[John] But there is a key point of dissension amongst as as to whether that higher arising happens by chance, or by intention.
[Arlo] Since intent must predate appearance, the intent for something to exist must exist outside the patterns themselves. This is saying Quality has "intent", which reduces the cosmos to a grand supermarionette performance as things are tossed about only by the will of Quality. [John] That is, I say intellect intends to analyze and examine social patterns, creating responsive and dynamic evolution in its essential relationship with society. [Arlo] This is a feedback loop, of course higher patterns in turn inform and manipulate the patterns from which they emerge. Biology pushes inorganic patterns to behave in ways they would not otherwise normally do. [John] So a lot rests upon, what you mean by rests upon. [Arlo] Emerge from. Dependency on. Unable to exist without. Destruction of the foundation eliminates the higher level. There are all kinds of analogous ways of saying this. [John] Well if that's not a pretty damn reductionistic way of putting it... I mean, rhetorically speaking at least. "Absent connection to other nodes" Arlo? [Arlo] Well I'm sorry, John, but the research clearly indicates a fairly rapid decay of cognition and cognitive skills, dementia, schizophrenia and an eventually return to animalistic states for humans placed into conditions of extreme isolation for prolonged time periods. Certainly some of it is extrapolative, as we couldn't do this to someone and observe the results, but the evidence is undeniable. Intellect disappears in the absence of sociality. Not "immediately", as enough of a "social echo" exists within a single brain to keep intellect going for a while. The same way a disconnected heart will continue to beat outside the body for a while before stopping. [John] You really do need to unstick your nose from the halls of Academe and join a bowling team or something. Just to get some realistic vocabulary if nothing else. [Arlo] Sorry, I'll try to grunt and stomp it out next time. ;-) [John] I agree the mechanics and neurobiology are different, for those animals displaying sociality, but I don't think the sociality arose from the mechanics and neurobiology. [Arlo] No, but those mechanics made possible the emergence of sociality. Thus we might expect certain other neurologically complex species to evidence at least rudimentary social behavior, but we would not expect to see signs of symbolic language in amoebas. Tomasello traces the appearance of a certain neurological mass in higher primate brains that led to the unintended consequence of shared attention. "Unintended" because this mass had not evolved for this purpose. But as it hit a critical point in its part of this neurobiology, it led to the ability of primates to realize they could use a symbolic code to create a triadic relation between "self-other-object". This is (for Tomasello) the foundation of all sociality (and hence intellectuality). I will note (because you may be seeing SOM in that) that for Tomasello there is never a S-O relation apart from the presence (even symbolically) of another; so it is always triadic, never dyadic. Anyways, the point is that sociality is only possible atop a foundation of sufficiently complex neurobiological development. Thus we see degrees of sociality, just like we see degrees of neuro-complexity. [John] What is a social pattern? It's a pattern of relationship between biologically and conceptually distinct selves. [Arlo] I think Tomasello would agree with this, only adding that the self-other relationship exists only when a shared object of attention is also involved. Thus he'd say (and I agree) that sociality is a relationship between the self, a perceived other, and a pattern of shared attention. 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
