Hi David (MB)
You said on 3 January:
> Bo said:
> > "There are no MOQ patterns across two levels, but lots of words that
> > straddles many levels."
> dmb says:
> What? Except for purely inorganic patterns, all of them cross levels.
You may mean (I desperately look for excuses) that inorganic
patterns (AKA "matter") are what the biological level exploits for
own purpose and so on upwards resulting in the intellectual level
having all lower levels as layers below itself? In that sense yes,
but that does not make social patterns intellectual ditto.
> Words, for example, when written are physical, when spoken are
> biological, when used to communicate are social and when used to
> philosophize are intellectual.
Language is neither inorganic nor biological, it is and remains a
social pattern, but when Intellect lodged on top of Society,
language along with the rest of the level were exploited for
intellectual purposes. But language isn't intellectual in itself, no
more than body is "social" even if it belongs to a social being, or
a particular molecule becomes biological if situated inside a living
organism. Elementary Dr. Buchanan!
> Culture exists across the entire range of levels as well. So do people.
> Hopefully, you and your linseed oil know this already.
Intellect - or SOM - uses the term "culture" freely across ITS
range (not levels because intellect doesn't recognize the level
context) and speaks about bacteria cultures and whatnot. The
linseed oil point I did not catch ...oh (after some time) painting ;-).
> Why would crossing levels be a problem? What would prohibit such a
> claim and why would you want to? I don't get it. It seems you have very
> different ideas attached to each of the key terms.
The problem is Pirsig's postulating an immune system for each
level and calling the intellectual such "a cultural immune system".
Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated, and
when they are, an immune system takes over in ways that
are analogous to a biological immune system. The
deviant dangerous source of illegal cultural patterns is
first identified, then isolated and finally destroyed as a
cultural entity. That's what mental hospitals are partly for.
And also heresy trials. They protect the culture from
foreign ideas that if allowed to grow unchecked could
destroy the culture itself. That was what Phædrus had
seen in the psychiatric wards, people trying to convert
him back to "objective reality."
He is correct in spotting "the mental hospitals" (psychiatry) as
intellect's agents - look to the last about "objective reality". But
either the culture term is identical to the Western civilization or
dropped from the MOQ, because there are obviously cultures
that don't match MOQ's intellectual level and have no mental
(mental/corporeal) institutions.
To prevent you from objecting that "culture" is a social entity (in
this particular context) LILA goes on:
Well, because police are never intellectual about
anything. They're just stooges for the social system.
They revere the social system and hate intellectuals. It
was a sort of caste thing. The police were low-caste.
Intellectuals were above all that crime-and-violence sort
of thing that the police were constantly engaged in.
Here is the "social immune system" consisting of police and other
"law & order" agents.
These are deep insights, but marred by the "all cultures as
intellect" blunder. The MOQ will never take off until the source of
all these flaws - the misdefined intellectual level - is corrected.
Pirsig would have been superhuman if not things were
overlooked in this immense endeavour and it does not subtract
from his greatness to point it out, but you (all) act like Imams
protecting the faith.
IMO
Bo
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/
