I'd like to see Chris Edwards try to shoot down the source of the heaviest
blow to materialistic science: Quantum physics! The experimental results
verifying quantum theory have knocked down the two principal pillars of
classical science: 1) Objective realism and 2) Locality of cause and
effect. These results effectively overturn the ontological dualism that was
the basis of classical science. A belief in materialism is no longer
sustainable among credible scientists or credible philosophers. Among the
"founding fathers" of quantum theory Erwin Schroedinger articulated the
"Principle of Objectivation" according to which classical science operated.
According to Schroedinger, the methods of classical science required the
deliberate exclusion of the observer. In Shcroedinger's words:
"By this [i.e., by the principle of objectivation] I mean the thing that is
also frequently called the "hypothesis of the real world" around us. I
maintain that it amounts to a certain simplification which we adopt in order
to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature. Without being aware of
it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject
of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavor to understand. We
step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not
belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective
world."
Among more recent quantum physicists one of the most outspoken
critics of materialistic science is the renowned quantum physicist Henry
Stapp. I quote a representative passage from his book "The Mindful
Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer":
"You may imagine that your mind - your stream of conscious thoughts, ideas,
and feelings - influences your actions. You may believe that what you think
affects what you do. You could be right. However, the scientific ideas that
prevailed from the time of Isaac Newton to the beginning of the twentieth
century proclaimed your physical actions to be completely determined by
processes that are describable in physical terms alone. Any notion that your
conscious choices make a difference in how you behave was branded an
illusion: you were asserted to be causally equivalent to a mindless
automaton.
We now know that the earlier form of science is fundamentally
incorrect. During the first part of the twentieth century, that
classical-physics-based conception of nature was replaced by a new theory
that reproduces all of the successful predictions of its predecessor, while
providing also valid predictions about a host of phenomena that are strictly
incompatible with the precepts of eighteenth and nineteenth century physics.
No prediction of the new theory has been shown to be false.
The new theory departs from the old one in many important ways, but
none is more significant in the realm of human affairs than the role it
assigns to your conscious choices. These choices are not fixed by the laws
of the new physics, yet these choices are asserted by those laws to have
important causal effects in the physical world. Thus contemporary physical
theory annuls the claim of mechanical determinism. In a profound reversal of
the classical physical principles, its laws make your conscious choices
causally effective in the physical world, while failing to determine, even
statistically, what those choices will be.
More than three quarters of a century have passed since the
overturning of the classical laws, yet the notion of mechanical determinism
still dominates the general intellectual milieu. The inertia of that
superseded physical theory continues to affect your life in important ways.
It still drives the decisions of governments, schools, courts, and medical
institutions, and even your own choices, to the extent that you are
influenced by what you are told by pundits who expound as scientific truth a
mechanical idea of the universe that contravenes the precepts of
contemporary physics."
Henry P. Stapp. Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating
Observer (Kindle Locations 30-35). Kindle Edition.
John L. McConnell
Home: 407-857-2004
Cell: 321-438-6301
Email: [email protected]
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Today's Topics:
1. Re: Spiritual snake oil? (Ron Kulp)
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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 09:34:40 -0400
From: Ron Kulp <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [MD] Spiritual snake oil?
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
> On Apr 11, 2014, at 2:30 PM, david <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> The following was excerpted from "Spiritual Snake Oil: Fads & Fallacies in
Pop Culture" by Chris Edwards.
>
> See any mistakes here? What would you say in response?
>
> Ron:
Judging by the title, Mr. Edwards
Sounds like he will probably try to
Table the Rigel" argument in some
Form or more or less color it as a kind of relativism.
"Spiritual snake oil" informs me that
Edwards believes that there is an established standard for spirituality.
>
> Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
deserves a lot of credit for getting a wide readership interested in
philosophy; unfortunately he also deserves some of the blame for creating a
market in which non-material philosophers and gurus thrive. After reading
his book, I found myself thinking about where he went wrong, and eventually
wrote an essay about his mistakes. This led me to start reading other pop
philosophy and pop science books with the intent of seeing if their authors
made the same mistakes as Pirsig.
> During that process, I remembered having read, years before I studied
logic, a critique of skepticism and science in a Michael Crichton book
called Travels. At the time I first read Crichton?s speech/essay, I thought
he made some good points. Upon returning to it, however, the flaws in his
arguments were obvious.
> Both Pirsig and Crichton are/were hyper-intelligent individuals. But
that?s beside the point. Logic addresses arguments, not people, and even the
hyper-intelligent make mistakes.
Ron:
I have read the entire essay at this point and it is my impression that The
author is not very well read on The topic of philosophy in general.
Also, he seems to be addressing
Those interpreters of Pirsig who
Do fit the description of "new age mysticism " and that's where the The
arguement begins to get fragmented and it's unclear what point Edwards is
trying to make Besides defending scientific materialism.
A blast from the past
> Robert Pirsig, author of the wildly popular and perennial bestseller, Zen
and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, can be seen as the founding father of
modern pop philosophy. Pirsig may also be the first modern writer to rework
old religious fallacies into mysticism/New Ageism. Many of his errors have
been repeated by modern day gurus and shamans such as Deepak Chopra.
Pirsig?s book, first published in 1974, sought to undermine scientific
thinking and created a cult-like audience of followers who persist in
believing in Pirsig?s non-material claims.
> Those who doubt Pirsig?s continuing influence might consider Mark
Richardson?s recently released book, Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert
Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The author of Zen and Now,
like so many of Pirsig?s devotees, traveled Pirsig?s famous motorcycle
route. I too would like to follow Pirsig?s path, but with a different
intention. I?d like to provide maintenance for his logic. Perhaps debunking
Pirsig, even at this late date, will be helpful in addressing the claims of
the many pop philosophers and gurus who have begun writing for the niche
market that he created.
> In the Introduction to the 1999 paperback edition of Zen and the Art
> of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig mentioned schizophrenia. In
> reference to his own battles with what appears to be some version of
> split personality disorder, he wrote: ?There is a divided personality
> here: two minds fighting for the same body, a condition that inspired
> the original meaning of ?schizophrenia.?? The more psychologically
> correct definition of schizophrenia is the inability of an individual
> to distinguish between the images in his head and images in the world.
> When this condition is chronic, it is defined as a mental disorder.
> When it is selective, we call it faith. Pirsig?s philosophical
> mistakes are all schizophrenic in that he cannot always tell the
> difference between things that merely exist in the mind and things
> that exist in the world. New Age philosophers often try to distance
> themselves from their more dogmatic religious cousins. However, a
> close examination of Pirsig?s writing shows
that the errors he makes are carnival-mirror distortions of those that
plague religion.
> In his book, which Pirsig informs us is a ?Chatauquah,? kind of a long
philosophical discourse told through an individual narrative, the central
philosophical theme is Pirsig?s search for something that falls outside of
the traditional philosophical arena. His alter ego ?Phaedrus? (Pirsig?s
personality before a long bout with mental illness) became consumed with the
concept of ?Quality? and went into a deep cavern of philosophical thought in
search of what it meant.
> In order to prevent his search from becoming a scientific quest, Pirsig
makes a few clumsy attacks on scientific materialism, otherwise known as
atheism. Pirsig?s brief dismissal of ?scientific materialism? aka ?atheism?
has an outsized importance in his book. Once he has gotten those pesky rules
of science out of the way, he is free to meander through the mystical and
philosophical caverns until he finds his Quality?a strange trip, given the
fact that he doesn?t even bother to define it.
> Here?s a sample passage:
> Phaedrus felt that?scientific materialism was by far the easiest to
> cut to ribbons. This, he knew from his earlier education, was na?ve
> science. He went after it?using the reductio ad absurdum. This form of
> argument rest on the truth that if the inevitable conclusions from a
> set of premises are absurd then it follows logically that at least one
> of the premises that produced them is absurd. Let?s examine, he said,
> what follows from the premise that anything not composed of
> mass-energy is unreal or unimportant.He used the number zero as a
> starter. Zero originally a Hindu number, was introduced to the West by
> Arabs during the Middle Ages and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and
> Romans. How was that? He wondered. Had nature so subtly hidden the
> zero that all the Greeks and all the Romans?millions of them?couldn?t
> find it? One would normally think that zero is right out there in the
> open for everyone to see. He showed the absurdity of trying to derive
> zero from any form of mass
-energy, and then asked, rhetorically, if that meant the number zero was
?unscientific.? If so, did that mean that digital computers, which function
exclusively in terms of ones and zeros, should be limited to just ones for
scientific work? No trouble finding the absurdity here. (297-298)
> The problem with this passage is that Pirsig reduced the wrong argument to
absurdity?his own.
> First of all, the number zero was invented not discovered, in the same way
that Newton invented, not discovered, calculus and Darwin invented, not
discovered, evolutionary theory. This does not mean that moving objects
began with Newton or that evolution began with Darwin, it merely means that
humanity finally created language that could describe real-world phenomena.
> The notion that the Greeks and Romans could not see zero is about as
significant as saying that the citizens of a landlocked country could not
see a ship. In Charles Seife?s wonderful book, Zero: Biography of a
Dangerous Idea, Seife pointed out that Greek mathematics concerned itself
primarily with geometry because it was useful for farming and building. The
Greeks could not conceive of negative landholdings, for example. The concept
of zero was created sometime during the 5th or 6th century in the Gupta
Dynasty when Hindu thinkers began to contemplate the infinite and the void.
Gupta mathematics was impressive and the calculations it enabled amounted to
a scientific revolution.
> This being said, it would not be proper to say that Indian mathematics was
right and Greek mathematics was wrong. This would be like saying that the
French language is right and German is wrong. What can be said is that
Indian mathematics is more expressive than Greek.
> The Greeks seem not to have spent much time contemplating the infinite or
the void, which is why they had no names for them. The Hindus, driven by a
religion that encouraged contemplation of such things, did. Similarly,
Central African tribesmen could hardly be expected to have a word for snow.
Yet snow, the infinite, and the void exist (or in the case of the last,
don?t exist but the concept does). It is only when cultures become aware of
things for which they have no terms are the mathematical and linguistic
?names? for them invented or borrowed. This occurs all the time. When
Americans first encountered Mexican salsa they adopted not only the sauce
but the word for it as well.
> If we were given a certain limited amount of sensory data?say the
observation of the sun peeking over the horizon every morning?we could
develop two different mathematical models, or languages, to describe this
phenomenon: the Ptolemaic (Earth centered) and the Copernican (sun
centered).
> At first, the Ptolemaic view and the Copernican view would both suffice,
and there would be no way of saying which better described the observed
phenomena. However, let us say that we get a new piece of sensory data, as
Galileo did when he used his telescope to see the orbital patterns of the
moons of Jupiter, and that one of these models more accurately predicts and
describes these new facts; then we would be able to say that one model was
the better descriptor of all the facts.
> The Copernican ?theory? is more descriptive of sensory data and gives us a
more accurate description of what is really happening in the universe. Thus,
it displaced the Ptolemaic version. If we understand this we can see that
Zeno?s famous paradox, for example, is not a paradox at all. (Zeno asked
how, if you go half the distance to a goal, then half of that distance, then
half of that distance, etc., you could ever arrive at the goal.) Zeno was
simply showing the Greeks that their mathematics (devoid of zero) had no way
of adequately describing movement.
> Modern mathematics, far from being a hard objective ?thing? is instead a
mish-mash of concepts that arose from a process of cultural synthesis
(almost entirely in Eurasia, where cultures were easily able to intermesh
because of war and trade). The Greeks contributed geometry; the Gupta
Indians the numbers 0-9 and the decimal system; the Muslims gave us algebra;
the English gave us physics and calculus; and the Germans contributed the
theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Each time, a culture?s language
was adopted and added not because it was ?right,? but because it was more
descriptive of objective phenomena and therefore a ?better? language.
> It is important to note that in his ?Chatauqua,? Pirsig devotes several
pages to the mathematician Poncaire? (1854?1912) and the supposed
mathematical crisis of his time, which involved the ?discovery? that two
different types of mathematical language?one called Lobachevskian and the
other Euclidian (which became known as the Riemann)?could be used. Pirsig
writes:
> We now had two contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth,
> true for all men of all ages, regardless of their 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? If there is no basis for distinguishing between them,
then you have a total mathematics which admits logical contradictions. But a
mathematics which admits logical contradictions is not mathematics at all.
The ultimate effect of the non-Euclidian geometries becomes nothing more
than a magician?s mumbo jumbo in which belief is sustained purely by faith!
(335) We see here that Pirsig is again confused by the nature of
mathematics. We cannot ask the question ?which of these geometries is right?
anymore than we can ask whether Portuguese or Inuit is the ?right? language.
What we can ask, is, which is more descriptive for the sensory data we have?
And, a paragraph down, Pirsig answers his own question: ?According to the
Theory of Relativity, Riemann geometry best describes the world we live in.?
(335) Reification is not a small mistake. Pirsig?s claim that computers run
on Liebniz?s binary code, which works through a series of zeros and ones is
not helpful. Does he actually think that computers run on concepts? There
are no zeros in a computer but rather a series of electrical ?holders? that
are either electronically switched on or off. Humans simply describe this in
terms of zeros or ones. Again, this description is subjective.
> Once this is understood, all of Pirsig?s philosophy falls apart. Consider
this oft-quoted passage of a conversation between him and his son:
> ?the laws of physics and of logic?the number system?the principle of
> algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so
> thoroughly they seem real.??They seem real to me,? John says.?I don?t
> get it,? says Chris.So I go on. ?For example, it seems completely
> natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed
> before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the
> seventeenth century there was no gravity.??Of course.??So when did
> this law start? Has it always existed??John is frowning and wondering
> what I?m getting at.?What I?m driving at,? I say, ?is the notion that
> before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were
> formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity
> existed.??Sure.??Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy
> of its own, not in anyone?s mind because there wasn?t anyone, not in
> space because there was no space either, not anywhere?this law of
> gravity still existed??Now J
ohn seems not so sure.?If that law of gravity existed,? I say, ?I honestly
don?t know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that the
law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot
think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn?t
have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it
is still ?common sense? to believe that it existed.?John says, ?I guess I?d
have to think about it.??Well, I predict that if you think about it long
enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round
until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion.
The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No
other conclusion makes sense.?And what that means,? I say before he can
interrupt, ?and what that means is that the law of gravity exists nowhere
except in people?s heads! It?s a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and
conceited about running down other people?s ghosts but just as ignorant and
barbaric and superstitious as to our own.? (41?42)
> Again, Pirsig mistakes the law of gravity, a description, for a thing. Of
course the law of gravity could not have existed before there was anything,
because without matter objects would not be attracted to each other because
there would be no objects. If we define the ?law of gravity? as a
description of real-world phenomena, in the same way that the word ?rock? is
used to describe a hunk of granite, then no, the law of gravity did not
exist before Newton. However, if we describe the law of gravity as the
attraction that objects, depending on weight and distance, have for each
other, then of course it existed?just as sound waves came from the falling
tree even if no ears were around to hear it.
> Pirsig might as well be saying that the word ?rock? was floating around in
the universe before there were ever rocks, or that poems about flowers
existed before there were flowers or poets to write about them. He might as
well be Plato looking at the shadows in his cave.
> This fallacious thinking is what eventually leads him to this conclusion
about his central conceit, which is the search for Quality:
> [Q]uality is not just the result of the collision between subject and
> object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced
from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and
objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. (304) Actually, he
was just strangling a reification, holding a shadow in a headlock. Because
Pirsig so often commits the philosophical sin of reification, he turns
something called ?Quality,? which is elusive by definition, into a kind of
creator god. It existed before matter, apparently. This is like saying that
the painting of a mountain created both the painter and the mountain.
Quality is a subjective term in that it differs from person to person. The
fact that most of us recognize Quality in the same way is not particularly
remarkable given that all DNA-based humans have far more similarities than
differences. Neither is it remarkable that separate human civilizations
developed mathematics, language, mythologies, and religions. The mistake is
reifying the descriptions of these human developments, such as when people
mistake their descriptions of gods for actual gods. Pirsig?s ?philosophy? is
different only in degree, not in kind, from the ?philosophy? of any other
religion.
> Understanding Pirsig?s elementary mistake?reification of descriptions?is
an essential first step in understanding the fallacies of those who follow
in his footsteps.
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