[Jan-Anders] When we have done step two clear we can go on to the next step: step three. The understanding of the evolutionary step from the social level into the intellectual level.
[Arlo] I think a critical consideration in this path of inquiry is to remember that the levels capture a wide range of complexity. You wouldn't begin an inquiry into the appearance of the biological level by envisioning lions or dolphins springing into existence directly from inorganic patterns. If you zoom in on the boundary between inorganic and biological patterns you're going to encounter amoebas, bacterium and eventually simple carbon atoms. At that level of analysis, I think, you'll find the boundary to be more fractal than absolute. Theorists like Michael Tomasello have speculated that the boundary between biological and social patterns was precipitated by the simple moment of 'shared attention'. That the simplest forms of 'social behavior' is just the recognition that something else is an attentional being like yourself. From that simple recognition (simple in act, although amazingly consequential) come all the larger and complex social structure we see around us today. I th ink you'll find the same thing when you zoom in on the boundary between intellectual and social patterns. What you want to find are those social 'carbon atoms' that led to the simplest of intellectual patterns. The other things to keep in mind is that the emergence or appearance of one level does not entail a cessation of evolution on the lower levels, and emergence does not entail immediate dominance. The lives of the first proto-social humans was still largely dominated by biological necessity. Imagine the length of time between the behavior of those carbon atoms and the dominance of biology over inorganic forces. So I'd expect that the first proto-intellectual patterns existed before an era where we expect to see them as the dominate level. In ZMM, Pirsig traces the moment of 'dominance' (the conflict point at which intellect first began to assert dominance over social patterns) to the intellectual conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists. Some (like the SOL crowd) use this to assert that Pirsig places the entirety of 'intellect' as the offspring of the Greeks (another way of declaring moral superiority over the non-Eurocentric peoples), but instead Greece became the first visible battleground between intellect and society in our own cultural history. And, due to the outcome of that conflict (the Cosmologists won), it was a S/O-intellect that rose to dominance. Had the Sophists won, well, we'll never know what our own intellectual history would have looked like (we can glean some guesses by looking at the intellectual histories of the Orient and other global cultures outside the European trajectory (a la FSC Northrop). I'm saying all this here because if this was a clash of intellectual orientations (Cosmologists vs. Sophists), then even here we are at the end of a long history since the first proto-intellectual patterns appeared. So you have to (IMHO) go back even further, to the origins and similarities that both of these traditions have evolved from. Someone once said to me that all intelligence was derived from the simple statement "why?". Its pithy, and of course you'd have to substitute in the accurate early linguistic counterparts. Maybe its some perception of 'planned action', which must have predated (and enabled) the appearance of tool use. Finally, keep in mind that when you identify this social 'carbon atom' you may not be identifying something noticeably 'intellectual'. Few consider a carbon atom to be in and of itself a biological life form, but nonetheless it was the catalyst from which all terran biology descends. 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
