[Ron]
Individualism works best within a social body. Individualism absolute is every
one for themselves...
[Arlo]
The best society is one that achieves the maximum balance of static and Dynamic
to maximize freedom. It attains this balancing the needs of its "individual"
citizens with the "greater good" of the nation. Outlawing murder, for example,
is an example of social control over individual behavior that conversely
increases overall freedoms. Taxation to support public libraries, I have argued
several times, is another area where social control increases overall freedom.
Taxation to fund a military is a similar process.
But this is simply a diversionary tactic, typical talk-radio rhetoric,
todevolve the discussion into "individual person" versus "groups of people".
Thisis NOT what I, nor Pirsig, nor Granger, nor anyone else refer to when they
talkabout the "collective consciousness". Nor is it what is implied in
youroriginal posts (if I understood you correctly).
The "collective consciousness" is described by Pirsig as the Mythos,
whichincludes the Logos. The emergent-self, as described by Granger and Pirsig,
isnot an external, removed "little homunculus". This is the S/O view, Platt's
view, of which Pirsig says, "This Cartesian "Me," this autonomous little
homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to
pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This
self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that
collapses the moment one examines it." Of course, this is why Platt resorts to
such deceptive and dishonest rhetoric to support it.
Of this S/O understanding of "self", Pirsig also says this. "Everyone seemed to
be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of life that told each person
that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a
component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge
physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate in the mode
of ship's radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A
scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated
people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement..."
The MOQ offers something better, and this better view of "self" is an emergent,
evolutionary "software reality" (as Pirsig calls it), that arises from the
mutually-transformative and mutually-generative involvment of "unique
biological being appropriating collective consciousness".
In LILA, Pirsig writes, "Between the subject and the object lies the value.
This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self" or any
"object" to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove.
Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something
else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is
absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things
as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed."
But the "self" is not "intellectually constructed" in isolation. Its
"intellectual construction" derives from social activity. This is what he means
when he condemns Descartes declaration. "If Descartes had said, "The
seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am,"
he would have been correct." More correct, indeed.
Pirsig wrote, "Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They
originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out
of inorganic nature." The "self" is, of course, a "mental pattern", a
self-referential "strange loop" that emerges to bring order and reference to
the mutally-transformative, mutually-generative interplay between
bodily-kinesthetic experience and collective consciousness.
Without appropriating the collective consciousness, Pirsig warns that the child
(my desert-island baby example) would never move beyond a bodily-kinesthetic
experience of the world. "... [E]ach child is born as ignorant as any caveman.
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal with each generation is
the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos..."
The important thing here is that the collective consciousness is NOT external
to the human "self". That's just either a faulty dualism or deliberately
distortive rhetoric. Nor is the collective consciousness akin to favoring "a
group over a person". That again is deliberately deceptive talk-radio rhetoric.
Ian calls it dishonest, and that is quite an understatement.
Pirsig writes, " One answer is to fudge both mind and matter and the whole
question that goes with them into another platypus called "man." "Man" has a
body (and therefore is not himself a body) and he also has a mind (and
therefore is not himself a mind). But if one asks what is this "man" (which is
not a body and not a mind) one doesn't come up with anything. There isn't any
"man" independent of the patterns. Man is the patterns.
This fictitious "man" has many synonyms: "mankind," "people," "the public," and
even such pronouns as "I," "he," and "they." Our language is so organized
around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible to get rid of
them. There is really no need to. Like "substance" they can be used as long as
it is remembered that they're terms for collections of patterns and not some
independent primary reality of their own."
Man IS a collection of patterns, of experiences encompassing the MOQ's
four-levels. And as man appropriates those patterns, he becomes enabled to ACT
on those levels. Man can respond to social quality because he IS social
patterns. Man can respond to intellectual quality because he IS intellect. Man
is NOT some external, removed "thing" that sits and interacts with
"patterns-over-there". Man is the patterns.
You had asked about a "collective unconscious". Personally, what is typically
meant by this term I include within the collective consciousness. As we
appropriate the collective consciousness, we don't just appropriate "active"
knowledge, we appropriate particular ways of thinking and seeing that are often
not articulated, but drastic in terms of their effect on the emerging self. For
example, in English, "arguing" is metaphorically framed as a "war". "I won that
argument." "I was losing the argument until I brought out the big guns." Etc.
(George Lakoff has written extensively on this). In some Hispanic cultures,
"arguing" is metaphorically framed as a "dance". "We tangoed around the idea."
In English, our interlocutor in an argument is our "opponent", in these
cultures the interlocutor is our "partner".
Beyond this, the sum total of collective knowledge gravitates towards certain
"themes". Jung referred to these as "archetypes". Campbell as the "monomyth".
Dawkins as "memes". These are themes and patterns we internalize often without
being consciously aware of doing so. Are they universal? Perhaps as the human
experience universally shares an inorganic and biological substrata of
experience (we are all susceptible to gravity, so seeing birds in flight may
have a universal effect on the collective consciousness as it grows). Are they
regional/local? Perhaps, as our kinesthetic experience varies from polar to
desert climes. And still other parts of the collective (un)consciousness may be
unique to specific cultures (how we categorize material artifacts, for
example... the "sorting sand into piles" section of ZMM).
What do you think?
[Ron]
I think we are all saying relativly the same thing, the argument is in the
details. I feel
The "epic battles" of the MD past has entrenched views . Since I am realtivly
new to the forum,
I see a lot of talking past one another where the concept has been taken to an
extreme.
I'm with you Arlo I also see Platts viewpoint and you guys are saying the same
thing in my eyes
This collective thingie has taken on a presence that we did not give it .
Now "Nooshpere" is what Platt and Ham are describing and not what we are saying
about collective anything
The noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from
the Greek νους ("nous") meaning "mind" in the style of "atmosphere" and
"biosphere". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in
a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere
(inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence
of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human
cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the
conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's
noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear
processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.
The word is also sometimes used to refer to a transhuman consciousness emerging
from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the
theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who added that the noosphere is evolving
towards an ever greater integration, culminating in the Omega Point-which he
saw as the ultimate goal of history. Teilhard's evolutionary vision of the
noosphere is supported by the Holographic Principle Theory of Mind, according
to which all of the information of the planetary milieu is stored and processed
on its outer boundary."
I'll be damned if it aint the terminology that's screwin with us, there is no
reason to quarrel like this
About misnomers and percieved conotations its asif we are fighting over how to
pronounce tomatoe!
If this is what they percieve we are saying about collective consciousness then
no wonder all the stink!
But fellas I think we are in more agreeance than we realize,I hope this is seen.
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