Hello again, > Question 1: What is the Intellectual Level, and specifically, what > makes it different from the Social Level?
Pirsig was nothing if not subtle. Hehehe! True, he went on for two books ranting and railing against everything from World War I, the Hippies, Victorians, and people with more money than brains who could afford to buy elegantly engineered mechanical equipment without the slightest appreciation for how it works. But on one point he was pretty muddy, leaving it to the reader to have the pleasure of working out the difference between the levels. All of them are up for grabs and have been hotly debated. The key. As the teacher says to her class right before the test, "If you don't remember anything else out of this class, remember this." The thing that makes the whole construct of the MoQ WORK is the idea that sets of patterns only achieve the status of a Level when they cease to support the level they are in and go off to meet ends of their own. Brilliant! So how does that tell us what the Intellectual Level is? We could start by saying what it is not. Is it thinking itself? The act of having thoughts. Thoughts are used to enhance and support the Biological and Social AND Intellectual Levels. Doesn't seem to meet the criteria unless you can say that thinking itself is now going off to meet ends of its own. Maybe it is, but hasn't it always? If the levels evolved one from the other in the order presented, then you'd be hard pressed to argue that "thinking itself" is the Intellectual Level. We've been doing it all along. Maybe it has more to do with a way of thinking. Is it Subject-Object Logic? A pretty broad term that demands discreteness (see my last post). Every living thing with enough brain cells for self-awareness views itself as discrete; but isn't Subject-Object Logic more involved than that? At the Biological Level it enables self-preservation, at the Social Level we develop "relationships" between our"selves" and our society, and more relationships between our"selves" and our God(s), our"selves" and our loved ones, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and our money. But what about at the Intellectual Level? Subject-Object Logic is who we are as biological beings. Way back in the Biological Level, something had to happen to ensure the survival of life. If you are an organism in the mud and you fail to recognize your own uniqueness - if you fail to see that you are discrete from everything else around you - then why would you bother to take action to ensure your own survival? What difference would survival make if you believed yourself to be one with the Universe? Whether you are in this form or that matters not because it's all one big Universe - which no doubt is unfolding as it should. Without the concept of discreteness, followed closely by the concept of ego (valuing your discreteness), the experiment known as Biology would have failed miserably. Everything would die because nothing would see any particular value in living. Discreteness is key. As evolution increased in complexity, so too did brain function. Eventually Subject-Object Logic achieved a level of complexity so great that it outgrew its original purpose as a means of perpetuating individual life - discretion - and though all those early mechanisms for survival were still there, it began to also consider cooperation as a survival technique. Not to sound too Lamarckian, but it seems clear that some sort of mechanism must exist that encourages learned cooperative behavior in early members of a species to morph into instinctive cooperative behavior later on. But I digress. You can see how biology values Subject-Object Logic, and how that evolved into cooperative social arrangements. I think it's clear that at a certain point Subject-Object Logic took off in pursuit of ends of its own, which we can call the start of the Social Level. Society is built on discreteness. The idea that we are unique individuals who come together to achieve common goals that may or may not support biological survival. To argue that this differs in the East is a fallacy. They too are descended from the same organisms in the mud as we and do not have different brain wiring than ours. The teachings of Buddha did not arise from the Biological Level, but were a reaction - an extremely insightful reaction - to the fundamental belief in discreteness that exists in all people everywhere. If everyone in the East innately "gets" the idea that we are all one, all "Quality", then why did the Buddha have to suffer so much to convince people? Why doesn't everybody over there agree? Why don't we? But again I digress. What muddies the water between the Social Level and the Intellectual is the same thing that muddies it between the Social and the Biological; namely that all three exist thanks to Subject-Object Logic. It is the engine of change, or advancement, and I would argue that no level beyond the Inorganic would exist without it. We are immersed in it and we owe it a great debt, but is it right? Just because it is fundamental to biological survival, does it follow that that's the way the Universe really is? What distinguishes the Intellectual from the Social? What IS the Intellectual Level? Isn't it just a grandiose acting out of ever higher constructs of Society? No. Society is an elaborate construction based on the concept of cooperation over discreteness. Both of which originated in the Biological to enhance survival. The Social Level came into its own when it ceased to view cooperation as a means of survival and began to view it as a way to achieve other sorts of things. When humanity started gilding the lily of cooperation with rules that had no direct relationship to enhancing survival, then the Social Level was born. All you have to do is use the same analogy for the Intellectual Level. The Intellectual Level is the "Gee Whiz"! If the Social Level made up things like religion to calm and control the masses based on nothing more concrete than that an authority figure said so, then the Intellectual Level is the antithesis of that. To religion the Intellectual Level says, "I don't care that religion serves a stabilizing, calming influence on society, you have to prove it before I will buy it." Or, here's another, "I don't care that building nuclear weapons is destructive, destabilizing, and may cause the end of us all, we have figured out how to do it, and it's cool!" Not to belabor the point, but do you see that the Intellectual Level is the logical extension of what happens when you take the seed concept, discreteness in the form of Subject-Object Logic so necessary to biology, layer cooperation in the form of the Social Level over that - which enables the leisure to think about more than just staying alive - THEN abandon the controls instituted by the Social Level? You get Subject-Object Metaphysics. You get Subject-Object Science. You get algebra, computer programs, nuclear weapons. You get ART. Subject-Object Logic first served the Biological, then the Social, and now has taken off on its own where it has become an entity unto itself. You could continue to call it "Subject-Object Logic", but a more precise term would be "Subject-Object Metaphysics" as that more distinctly defines the difference between all thinking and that based on specific premises. When a set of static patterns serves as its own master it is by definition its own level. Another idea... A Metaphysics represents a belief system. I would like to explore the difference between belief and instinct. How are instincts acquired? Did they start out as beliefs? Why do we hold so strongly to our beliefs? Is there a mechanism for turning long-held and strongly felt belief into instinct? Mary - The most important thing you will ever make is a realization. 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/md/archives.html
