Hi Krimel

12 March you wrote:

> 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.

Agree about ambiguity and also about "mind" emerging from the 
second level, but only in the sense that intellect's S/O glasses 
made us see that the said "manipulation of experience" as going 
on in (a) mind. The paradoxes emerging from intellect as SOM 
has no relevance for the MOQ.          

> 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. 

The said time corresponds to early 3rd. level (there surely were 
humanoids living in tribes for millions of years, but this wasn't 
social level proper). If they weren't social level inhabitants 
(language f.ex) they surely lacked in "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.

Now you logic start disintegrating. When a baby is born it surely 
has all sense organs but no input from these tells it about living in 
a cosmos. It's a purely biological organism craving food and 
warmth, but soon its social self will emerge and and by and by its 
intellectual self that  will learn about cosmos.          

> [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.

I see, you speaking about "inorganic" and "biology" weren't the Q-
levels but the ordinary scientific classifications. Anyway the levels 
and their struggles are important for MOQ's explanatory power. 
Regarding tribe you may be right, apes live in tribes, but klan 
presupposes ancestry and I doubt if other than homo sapient 
knows that. I don't think you get the idea of the level spawning 
more and more complex patterns until one gets too complex to 
be contained by the parent. Otherwise why wouldn't animals start 
to form nations, states...etc? I'll say because they lack the more 
basic social patterns and these will not materialize unless the 
social level is reached which takes control of biology.      

> 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.

These explanations sounds plausible at first, but like the 
inorganic-biological transition - where no explanation how life 
emerged exist - the biological-social transition is just as 
mysterious, but to SOM it's about animals getting more and more 
able-bodied and -minded until Nobel Laureates emerge.          

> Even into the present day these technological advancements alter the
> way we understand the world and our place in it. 

I think it's the other way round: new understandings alters 
"technology". For instance Quantum Mech has completely pulled 
the rug from under the objective part of SOM, but because the 
results is still interpreted from SOM's premises its (QM's) findings 
is interpreted as if reality is subjective ... the performer having an 
influence on the experiment.   

Bo 






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