[Krimel] It would seem that you both are willing to ascribe at least social level behavior to primates. This is my point. The MoQ does not allow this. The social level only applies to humans.
Ron: well you just said Humans are Primates "great apes" to be exact. again I propose that the level be defined by the society. "one chimpanzee is no chimpanzee" this keeps with Pirsigs MoQ by only being able to accurately asses Human definitions. assessing chimpanzee definitions is well, limited. Keeping in mind that we are in no way objective . So it only makes sense that we may only assess Human societies with any kind of accuracy. The same way we may only asses native culture by the definitions of the participants. If we can not decipher those definitions then we may not get an accurate appraisal. [Krimel] But many things are objective in the sense that they govern the lives of both Tarzan and Cheetah regardless of their definitions. The sun rises and sets, the wind blows, the earth shakes, if they fall from a tree they will accelerate toward the ground at 9.8 m/s/s. Pirsig specifically says that the social level only includes humans. So any talk of commonality in form or function between human and animal social behavior is off base. Such commonalities must be part of the biological level. But if you remove the biologically based elements of human social behavior you really aren't left with much. Ron added: This is what I was trying to get through to Bo, the intellectual level is meaningless without a cultural definition. Western culture defines intellect as analytical thinking. Bo is correct in this way, but is analytical thinking representative of the universal concept of an intellectual level? hardly, without cultural definitions the level has no meaning. There could very well be an ant hill in Botswana somewhere that dwarfs the intellectual capacity of human beings and we'd never know it. that's whats kinda cool about the MoQ. [Krimel] Or as Douglas Adams would have it, white mice might in fact be protrusions into our dimension of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings. But even then under the MoQ they would still be confined to the biological level. 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/
