Hi Diana and all:
In Chapter 12 of Lila, Pirsig explains how mind/matter paradoxes
are solved by the MOQ moral hierarchy:
�The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the
connecting links between these two levels of value patterns have
been disregarded. Two terms are missing: biology and society.
Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They
originate out of society, which originates out of biology which
originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know
so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as
social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as
biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is
no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the
atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in
language." Our intellectual description of nature is always
culturally derived.�
Now from the NY Times comes a report of recent work by a social
psychologist at the University of Michigan that has turned upside
down the long-held assumption that the same basic processes
underlie all human thought. Some excerpts from the article:
�In a series of studies comparing European Americans to East
Asians, Dr. Richard Nisbett and his colleagues have found that
people who grow up in different cultures do not just think about
different things: they think differently.�
�Easterners, the researchers find, appear to think more
�holistically,� paying greater attention to context and relationship,
relying more on experience-based knowledge than abstract logic
and showing more tolerance for contradiction. Westerners are
more �analytic� in their thinking, tending to detach objects from
their context, to avoid contradictions and to rely more heavily on
formal logic.�
�Given a choice between two different types of philosophical
argument, one based on analytical logic, devoted to resolving
contradiction, the other on a dialectical approach, accepting of
contradiction, Chinese subjects preferred the dialectical
approach, while Americans favored the logical arguments.�
�Neither approach is written into the genes: Asian-Americans born
in the United States are indistinguishable in their modes of
thought from European-Americans.�
�. . . psychologists may have to radically revise their ideas about
what is universal and what is not, and to develop new models of
mental process that take cultural influences into account.�
Well, those psychologists might do well to look at the MOQ model,
as might physicists, biologists and other science types who,
despite their constant search for mechanisms, still struggle to
explain light and life.
I�d be interested to know if Diana, who lives in Hong Kong, agrees
with the study described in the article which can be read in full
today on the NY Times web site.
Platt
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