Dearest Mark and Dearest others, Mark: When the, 'problem' of intellect is mentioned, my initial reaction is, 'Problem? What problem?'
Mati: Here is a problem. You are sitting in a doctoral committee meeting to review your research proposal. You want to use MOQ as possible basis for a research methodology to understand and pose a way to better approach your research problem. There are a bunch of real smart guys in the room, your advisor, the department chair is there who has a strong background in philosophy who, rightfully so, questions and is critical of the basis of every idea that is presented. Now the problem. Most of these guys are not well versed in philosophy, you painfully explain MOQ with your diagrams and careful explanations. It is like trying to get a newborn infant up and walking in a one hour meeting. Now after an hour of brain grinding questions they drop this one. "Well can you define intellect in such a way that clearly delineates social from intellect values and give us a clear indication or example as to how you are propose to delineate the interview data you collect as social or intellect based values?" That was the problem and still is. Mark: The intellectual level has always seemed so very simple to me. May i explain please? Imagine a time in the course of value evolution when there is no intellectual level? Mati: I have a thousand times. Mark: Evolution is dominated by social patterns, and these patterns are those of imitated behaviour and the celebrity. The celebrity is the best human - those with arte. The arte humans are the ones who get to choose what language is transmitted from one generation to the next. For them, the Good is Arte, and language reflects this. Duality already exists at this time: Duality between those who are arte, and those who are not. A better term may be, 'differentiation;' those with arte are differentiated from those of no or little arte. At some unspecified time, geometric patterns are described for the first time in language. Geometric patterns are perfect examples of the Truth. If you want to build a Good wall, that wall will be the best if True to Geometry. This challenges arte, because Truth is so regardless of how little arte anyone has. What good is it to have all that social arte when an ugly, weak little bastard can build a wall in accordance with geometry which protects everyone - even those without social arte - from the enemy? Once the concept of truth is worshiped in its own right language isn't dominated by social arte privilages anymore, and so the intellectual level begins to break free from the social level: Abstract symbolic manipulation. Structures of all kinds from music to poetry now have a new dimmension - new differentiations which begin to replace the old social differentiations of the Good. Mati: Very interesting stuff of which I really enjoyed. Are you saying that ones capacity to utilize truth is the basis for intellect? If so then how would you answer the doctoral committee question? Take care. Mati 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/
