All, > > Bodvar said:...I believe that the "SOM as intellect" tenet is now generally accepted (among the thinkers) and that means that the MOQ is no intellectual pattern and thus saved. DMB will probably repeat "Bo is wrong" till he drops, but that can't be helped.
dmb says:Consider it repeated. There are many thinkers that make a case against SOM and of course they use intellect to make that case. I think this should be obvious because the MOQ is our prime example of such a non-SOM intellectual description. Maybe your confusion is caused by a failure to distinguish between the capacity to think with the product of that capacity. It's like the difference between the skill of a carpenter and one of his products, between the ability to cook and the meal that's been prepared. The ability to manipulate abstractions is different than any particular configuration of of abstractions. That's how we can think of metaphysical systems as paintings in a gallery. The same basic skill set can produce any number of pictures. The notion that there can only be one true picture of reality is one of the central problems with SOM. Unlike the MOQ, scientific objectivity allows only one construction of things. This is also a feature of all forms of essentialism. I mean, your insistence that intellect equals SOM is probably, and ironically, a stubborn vestige of the SOM picture of reality. Personally, I don't like the consequences of that equation either. It denigrates the intellect and more or less denies it the capacity to change or evolve or to paint new pictures. Pirsig is saying that intellect is the most dynamic level and that's what makes it the most moral level but your equation turns the intellectual level into the MOQ's own worst enemy. Time to go to work. > mel: This is an interesting exchange, above. It is a trap, a cage, and the question is; who is on the inside looking out and who is outside looking in? It highlights something that 'peeks through the curtain': perception in sets and systems. I think part of the trap is in language and the habit of language and the schooling in which we were brought up. All three are creatures of the social level, relatively dynamic for the social, but far less so than the functions of intellect that they support . Another part of the trap is recursive and concentric. Whenever we peceive a system, we see from one 'ring' meta to the system we perceive. The extent to which we understand the perceived system is the extent to which we are fluent in the meta system. While it has been put forth that SOM is only one possible tool in the intellectual level. It seems to be a failed analogy to some. Maybe a better way to look at SOM is as a system within the intellect. It has as its best function the reductionist, the granular, the take-it-apart-and-look-under-the-hood/bonnet approach. SOM divided the sky into day and night, earth and sky, the dry land and water and pairs all the way down to the quantum level where we can do little more than play whack-a-mole with the fizzy bits and wonder where the went. Hard to argue with success, but that's only part of the story. It is in coming back the other way, from the simple to the complex in the synthetic, the manufactured, the creative, that we begin to see things 'peek through the curtain' and SOM loses it's luster. SOM is a largely deductive function only partly above "water line" of the 'social ocean' and apt to be reclaimed at high tide or flood surge. SOM deals with all the parts and pieces... When we begin to buld upward we begin to see from a different place in intellect. We begin to deal not with the pieces, but with the relationships between the pieces. We begin to discover what is emergent and beyond the simply predictable. We move beyond the Subject or Object to the organizational and creative. We move from the intellectually Static to the Dynamic. We create whole new tools. I briefly mentioned the distinction earlier of different orders of infinity, which I think (per Stuart Kauffman's writings), a perfect analogy to steal. SOM is like a first order infinity in how it deals with the world...it will get you close. Like knowing all the integers in the the infinite number line will allow you to always be able to bracket anything between two integers. No matter how big or small a number you can know what it is between--that's a pretty close understanding of the universe. But compare that line of infinite integers to the real numbers and you see that the 'density' of numbers is different. I hope this makes sense as a direction to explore. thanks-mel p.s. or then again...my SOM television is Black and White and I can see all the shows you can see. You can watch Bogart movies and the Marx Brothers on your television. Therefore all televisions are black and white... (Yes, I know the logical fallacy, but it feels like this argument of SOM/MOQ) 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/
