Marsah said to dmb:
I have never said any old thing is right.
dmb says:
You weren't quite that pithy, but that does seem to be what you're saying. You
said, for example, "Reality is whatever you think it is, there's no way you can
lie about it, and if you change your understanding of reality, then reality
changes too."
Do you think there is any real difference between saying "any old thing is
right" and saying "reality is whatever you think it is"? I don't. Do you think
there's a big difference between "there's no way to lie about it" and "there's
no way to be wrong"? I don't. They sound more like infantile wishes than
philosophical assertions. And this mindless whateverism is so obviously NOT
what Pirsig is saying. It is as if you've taken the ideas about the personal
and aesthetic factors in our rationality, about multiple truths and the
provisionality of those truths and put them all in a blender with two cups of
marshamallows and set the thing on high.
Now who's gonna clean that up?
> > Andre quoted Pirsig:
> >> 'Poincare then hyposthesized that this selection is made by what he called
> >> the 'subliminal self',
> >> an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phaedrus called
> >> pre-intellectual awareness.
> >> The subliminal self, Poincarre said,looks at a large number of solutions
> >> to a problem, but only the
> >> INTERESTING ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical
> >> solutions are selected by the
> >> subliminal self on the basis of 'mathematical beauty', of the harmony of
> >> numbers and forms, of
> >> geometric elegance. 'This is a true esthetic feeling which all
> >> mathematicians know',Poincare said...
> >> It is this harmony, this beauty that is at the center of it all'.
> >>
> >> Poincare made it clear that he was not speaking of romantic beauty, the
> >> beauty of appearances which
> >> strike the senses. He meant classic beauty, which comes from the
> >> harmonious order of the parts, AND
> >> WHICH A PURE INTELLIGENCE CAN GRASP, which gives structure to romantic
> >> beauty and without which life
> >> would be only vague and fleeting...'. My emphasis.(ZMM, p261)
>
"Mathematics, the cornerstone of scientific certainty, was suddenly uncertain.
We now had TWO contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth, true for
all men of all ages, regardless of the individual preferences. This was the
basis of the profound crisis that shattered the scientific complacency of the
Gilded Age. HOW DO WE KNOW WHICH ONE OF THESE GEOMETRIES IS RIGHT? ...And of
course once that door was opened one could hardly expect the number of
contradictory systems of unshakable scientific truth to be limited to two. A
German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which
throws overboard not only Euclid's postulate, but also the first axiom..."
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