Hi Peter
On 23 Nov. you wrote:
> on one hand your apparent unwavering confidence in your understanding
> of the MoQ is persuasive and makes me think I need to understand your
> point of view more; on the other hand in your posts your use of common
> words with your own specialised meaning, your poor phraseology, your
> sometimes patronising responses and that you frequently miss out
> conjunctions in your explanations and use unusual punctuation all do
> not help your cause.
But English is not my first language. In the old days when there
were other Europeans around this site I used to find them easier
to understand than the "natives". But no sore feelings, I
appreciate your honesty.
> It could be my weak brain that's the snag and if I were more familiar
> with ZAMM and LILA I would be able to decipher better what you mean;
> so I hope you don't take those comments too negatively, I say them in
> the hope that they can some how lead me to be able to understand you
> better.
> I'm in the process of reading your SOLAQI update but in the meantime
> I'd like to ask you a couple of, for me, important questions:
GOOD!
> Do you think that a cat can think?
"To think" carries tons of SOM. What you ask is really "are cats
self-aware"? Cats are certainly INTELLIGENT but is neither part
of the social nor of the intellectual levels, particularly the latter
where the "self-awareness" term - not belong - but was
CREATED.
If you can stand some more on "intelligence"? It is a biological
pattern by way of the neural complexity called brain that makes
higher organisms able to store former experience (Read and
Write memory) and retrieve it - play around with it in imaginary
scenarios - what makes them able to learn from experience
included seeing other perform an act. At the bio.(cat) level this
does not include a self or language, particularly not the internal
kind we call "thinking". As the social level rose on top of biology it
adopted this pattern and because the biological pattern which
spawned "society" were Homo Sapiens, brain and intelligence
were enormous. If language was part of the social level from the
start or developed is a big question, the Neanderthals certainly
lived in family and tribal groups, but did not have language.
Anyway, with language came the silent form called "thinking", so
did names and a group identity that transcended the animal
range. Kingdoms and other "doms" arose. (this is a leap of tens
of thousands of years course) I find this passage from ZAMM
catching this reality so well.
One must first get over the idea that the time span
between the last caveman and the first Greek
philosophers was short. The absence of any history for
this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the
Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of
at least five times all our recorded history since the Greek
philosophers, there existed civilizations in an advanced
state of development. They had villages and cities,
vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields,
agricultural implements and domestic 381 animals, and
led a life quite as rich and varied as that in most rural
areas of the world today. And like people in those areas
today they saw no reason to write it all down, or if they
did, they wrote it on materials that have never been
found. Thus we know nothing about them. The ``Dark
Ages'' were merely the resumption of a natural way of life
that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.
This also shows that - to Phaedrus - "The Greeks" are the pivot
point that changed everything , in ZAMM they meant the coming
of SOM, in LILA it ought to have been the emergence of 4th.
level. But more on INTELLECT in another post.
> Do you think quality can manifest itself in any way without the
> inorganic?
The quick answer is "no", but it requires some explanation. At
first Pirsig put great emphasize on a QUALITY outside the MOQ
(that creates an infinite regress) He later "recanted" and said that
the Quality he speaks about in ZAMM is the DQ of the MOQ. In
that case the basic postulate is Reality=DQ/SQ (which isn't
different from the Reality=Quality in any other respect than
removing the Quality outside/ahead of the MOQ) thus Quality's
first manifestation was/is the inorganic level.
Everything in my opinion of course, but I can't add this at the end
of each sentence.
Bo
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