Magnus 25 Sep. u wrote:
Bo before: > > For the benefit of us mortals please present the solution to you own > > riddle. You originally asked:" What type of pattern is the observed data > > of a falling stone? Magnus: > The key word is "data". Any data is always an intellectual pattern > (representing something else via language). The Neanderthal race (who did not have language) did not give names to their "data", yet they surely knew their way in their world, so their sense datas were processed (not just the visual ones) in many ways. They knew that one object was X and another was Y, so all interpretation/processing of ALL sense data must be "intellect". > Ok, the stone age. Your view of that is a simple society of humans in > which all their actions were governed by myths that have developed > over the eons leading up to the said age. This is one way to look at > it, and a valid one. And in this view, the myths governing their > actions are social. Good, but who speaks of "simple"? It was as rich and varied as anything we can muster. > But to them, those myths are not *explanations*, they are simply the > way they have always done and the way they will continue to do things. > It's not until we look back at that society and, as Marsha would > probably put it, conceptualize their society, that we can talk about a > "social explanation" for their actions. But it's not really a "social > explanation", it's an intellectual explanation explaining how their > society worked. Of course the stone agers did not regard their myths as explanations, that's the very point. The subjective explanation as different from objective reality IS intellect itself - one of its many aspects. > But there *is* another way of looking at the whole scenario, and that > is to view each member of that stone age society as a walking, talking, > thinking individual. As such, each member of the society is by itself > capable of supporting intellectual patterns, and I bet more than one > stone age teenager questioned those myths and thought out alternatives > that would probably have worked just as well, if not better, than the > myth way. I object strongly, the skeptical attitude is intellect's and intellect's alone. I've read reports by anthropologists who have stayed among stone age tribes (our Fredrik Barth in New Guinea) and what characterize these is their all-encompassing myths, even the overflying airliners were incorporated in it, the lack of "skeptics" were total. Look to Sabine Müeller's (The Jungle Child) story about her sojourn with her parents in New Guinea, how she herself turned a full-fledged native. > However, the society was always stronger and it's not until the Greeks > that anyone mustered up enough evidence to start changing things. > (Although I'm pretty certain that this happened long before then, but > perhaps not historically documented.) Sure, it may not have happened suddenly. Thales the first known Greek thinker lived around 400 BC, there surely were centuries of "preparations". Pirsig sees Homer's time as social and that is around a millennium before "our" thinkers, but around this time the intellectual level "came of age". This looks like a "reconciliation" and is as far as I get this evening (saturday) Will deliver a comment to the remaining paragraphs tomorrow 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/
