SA:
> [Platt]
> > Right. But other than "Lila" I have yet to see a
> break from the
> > SOM-based scientific worldview intellect. Have you?
> I'm also looking > for the intellect that unites
> science and the humanities, the practical > with the
> beautiful. Any suggestions?
[sa]
> Platt I pulled this quote from you, from another
> thread as follows:
>
> "> [Platt]
> > Also the physicist Erwin Schroedinger who said, "The
> external world > and consciousness are one and the
> same thing."
Yes, but who really buys that? Certainly not your average man on the
street who is dominated by SOM whether he knows it or not. And not
many heavy thinkers, like scientists and philosophers. That's what I meant
by "a break from,'' a new worldview adopted by many if not most people. I
think Pirsig has given us an outlive of just such a new worldview whereby
one automatically thinks, "That's a good dog" instead of "That's a dog,"
or "That's a high quality explanation." instead of the "That's the truth."
When will that happen? Don't hold your breath. But, we can continue to do
our part.
> That's one suggestion you found yourself. Here's
> another from a 1998 Nobel Prize winner in physics as
> follows (parenthesis are my inserts):
>
> "In passing into the Age of Emergence (thus,
> leaving the Age of Reductionism) we learn to accept
> common sense, leave behind the practice of
> trivializing the organizational wonders of nature, and
> accept that organization is important in and of
> itself-in some cases even the most important thing.
> The laws of quantum mechanics, the laws of chemistry,
> the laws of metabolism, and the laws of bunnies
> running away from foxes in the courtyards of my
> university all descend from each other, but the last
> set are the laws that count, in the end, for the
> bunny.
> The same is true for us. Those who refuse to see
> reason are invited to go with me into the high country
> (interesting use of words here) in July, where there
> is not such an urgent need for quantum mechanics and
> elementary particles. It will not be so difficult.
> We will rise early on a chilly morning and light my
> butane stove for cocoa. No bears have come in the
> night, fortunately, but the reason is not our clever
> suspension of the food but the intelligence of the
> bears, who know enough to go down to the big
> campgrounds where the people are. We sit on cold
> granite admiring the sizes and shapes of flashing
> flecks of mica, sipping excessively hot chocolate and
> watching the gold sunlight paint the tips of peaks and
> slowly descend. A small steam burbles through the
> chinquapin a few feet away, keeping us company, as it
> did throughout the night. Grey stones lie all about
> in shadow on granite slabs or bare earth, covered in
> some places with matted pine needles. Everyone else
> is still asleep. The cold downhill canyon wind blows
> for a while and then dies away in preparation for its
> morning reversal. The sunlight reaches down to light
> up the nearby trunks one by one and finally floods the
> ground, eliciting muffled complaints from previously
> sleeping people who now understand that they will
> roast if they remain in those bags. Complaints give
> way to clomping of boots, clanging of aluminum posts,
> and unfocused conversation about who actually won the
> card game, whose job it is to cook the oatmeal, and
> who mislaid the toilet paper. Organizational activity
> then magically takes place in which the frowzy slowly
> transform into the clean and purposeful, paraphernalia
> slowly self-assemble into packs, and the ground is
> rendered so spotless that the chipmunks and jays
> wonder what happened. We then set off together though
> the deadfall toward the summit. There is relatively
> little conversation, for there is more swampy mud and
> skunk cabbage than we would have liked, and the rock
> climbing beyond the edge of the forest requires
> concentration. As usual in the high country, the
> climb up is hot in the sunshine but cold in the shade,
> the latter provided by granite shelves punctuated here
> and there with pine growing right out of the rock for
> no reason at all. After a long, treacherous ascent we
> reach the lip and discover, to our surprise, that the
> other side is a shallow plateau in which our stream,
> now a trough bulging with violently purple lupine,
> snakes among immense boulders toward a vast meadow
> carpeted with pink wildflowers. Bumblebees are there
> happily stuffing themselves, as is a large buck, who
> gets spooked by our approach and bounds away...
> We live not at the end of discovery but at the
> end of Reductionism, a time in which the false
> ideology of human mastery of all things through
> microscopics is being swept away by events and reason.
> This is not to say that microscopic law is wrong or
> has no purpose, but only that it is rendered
> irrelevant in many circumstances by its children and
> its children's children, the higher organizational
> laws of the world."
>
> - "A Different Universe: reinventing physics
> from the bottom down" by Robert B. Laughlin;
> copyright 2005
>
> Sounds MoQ!
Starts off like an argument for intelligent design. Then waxes romantic,
like Wordsworth:
"One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Ends up like Shakespeare:
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
So nothing new, but a well crafted reminder to broaden one's perspective
and smell the flowers -- a message too often ignored. Again from
Wordsworth:
"Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours."
Thanks SA,
Platt
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/
