Ron said to dmb: I feel it is important to Establish just what is meant by Pre-intellect in relation to: 1. Pure experience 2. Pre-conceptual 3. Pre-reflective 4. symbol creation 5. Symbol recognition 6. symbol manipulation
dmb says: As I understand it, the term "pre-intellectual" is equivalent to one, two and three. They all refer to the same basic idea. They all refer to a type of experience that is prior to four, five and six. The creation, recognition, manipulation or any other use of symbols is an intellectual activity, part of our conceptualizations and occur in reflection. So all of the terms are related to pre-intellectual experience. The first half are and the second half are not pre-intellectual. Its really that simple. Maybe it would help to point out that this has nothing to do with Bo's distinctions, which I don't get. My understanding is based on what I read in the pragmatists, namely Pirsig, James, Dewey and Mead (That's George Mead the pragmatist not Margaret Mead the anthropologist). Ron said: ...When Pirsig termed INTELLECT as symbol manipulation for purposes of economy of thought, he kind of confused the issue of SOM. Does he term SOM as an intellectual pattern or a logic pattern? Are the two terms synonymous in this description? ..This being said, just where the hell does SOM leave off and pure experience begin? ...It seems plain to me that SOM is a great deal more than an intellectual pattern in our present western culture it has fused with the culture. I think this is why it can be traced linearly in time as an intellectual pattern but not conceptually because it has become enmeshed in the culture. dmb says: Philosophers who work the problem of SOM will point out that the distinction grows out of the grammatical structure of Indo-European languages. That's one of the major reasons why it seems so emeshed. Its built right into the way we talk. That's not a problem and the notion works just fine on a practical level. But we can trace its emergence on a more explicit level in the first philosophies of ancient Greece, where it moves from the practical realm to the theoretical realm and that where the problems begin. It got into the Western religions too. As Nietzsche says, Christianity is Platonism for the people. Yea, its downright tangled up in the culture. There's no doubt. Pirsig isn't the only one who says it began with philosophy or that it should end now. You can add Rorty and Heidegger to Nietzsche and Pirsig. They all complain about SOM as a metaphysical assumption, as a theory about the structure of reality, which is where it becomes a problem. SOM and the MOQ are both metaphysical systems. They're rival intellectual descriptions. They both use logic and attempt to conceptualize how it all hangs together, etc. I've always been confused by the confusion over intellect. Among other things, Pirsig says that anyone capable of reading his book already knows what intellectual activity is. Hopefully, we do it all the time. I have to or I'd fail my classes. I wouldn't be able to chat with you about this, etc. In terms of symbol manipulation, we could say I'm trying to characterize and arrange the concepts so they fit into a coherent picture. I'm manipulating symbols with the hope that it'll provide some kind of answer to your questions. (Although I don't understand them, exactly.) And you went thru a similar process in constructing those questions. If i say "good morning, nice weather we're having" there ain't too much manipulating going on. Its a ritual more than a real conversation, like tipping a hat. I suppose even many seemingly intellectual exchanges would boil down to little more than that, but we can try. Social level communication is more like the use of symbols in conventional and habitual ways. But intellectual level activity is such that you could manipulate symbols in order to investigate the symbols and the way the are used. And this is more than just a quantitative change, although that's true too. This capacity to manipulate symbols emerges from their social level use and in that sense the social level is prior to the intellectual level, but this is not at all what I mean by pre-intellectual experience. If that were the case James's pure experience would be equivalent to the social level and what a mess that would be. Instead, pure experience is not only pre-intellectual, it is also pre-social. Think of it this way. You could say animals have nothing but pure experience. (I'm not equating with instinct, however.) They never conceptualize experience in any way. They don't verbalize their experience. But they have experience and usually they respond to it immediately and appropriately all the same. We're animals and we have that going on too. The social and intellectual levels emerge from this and this world of symbols allows us to respond to experience in ways that animal don't or can't, but this does not replace or erase the role of pure experience. It works to guide activity at any level, biological, social or intellectual. Its pre-everything, so to speak. Thanks, dmb _________________________________________________________________ Climb to the top of the charts! Play Star Shuffle: the word scramble challenge with star power. http://club.live.com/star_shuffle.aspx?icid=starshuffle_wlmailtextlink_oct 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
