Hi Ron -- > I think I see your beef with the term "intelligence" > but I must ask you then, what of this information > that is commonly held in the human mind? > Does a collection of communicating minds have > more success in it's value assessments than an individual > mind? Does this then qualify it as an evolutionary step?
Your question is fundamental to the issue, but the wording is ambiguous. I've found that if there's a chance for ambiguity to confuse, it will; and since I've already unnerved some anti-SOMists here, please accept these suggestions as my attempt to clarify rather than nit-pick. When you say "information commonly held in the human mind", I think you mean "universal information held in human minds." That gets rid of "common", as well as the suggestion that an individual's knowledge has a collective mind. Secondly, "minds" don't communicate; people do, and people only communicate information or ideas, not mental images or values. Thirdly, I'm frankly confused as to the meaning of "evolutionary step" in this context. (Perhaps you could explain that to me.) Since I believe that value perception is proprietary to the individual, any assessment of value is a survey to determine the "majority opinion". This is the basis of our justice system, as you know if you've ever served on a jury of your peers. So, yes, pooling ideas in a collective effort is often more effective than individuals working alone in achieving certain goals, particularly where a project calls for multi-tasking or value assessment. The point in contention is that intelligence and/or knowledge is a community reservoir from which individuals pick fragments in some "hit-or-miss" manner. All knowledge comes from experience, and only individuals experience. Therefore, "collective knowledge" is a misnomer. The knowledge isn't collective, only the information communicated is. A pool, or collection, of facts, ideas or values is only a reflection of individuals who lend their expressed thoughts to the pool. That societies and cultures can adopt common behavior patterns or belief systems does not mean that knowledge is collective. Even what we call "universal knowledge" is no more than the experiential observations of individuals that have been accepted by the community of mankind at large. One final note: The reason you see "collective intelligence" bandied about here is that MoQ's author early on was obsessed with eliminating the mind-matter dualism of philosophy. He came upon Quality as an aesthetic property that seemed to transcend the duality because it was neither subjective (mental) nor objective (material). [If you haven't yet done so, I suggest you read Pirsig's SODV essay in the archives.] After this epiphany, he sought to remove everything from the inorganic, biological, and societal world and attribute it to Quality. That of course included human consciousness, intellect, love, creativity, judgment, freedom, and evolution itself, all of which were defined as "patterns" of his "primary empirical reality". By this abstraction, Pirsig believed he had resolved the duality problem. There is no subject or object. There is only a monism: Quality. It replaces God, mind, matter, and spirit. And, if you can't accept this radical new idealism, you'll eventually find yourself as disappointed as I am. Thanks for what may be my last opportunity to expound here, Ron. Essentially yours, Ham 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/
