> [Krimel] > Certainly memory is a critical factor in all of this; perhaps the most > critical factor. Beyond the neural node, what society has done is > allow the off loading of biological memory into other forms, written, > pictorial and now digital. This expansion of our ability to access the > past is a key point.
[Bo] All right no disagreement except the phrase " ..what society has done..etc.) "Society" in this your context is just - well - society, what we in MOQ speak about is social VALUE and - for instance - the USA is not a "society" dominated by social VALUE. [Krimel] Pirsig sometimes uses the term Value interchangeably with Quality with the same unfortunate result. He mostly appeals to positive Values and tends to ignore negative Quality or negative Value. Perhaps the most often quote passage in this regard is: "Value, the leading edge of reality, is no longer an irrelevant offshoot of structure. Value is the predecessor of structure. It's the preintellectual awareness that gives rise to it. Our structured reality is preselected on the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it's derived." One of the points I have been trying to make of late is that Value in this sense is entirely a product of biology. It is an autonomic function. More than just preintellectual it is automatic, instinctual, inbred. The "source" of this Value is the evolutionary history of the organism's species. The same may be said of societal Values. They are a product of the evolutionary history of the society. As such, one might judge societal values on the basis of the longevity of the society. Egyptian culture lasted about 3000 years without radical change; an impressive record. Chinese culture is similarly long lived. Jewish cultural is an extraordinary example given the culture's lack of a physical homeland for much of its cultural history. As I have tried to make clear social behavior is an evolutionary strategy. The very forms it takes are also subject to evolutionary pressures. In many ways societies can be viewed as organisms as in the call of some biologists to regard an ant colony or bee hive as a single organism. > [Krimel] > The social level is a biological strategy for evolutionary survival. > Primate social patterns show remarkable similarity across species from > monkeys to humans. Dominance hierarchies, feeding patterns, rearing of > young, social interaction are as critical to baboons as to people. > This is just another example of the rather blurry distinction between > Pirsig's levels. Those lines are often so blurry one wonders why they > were drawn at all. [Bo] Likewise, there certainly are biological VALUE dominated "societies", but from this your mis-conception all errors spring. Look at it the other way - levels as escape from the former level's strictures, where social value is bringing biology UNDER CONTROL An animal pack, herd - even tribe - is no such just more eating, copulation and killing. No, the level lines are sharp provided one sees what they are about and not uses "social" in a sloppy way. [Krimel] Or look at it this way. Maslow suggests a similar set of levels. At his lowest level are physiological needs: food, water, reproduction shelter and the like. If these physiological needs are not satisfied nothing else matter. As Maslow puts it: "For the man who is extremely and dangerously hungry, no other interests exist but food. He dreams food, he remembers food, he thinks about food, he emotes only about food, he perceives only food and he wants only food." Once physiological needs are met humans tend to focus on the social need for companionship, next on social esteem and finally on self actualization. Are you suggesting that societies can be judge in accordance with their ability to provide satisfaction of these needs on a grand scale? Because that is really all that technology allows. People in very primitive cultures can easily work their way through three of Maslow's levels. The fourth is elusive perhaps even more elusive in the modern era. But it is just plain wrong to think that society aims at suppressing biology. Death suppresses biology. Society's function is to ensure biological survival. Anything further is icing on the cake. > [Krimel] > Certainly most primate species are able to organize themselves into > social groups without much in the way of complex symbolic > communication. Expressions of emotion and the ability to interpret > those responses in others are critical in this regard. But there is no > indication that human societies either originated or "took off" as a > result of language. While it is difficult to specify when language > developed in humans there is every reason to think that it has been > with us hundreds of thousands of years. [Bo] Not THAT fast. Language's biological facilities in primates are easy to track, whether Neanderthals had it is dubious and that's just fifty thousand years ago, however if there have been unknown human races before those may well be, yet its has little to do with it, IMO language is the ultimate social tool in the said sense of tearing existence loose from biology. [Krimel] While I have no reason to doubt that Neanderthals had language, modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years and almost nothing changed in their lifestyle until the invention of agriculture and writing, as I stated earlier. There is nothing to suggest that modern humans have ever been without language and for more than 150,000 years this "ultimate" tool did very little to change the social living arrangements of humans. Writing on the other hand is a whole new ballgame. It extends the memory storage capabilities, (read: intellect) of every individual who can read. > [Krimel] > That is hundreds of thousands of years with very little change in > cultural patterns. Radical social changes began with agriculture and > writing roughly 12,000 years ago. This was a truly significant change > in the way people organized and interacted. Its effects have been > profound and long lasting. [Bo] In your trite "social" context, sure, but the great VALUE upheaval had already happened. [Krimel] I thought the Greeks staged the big Value Upheaval Party. > [Krimel] > Again there is no clear line between the biological and social and > even less between the social and intellectual. It is not even the > least bit clear whether the intellectual grows out of the social or > visa versa. But your claim that the Greeks invented the idea that > objective truth as independent of subjective opinion is just > misguided. [Bo] Well with your non-understanding of the level IDEA no wonder you see no clear lines anywhere. The mystery is how you can deny the intellectual level growing out of the social when you don't see any levels? [Krimel] Pardon me if I call it, my "other" understanding of the level idea. To me it is a heuristic, a rule of thumb, an approximate metaphor. You can look at things that way if you like and sometime it will provide insight. So sometimes I do. But it is neither an especially novel nor especially profound and sometimes it makes no sense at all. Intellect and social structure in humans clearly co-evolved. They occur together. Much of the advance that occurred since the invention of writing is the winnowing out of useful information that can be stored and retrieved. Big advances in this arena occurred with writing, the printing press and more recently digital storage. It is not processing capacity that seems to matter so much as retrieval capability. >[Krimel] > The priests of Ra in Egypt proclaimed the facts of life as revealed by > the gods and that Truth was objective and independent of any petitioner > who tried to advance subjective opinions on the matter. [Bo] This, however, is an interesting point if I was able to understand it. "The facts of life as revealed by the gods ... and that Truth was objective.." Do you say that the divine revelation was TRUTH or that these ...? Try again please. In a MOQ context the pre- Greek, pre-intellect cultures (among those Egypt) surely claimed that their respective gods were reality itself (If an Egyptian travelled to Babylon and learned that BAAL was god over there it did not disturb their belief in RA, these godheads only concerned themselves with their respective realms). But if the Egyptians had a notion of TRUTH above the god context I doubt. THAT was the 4th level emerging. [Krimel] As I have said many times objectivity is what multiple individual's can agree upon. What I was saying is that what the priests said was law. Their statements were given as objective statements and those particular statements were to be regarded as Truth. Personal opinion as to the veracity of that particular Truth was at best irrelevant and at worst lethal. In those good old days Gods tended to be seen as local; true, but that too was an objective fact about the nature of Gods. Even beyond the theological the Egyptian and Babylonian capacity to build and organize large numbers of people is testimony to their intellectual capabilities. [Bo] > As for rebellion against old mythologies, it is hard to imagine a time > when this was not going on. Each new generation has come into the > world equipped to question the received wisdom. Amenhotep in Egypt was > the first monotheist. This rebellion against the established > priesthood was a milestone in human culture that is seldom mentioned. > It is significant to note that the Jewish Exodus occurred within a > generation of his rule and if one were to draw a direct connection > between them Amenhotep's rebellion had as much impact on the > development of western civilization as anything the Greeks did. [Bo] A most profound observation. Monotheism was a great shift and in connection to my above (about the various old mythologies not interfering) with monotheism it all changed. GOD was universal, yet we see that the Jews considered themselves the chosen ones so it was also the birth of jingoism. [Krimel] The Jews hardly invented jingoism. They were neither the first not the last to see themselves as the chosen ones. In fact every group tends to see itself as the chosen ones and to regard outsiders as inferior. In fact this is one of those human predispositions that might even be regarded as biologically determined. You can randomly assign people to groups and they will quickly, in a matter of minutes, begin to identify with their group and to see people in another randomly assigned group as inferior outsiders. > > Matt: > > Your point, however, is not my point. We _can_ define intellect, > > and all the other levels, and we _should_ define intellect, and all > > the other levels. > [Bo] > Agreement! > [Krimel] > So what's the hold up? [Bo] The likes of you who don't see any levels, much less any definition of them. [Krimel] Actually "see" is a good choice of words here. I much prefer the visual metaphor of "resolution". That is, what "level" of detail are we looking for? Arlo mentioned something along these lines not long ago. Collectives are composed of individuals and which level we choose to focus on is a matter of circumstance. We could look at individuals, families, communities, counties, provinces, nations or the world as a whole. At each level of resolution, whether we elect to zoom in or zoom out, we see commonality and difference; patterns. And we see different patterns at different levels of resolution. We can notice that some patterns are more interesting than others without getting all bent out of shape when our arbitrary lines get crossed. 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/
