[MD] Definitions.

[david buchanan]

Dan said to dmb:
Lila is portrayed in the way she is to help flesh out the characteristics of someone caught in a biological web of love, hatred, jealousy, envy, lust, etc. She attacks Phaedrus and his 'intellect' not because she doesn't understand it, but because she understands it all too well.


dmb says:
Let me add a little textual evidence to support what I've already said (below). He's not talking about Lila in particular here, but the relations between the levels in general. I think it shows that we can't leap-frog over a level of values. This overall evolutionary relationship also works on the personal level as a developmental relationship. Maslow's hierarchy of needs illustrates this developmental idea pretty well.

"The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, 'we are suspended in language.' Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived."

"The MOQ resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding them all in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values.  They are not two mysterious universes that go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one."

"The MoQ says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns."

dmb replied previously:
Understands all too well? I think that's obviously not true, Dan. It would be inconsistent with the wider picture of static values as a hierarchy of levels. How could she understand intellect "all too well" if she is "intellectually nowhere"? That's her role in the book, right? Her chances of escaping insanity or death are probably best with Rigel because she has to start healing from the place where she is, so to speak, developmentally. She's going to need some social values first then maybe she could move on to intellect. You know, joining a church is better than dying of alcoholism.