Hey, Matt, DMB, Wow. You're reading far more into the Douglas Adams reference than I intended ... but here goes.
The point of the "trilogy" is absolutely not the meaningless of life, the very opposite - irony. Just that the meaning does not come from the tangible things (and the tyrrany of numbers) we take for granted. If we expect the meaning of life to be the answer to a question - we are doomed to be disappointed. We are "trading answers for questions" - processes of asking and experiencing .... a journey beyond the edge of the known world and back. It's a very simple boy meets girl story, with the Orphic myth thrown in, where they discover that the intangible quality of love conquers all. (Slartibartfast BTW is the epitome of Pirsig's ZMM ... the technologist who takes pride in his work ... because he values the interaction with the details matter ... and many more parables ...) Matt, I (and Adams) do not make the opposite point about "pre-conceptualized experience" ... you say ... "But think about what Whalie's sudden ability to conceptualize (not existing until that very moment) pre-supposes--ability to use every single word he uses, and correctly no less." You have heard of irony right ? He is making the very point that whatever the whale is actually thinking, it sure ain't those sentences and words he puts into the whale's head. He is pointing out that this pre-conceptual experience must just be being piped into to sense organs (miraculously also pre-formed) and .... and ... and ... before the brain can even decide what to do with the incoming data - how to "think" at all. (The other major irony is the relationship with Dawkins, but don't get me started there.) The butt of the joke is the miraculous creation, of the whale, in all it's sensing and thinking glory. Anyway, humour is a matter of taste, silly & pythonesque (Cambridge intellectual) is not everyones taste, All I suggested was that H2G2 was thought provoking. I'm not suggesting it has any major new coherent phiolosophical thesis to be analyzed, just lots of "interesting thoughts" of which I quoted one (and now two or three or four more). Maybe I should do a thesis on this ;-) Ian 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/
