everyday way of looking at the world, which is why some agree that the
> MOQ is a Copernican-like revolution.
Right, aware as self-aware is a sensitive term. It's plain that lower
biological organism don't think (they have no neural system) yet know
their world, know what's "good and bad". They ARE value patterns
after all! I for one think self-awareness is intellect's (while SOM) self-
congatulatory term, claiming a god's-eye view of existence, but this we
may sort out when .....?? ;-)
Bodvar
>
> On 30 Jul 2010 at 10:28, skutvik at online.no wrote:
>
> Hi Magnus
>
> I stick to the Newton issue (will address the stacks in the next post)
>
>
>
> You said:
> > Is that right? So, gravity did exist before a human formulated a
> > theory about it?
>
> We accuse each other of SOM-ism, but here is a shining example of you
> being unable to snap out of SOM's dichotomy: Either are things
> man-made or they exists "out there". The Gravity example was meant to
> demonstrate how an intellectual theory changes the intellectual
> outlook, but the SOM-induced "intellect=mind and mind=human" never
> fails. Strange as it sounds Newton isn't a "man" in a MOQ context, but
> a compound of all levels and the Gravity Theory an intellectual -
> scientific - product that came to dominate that level. At the social
> level - and I mean from within that level, not from intellect's view
> - there is no gravity, the fact that things fell to the ground was
> part of the overall order. So again, the true MOQ has no human
> perspective, only the weak interpreters who regarded the MOQ as an
> intellectual pattern ... meaning a human mind-pattern.
>
> > But you make it quite clear what you think when you write "is". You
> > simply see the universal stack through the eyes of the intellectual
> > level of the human perspective stack. Then you say that what you
> > perceive through those eyes are identical to, i.e. "is", what's on
> > the other side because you're afraid of assuming you see a reality
> > "out there" with a mind.
>
> From SOM or intellect seen it's just madness to suggest a perspective
> that excludes humans and their "mind", but the MOQ's first job in
> office is to reject the Subject/Object (including its mind/matter
> version) distinction as reality's ground, ergo, there is no matter
> (this everybody seem happy to accept) but when it comes to "there is
> no mind" most wince, but if the subject is the "measure of all things"
> we better switch to Ham's "Essentialism".
>
> > Let me ask you one thing: You say that gravity didn't exist before
> > Newton, right? And that it changed somewhat with Einstein. You don't
> > acknowledge any difference between gravity and the theory of
> > gravity, right?
>
> First, the intellectual theory on as signs on a sheet of paper isn't
> the inorganic pattern that makes things fall, but the theory made that
> pattern become "gravity". You will not find any references to - not
> only gravity - but the phenomena in the few pre-intellectual text
> there are, there was simply not a "nature" before intellect.
>
> Then, imagine a biological pattern, take a flu virus. Flu
> > viruses have a nasty habit of changing now and then. They adapt to
> > new medication so they can spread as much as possible. When we
> > analyse this flu virus, they call it a little bit different every
> > year because it seems to be different every year. Just like gravity,
> > we need to adapt our understanding of the pattern to be able to make
> > new medication when required, just as we needed a refined
> > understanding of gravity when aiming for the moon. Now, in your
> > view, is there a difference between these two refined understandings
> > of gravity vs the virus?
>
> The 2nd. level is below the 3rd. and if there were no theorizing
> about what cause things to fall on the social level there were
> absolutely no "theorizing" about anything at the biological level (LOL
> *) Gravity is science so I believe it's no difference between a new
> scientific theory creating a new physics (not physical) reality and a
> new ditto creating a new biology reality (not biological). But again
> MOQ is not interested in science, its business is the value
> relationship and moral codes there are between the levels. So you will
> understand that I'm no fan of any Q-versions of the scientific
> disciplines. "Give unto intellect what intellect's is and unto the MOQ
> ... etc.
>
> *) The levels are as present today as ever, it's just more easy to see
> their workings when they were "leading edge".
>
> Bodvar
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
> Moq_Discuss mailing list
> Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
> Archives:
> http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
> http://moq.org/md/archives.html
>
>
More information about the Moq_Discuss
mailing list