[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[plattholden at gmail.com]

What fun to have Krimel back. In condemning Bo's SOL he presents us with a 
classic example of SOL. You'll notice throughout Krimel's scientific S/O 
explication of the MOQ levels that values are not mentioned once. Not 
surprising really since, as Pirsig put it, "Science has no values. Not 
officially." (Lila, 4)

When you strip values from your description of the MOQ, your understanding of 
it, by S/O scientific measurement, drops to 0.

Platt     



On 30 May 2010 at 21:35, Krimel wrote:

Mary
Almost a week and no response.  I would like you, the thesis writer, to tell
me what the difference is between the Intellectual Level and the Social.
Save me from being 'victimized' by Bo.  

[Krimel]
I don't agree with dmb on much of anything but the one thing I do agree with
him about is Bo's ludicrous SOL. Of all the comments I have scanned while
lurking the truest I have heard was Bo's comment that the SOL is
unassailable. It IS unassailable to the extent that it resides inside Bo'
thick skull. 

The levels within the MoQ are a mess and in large measure that confusion
does result from Pirsig's somewhat incoherent account of them.

The inorganic level is composed of static patterns of inorganic matter and
force. Whether these turn out to be waves or particle, wave/particle or
something completely unexpected matters little. By the time we are able to
interact with them they are relatively static. Those static patterns and
relationship can form and remain stable for periods of billions of years.
The inorganic level is the collection of those static patterns.

Under certain conditions inorganic patterns can attain a level of complexity
of both form and relationship so that they are able to self replicate. That
is they can iterate. Those iterations of static patterns change over periods
of millions of years. The biological level is the collection of these self
replicating patterns.

One strategy for ensuring self replication of biological patterns is through
the cooperative efforts of individual members of biological species. I am
among those who think Pirsig was dead wrong to exclude the host of social
species from the social level. Ants, bees, herd animals, various fish, birds
and almost all primates including humans employ social behavioral patterns
to ensure the biological survival of the species. Those social patterns that
succeed in this are able to replicate themselves. From bees and ants where
some have suggested the "individual" ought to be considered to be the
individual hive or colony, to the collection of ethical practices of the
Jews which have ensure the social identity of the Jewish people for about
5,000 years, social patterns are the collection of behaviors that ensure the
replication of social organism like hives, colonies, ethnicities, nations,
corporations, cities etc. The social level is the collection of those
patterns. They are stable on the scale of millennia. 

The intellectual level is at this point the only level that, as far as we
know, ought to be considered uniquely human. Although I would say in
principle this is an open question. Intellectual patterns replicate by being
passed from one individual to another. They must be communicated as in
texts, graphics, videos etc or reified in the form of motorcycles or
skyscrapers. In humans social patterns influence greatly which intellectual
patterns can be passed along but in short intellectual patterns are ideas,
systems of thinking, conceptual structures. These patterns can change
typically on a scale of hundreds of years although this seems to be
accelerating. The intellectual level, as it existed say 20,000 years ago,
was limited to what could be spoken by one person to a relatively small
number of others and passed almost entirely by word of mouth. With the
invention of writing, roughly 12,000 years ago some intellectual patterns
could be passed across time and space to anyone capable of decoding them and
they began to accumulate at a faster rate. This was greatly enhanced by
invention of the printing press and their rate of accumulation and
transmission has been speeded geometrically with digital encoding. But the
intellectual level is the collection of all such patterns from the Vedas to
the blogosphere. To claim that one particular set of such patterns
constitute a "level" is ridiculous on its face. Even to say that all
patterns within the level have some particular qualities in common is silly.

Whether you arrived at your conclusions independently or through Bo's
pernicious influence, if you endorse the SOL (which I would expand to mean
"Shit Outta Luck") you are SOL indeed.

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