On 23 Jul 2010 at 14:17, David Thomas wrote: On 7/23/10 12:15 PM, "Platt Holden" <[email protected]> wrote:
Thanks for your synthesis and comments I see little I disagree with. > 1. If highly moral cultures are dominantly guided by intellect, why did > Pirsig judge many Indian cultures as good.?. > Comment: I'd like to see someone try to argue that Indian cultures were > dominated by intellectual values. Or that they were egalitarian. While the concept of individual land ownership may have been foreign to them they still ferociously protected their territory which amounts to the same thing. Nomadic peoples of necessity kept few private possessions. If you took without permission, a fellow tribe member's horse, bow and arrows, or anything else, if that member didn't make you pay (maybe with your life) the tribe did (sometimes with banishment). There was specialization of craftsmen, barter, gifting, long distance trade, rare items (shells etc) that served as common currency, all with little or no governance. All these are essential, abet loathsomely traditional/social level, precursors to capitalism. > 6. The distinction between the social and intellectual levels is shaky at > best, especially the claim there is no direct connection between biology and > intellect. > Comment: The key word is "direct." The intellectual level is more directly > connected to the social than the biological or inorganic, but is connected > to all below nevertheless. I would add that the transfer of information between levels must be both ways between the social and intellectual. I've taken to thinking that the two upper levels might be better represented a one level split down the middle. Isn't odd that a Wikipedia search for "intellect" redirects you to intelligence and when there you click on "Intellect (disambiguation)" you find: > Intellect is an umbrella term used to describe a property of the mind that > encompasses many related abilities or Intelligence.(a link) So we are right back to intelligence which is defined: > Intelligence is an umbrella term describing a property of the mind including > related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, > communication, reasoning, learning, learning from the experience, planning, > and problem solving. Followed by pages of different theories about what intelligence might be with little or no agreement on any of them. Maybe Hume was right that there is no such thing as intellect. Wouldn't that be a kick in the MoQ's proverbial nuts? And of coarse all of the above further mutilates the thrice dead corpse of Bo's SOLBISMSOLAQIPD..BS! Out Damn Zombies! [Platt] Here we part company because there's no doubt that reason and the "scientific method," based on the subject-object division, dominates the thinking of the law, the government, the military, the academy and other social institutions in the West. In addition to the S/O assumption (which can be called "externalism) there are many ancillary assumptions supporting the edifice of currently acceptable thought, including empiricism, experimentalism and evolutionism. To challenge any of these, not to mention determinism, materialism, and mechanism, makes you a candidate for electroshock therapy. Sadly, from the success of these assumptions that enabled man to dominate nature, it was just a hop, skip and jump to applying the same assumptions to dominate human nature. That attempts to do so have for the most part resulted in colossal failures and untold suffering has been ignored by many of today's intellectuals. There aren't many Dusenberrys in the academy, and none in government bureaucracies. I read both of Pirsig's books as an assault on this dominant static intellectual mode with a solution found in a higher "Dynamic morality." [David] All that being said I still think both Pirsig's books are high quality and valuable. If they did and do open people's eyes to the value of philosophy in general, and values based philosophy particularly they will have done a very good thing indeed. [Platt] Couldn't agree more. Regards and thanks. 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
