Marsha said:
I wasn't speaking of those on this list who are analyzing the physicists
metaphysical notion of 'real'. Most, of these physicists/scientists are
scientific materialist and they believe that the photon is an independent
existing entity.
Dave T replied:
...Comparing the scientific materialist position to Pirsig's, Which would
support a relatively higher degree of "independence" for "the inorganic pattern
of value" called a photon? That would be Pirsig of course. Pirsig suggests
that this quantum indeterminacy of photons is a result of some tiny degree of
"experience," they "feel" leading them to "show a tiny degree of freedom."
Photons "feel" or "value", like every other pattern, it is good to be free to
whatever small degree is available to them. The more important question is,
"Which position is closer to reality?" ...
dmb says:
Well, it doesn't take a lot of fancy theory to re-frame this issue of
independently existing entities within scientific materialism. We're just
talking about standard realism, the standard operating premise of common sense
and of science, at least as it's commonly conceived. When we talk about this
view in more specifically philosophical terms, we call it SOM but it's not
really a different view.
DT's reply attributes the same kind of realism to the MOQ, asserting that
static patterns are independently existing entities but they differ from the
usual photons in having an ability to respond in some small degree rather than
behaving in a purely mechanistic way. While it's true that the MOQ does ask us
to re-conceptualize the "laws" of physics, I think it does so without reverting
back to that kind of realism. If the MOQ's static levels are taken as a stack
of independently existing patterns, then you're right back within the
subject-object paradigm and all you're done is give new names to the
independently existing objective reality.
But for Pirsig the idea of an independently existing reality is thee central
idea being challenged. He says that reality as we know it is a giant pile of
analogues, the effect of countless ghosts and every philosophy has never been
anything more that one person talking from one particular place and time. His
task is to get rid of the notion of a single objective truth about the one and
only objective reality by reminding us that the landscape we sort and measure
INCLUDES that figure in the middle doing the sorting. "To see the landscape
without seeing this figure", he says, "is not to see the landscape at all". He
says man is a participant in the creation of all things. And that means all
things are dependent on man. We invented the idea of independently existing
physical entities. That's the sense in which there is no independent reality,
no objective reality.
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."
... We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around
us and call that handful of sand the world.
Once we have the handful of sand, the world of which we are conscious, a
process of discrimination goes to work on it. This is the knife. We divide the
sand into parts. This and that. Here and there. Black and white. Now and then.
The discrimination is the division of the conscious universe into parts.
The handful of sand looks uniform at first, but the longer we look at it the
more diverse we find it to be. Each grain of sand is different. No two are
alike. Some are similar in one way, some are similar in another way, and we can
form the sand into separate piles on the basis of this similarity and
dissimilarity. Shades of color in different piles... sizes in different
piles... grain shapes in different piles... subtypes of grain shapes in
different piles... grades of opacity in different piles... and so on, and on,
and on. You’d think the process of subdivision and classification would come to
an end somewhere, but it doesn’t. It just goes on and on.
Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting
and interrelating them. Romantic understanding is directed toward the handful
of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world
although irreconcilable with each other.
What has become an urgent necessity is a way of looking at the world that does
violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into
one. Such an understanding will not reject sand-sorting or contemplation of
unsorted sand for its own sake. Such an understanding will instead seek to
direct attention to the endless landscape from which the sand is taken. That is
what Phædrus, the poor surgeon, was trying to do.
To understand what he was trying to do it’s necessary to see that part of the
landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, is a figure in the
middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape without seeing this
figure is not to see the landscape at all. To reject that part of the Buddha
that attends to the analysis of motorcycles is to miss the Buddha entirely.
"Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about
Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would
say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists
and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a
relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the
creation of all things."
"Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians or Platonists. The
latter feel that classes, orders, and genres are realities; the former, that
they are generalizations. For the latter, language is nothing but an
approximative set of symbols; for the former, it is the map of the universe.
The Platonist knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos, an order; that
order, for the Aristotelian, can be an error or a fiction of our partial
knowledge. Across the latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists
change their name and language: one is Parmenides, Plato, Spinoza, Kant,
Francis Bradley; the other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Locke, Hume, William James."
(Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), Argentinian author. "The Nightingale of
Keats," Other Inquisitions, University of Texas Press (1964).)
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/md/archives.html
