Ron: Krimel, I was reading the first few chapters of Lila last evening, some key points made right off the bat, That "Lila" was directly related to the Hindu conception the game or the play of Lila and he sets the stage for random accesss, he really seemed to think this was the best way to organize thoughts without losing creative spontaneous dynamism a sort of study in radical empiricism.
Please expand on your statement that he ran away from the implications. I'm curious to your take on the implications. [Krimel] Here is what Pirsig says about random access: "Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all based on it. A library is one of civilization's most powerful tools precisely because of its card-catalog trays. Without the Dewey Decimal System allowing the number of cards in the main catalog to grow or shrink at any point the whole library would soon grow stale and useless and die." When he describes how he organized his slip of paper into trays, he gives a remarkable account of the dynamic, organic structure that underlies all this. He says that he began by writing down ideas and putting then into piles. Once a pile got too big to be useful, he broke it down into smaller piles which could grow or remain static. Out of this system his ideas took on a shape all their own. I think this is a process that leads to that fundamental fractal, self similar structure that exists in nature in the form lightening, river deltas, trees and broccoli. Starting with a bunch of disorganized stuff, groups of stuff associate together. They form thick rich patterns of connection that then branch into small self similar structures; piles of shit begetting new and interrelated piles of shit. That structure of thick trunks branching into levels of finer and finer detail is actually the physical structure of the human nervous system. I believe that Pirsig is showing here how closely conceptual structures of thoughts and ideas mirror the physical structure than underlies them. The sorting technique that he talks about can shake out in at least two ways. The most well known is the hierarchical model were different people begin sorting similar piles and at the point they begin to collaborate, they need to be sure that everyone is organizing the same stuff into the same piles. A conceptual system where one person calls poodles dogs is not compatible with a parallel system that labels them cats. So, hierarchical formal systems evolve primarily to insure common ground. What Pirsig talk about is somewhat different. He describes what is known as a semantic network approach were ideas are lumped together by virtue of their common associations. Thus I tend to think of firetrucks and apples and cherries and roses when I hear the word "red". The probability that any one of those ideas will be associated with any particular instance of hearing "red" is a function of how often I have connected those concepts together in the past. Each instance of sensory pairing of red and cherries and each remembrance of red cherries that I have, strengthens the bond. Again this pattern of ideas connecting together reflects the underlying physical structure in which those ideas reside. A second aspect of Pirsig's talk about random access is just the idea of "random access". Throughout most of history this was not something people considered. It really only became possible to consider it with the invention of writing and collections of writing. As Pirsig says systems were devised to organize and facilitate random access to the materials so that people could find particular works of interest. You see the same kind of thing evolving with the introduction of indexes into books. As accountant and bean counter emerge they too begin to develop systems that allowed random access to data. First of all the process of random access really isn't alien. It just was not apparent before filing systems developed. Actually randomly accessing memories in our heads is what we do all the time. It is a function of who and what we are, but it could not be and was not externalized until the invention of writing and collections of writings. Random access was the glory of librarians and the hell of filing clerks everywhere for centuries but in the main it was limited to particular professions until about 1980. The computer revolution put random access on a massive scale into the hands of everyone. We can now instantly randomly access the accumulated knowledge of all of mankind in seconds. This ability is a monumental positive change in human consciousness. It gives us virtually the same kind of access to the thoughts of others as we have to our own. Dave can rant on all he wants about mystical states and the sense of beauty being sacrificed on the alter of modernity but come on; get real. Bill Gates has done more to enlighten millions and transform their understanding of themselves and world around them than all of the navel gazers and prophets in all of history. Ok, I know Gates might not be the right example but plug in Jobs, or Watson or Torvalds or whoever you want, the statement stands. I see nothing to gain be ignoring this or pretending that it is icky. The world has changed and those who can't keep up will be left behind. Once again I see Pirsig pointing in the direction of something very important but not necessarily getting its full implications. 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/
