[Bo] We are on the same track (parallel at least), I vouch for every word of this paragraph ... except that of me not getting it, I understand perfectly what the problems are with the mind/body divide (an offshoot of the S/O root)
I particularly liked your "if we regard "mind" as an emergent ...etc" part. Your quotation marks hopefully indicates that it's not mind in the SOM sense, but that the biological brain's ability to store experience, retrieve it and play around with it via logical loops what makes for INTELLIGENCE. With the coming of the intellectual level and its S/O this function became something going on inside a mental realm, inside a mind. This makes the mind/matter problem go away, it dissolves the SOM-indued paradoxes. [Krimel] My quotation marks were meant only to indicate that 'mind' is an ambiguous concept but that whatever it is, it emerges from biology which emerges from the inorganic. As near as I can tell, current thinking is that folks with mental capacities identical to our own left Africa about 50,000 years ago. What distinguishes us from them are primarily improvements in mental techniques for organizing and processing information. It works something like this. Each subject is tasked at birth with constructing an internal representation of the cosmos. As building blocks we have only sensory input from the environment and the biological structures we have inherited. The rest of the conversation is of necessity how we stack those blocks. [Bo] The biological level has a self/not self distinction - a biological necessity for an immune system, but it's not about subjects and objects in the intellectual sense. This biological distinction was adopted and refined by the social level where the individual got personhood, name, ancestry and a host of other settings, but sociol VALUE is the "common cause" that spawned groups beyond the family: Klans, tribes, nations ...etc. Yet, even if a social level person (by this I mean at an age before intellect) perfectly well knew the difference between himself and his fellow tribesman, this was not intellect's subject, the fundamentally isolated entity, shut off from subjects and the reality "out there". [Krimel] Here the problem is your insistence on having 'levels' at war, exploiting adopting and interacting. It is not a matter of levels but of events, circumstances and adaptations to change. These might be classified according to a level system but it is the specifics that matter not how those specifics fit into a particular taxonomy. For example most primate social groups have structures like klans and tribes. These are the kinds of social structures humans are adapted to fit into. What led to higher orders of social grouping was climate change at the end of the last ice age and technological advances in such spears, bows and arrows, mud and stone huts for relatively permanent dwellings, shifts in patterns of hunting and gathering, domestication of animals, agriculture, writing etc. Even into the present day these technological advancements alter the way we understand the world and our place in it. Personally I view the structure of our understanding taking a particular shape that is found throughout nature. It is the shape of lightning, river deltas, the root and branch systems of plants, our own arteries, lungs and nervous systems. It is a shape that evolves to allow the most efficient distribution and flow of 'fluids'. In a conceptual sense technological advances reshape our thinking to allow more efficient and inclusive ways of organizing and structuring our internal representations of the external world. I would add this structure to Kant's list of time, space and causality as a priori, hardwired attributes that we must use to format the world. This structure of thought exhibits the property of self similarity across scale. This is as close to 'levels' as I get. Levels emerge as a function of scale. Or as I have said before in my usual effort to distill anything meaningful down to where it will fit on a bumper sticker: Zoom in, Zoom out, Refocus. [Joe] To the S/O distinction I prefer the Mechanical/Conscious distinction. It broadens the playing field by including a broader amount of the literature of music and sports, as well as thought. Static/dynamic carry a weight of meaning for rational thought, and Conscious/Mechanical puts a nice sheen on it. [Krimel] The mechanical view has held sway in the west since Descartes and Newton. See the MindWalk discussion. The view that has been gaining grown since you were a young man is an organic and probabilistic one. 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/
