[Chris] Yes. Arlos reasoning is quite logical I'd say. [Arlo] Thanks.
[Chris] Because I lean towards the interpretation that the split between seeing the self and the world as one and the self and the world as separate is the emergence of the intellectual level - however I really don't think this can be accredited to the Greeks only, but that is my job to prove later on - then this sense of individuality would perhaps not be there at all when language etc developed. [Arlo] What you read in that post was an extreme condensing of evolution. No, I do not think the "self" was immediately present at the onset of language. I think (and Pirsig supports this) the "self" is an "intellectual idea" that emerged out of the substrata of social patterns much later, and only after the social substrata had evolved itself sufficient complexity. [Chris] I mean, It is impossible for us to think ourselves into a way of thinking such as one of not thinking about thinking, but we may hypostasise that when events occurred that accelerated the development of cultures, then the notion of "self" that later on became so near-impossible to get rid of wasn't there. So what would this mean if we think about the development of early cultures - the social level? [Arlo] I veer from Pirsig on what is commonly considered here to be the "split" between social and intellectual levels (if any consensus can be said to have been reached). I place the use of symbols at the advent of the social level, since symbolic interaction co-occurs with collaborative behavior and mutual attention. For me, the distinction between the two levels (and this is just my present-day thinking) is somewhat understood as a "cognition/metacognition" break. That is, the intellectual level emerged when people started thinking about their symbols as entities-in-themselves. Prior to this point, the "self" was not a concept but was likely an unexamined reality of bounded biological separateness. We likely had symbols to represent identity, I, you, me, her, him, etc., but these symbols were more-or-less unexamined aspects of our day to day lives. At the onset of the intellectual level, that "I" symbol became a subject of analysis itself, a "reality" to be examined and contemplated. At that moment, the modern notion of "self" was born, and along with it other intellectual patterns that were the philosophical result of the consideration of symbols as existants themselves. I place the advent of social pattern emergence (tied to use of symbols) at about 90,000 - 110,000 years ago, when the first archeological records of symbolic thinking appear in the world (in Africa from Oued Djebbana, and near Israel at Skhul Cave). These artifacts grow in complexity, but maintain a level of symbolic artisanry, up to about 24,000 - 20,000 years ago with the art found in the Pech Merle caves in Francem , with a rapid development beginning around 40,000 years ago. So considering what early cultures, pre-intellect and pre-self, were like, this would seem to be a good era to look at. Interestingly, although the artisans of Pech Merle were sophisticated enough to locate and produce materials, paint and sketch a wide array of symbolic art depicting people and animals (along with human-animal hybrids), they left us no known record of who they were, signatures on their art, no historical account of their journeys, only amazingly beautiful art. We have no recorded language from this era, no hieroglyphs, no Rosetta Stone, nothing. (Indeed, I'd make the argument that recorded language (written, pictoral, hieroglyphic, etc.) was an outgrowth of the intellectual levels ability to reflect on symbols as things-in-themselves. This would make the onset of written language (again, of any form) to be correlated with the emergence of the intellectual level - maybe not its dominance but its point of origin). What do you think? 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/
