[Arlo previously]
So what makes something "intellectual" is how few people understand it? How
about mathematics? Is that "common knowledge"? Does that make math a social
pattern?

[Platt]
Arithmetic is common knowledge. Topology is not.

[Arlo]
Are you saying arithmetic is social and topology is intellectual? For me,
you've just proved my point, "math" is an intellectual pattern (or collection
of intellectual patterns" and it is "common knowledge". Thus "common knowledge"
is not simply "the social level".

[Arlo previously]
In ZMM, which Pirsig calls the path to enlightenment. 

[Platt]
Have you the exact quote? 

[Arlo]
Right. Because you've never seen this before. 

""Quality is the continuing stimulus which causes us to create the world in
which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." Religion isn't invented by
man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among
these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know
something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the
Quality stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you
know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what
you already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows
this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of
analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective
consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. "

This is preceded by this important statement.

"What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is
the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the
huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the
body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard
this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is."


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