Hi Elephant, Marty,
ELEPHANT:
"Precisely", as the man said. "Force" as used to include "gravity" is a
concept expressed in mathematics, ie a measurement of the rate of
accelleration. If you can tell me how "rate of accelleration" is not a
mathematically expressed idea, I'll eat my iMac.
The concept you refer to as "gravity" is the one expressed
as a mathematical formula and is called the "law of gravity". Pirsig is
not referring to a mathematically expressed idea when he uses the phrase
"gravity itself". He is referring to the actual force that pulls apples
downward.
He says: "The law of gravity and gravity itself *did not exist* before
Isaac Newton." It's cut and dry. Pirsig is saying that the *force
itself* is really a human concept, created by Newton and then
perpetuated throughout the culture by a form of brainwashing we
call education.
But science has shown in the 20th century that light of distant
galaxies, which took thousands of years to reach us, form a spiral
shape, and Newton's gravity is partly responsible for that shape. This
shows gravity predates Newton and so he discovered, not invented it.
MARTY:
I believe that Pirsig's point is that all of that
stuff - planets, solar systems, gravity, are all static patterns, and
those patterns can (and probably will) change over time.
Yes, that's what I think to. Most people would say that peoples' ideas
of planets and stars changed from a Ptolemeic definition to a modern
definition during the age of enlightenment, while the stars and
planets stayed the same throughout. But what makes his view
radical is that not only did the attitudes change, but so did the
so-called objective reality of the planets and stars. He wouldn't
say Aristotle's concept of a cosmos with concentric spheres was
wrong, even in retrospect, because the 'burning balls of hydrogen in
an immense universe' simply didn't exist yet. Those spheres damn well
existed, at least in the high quality illusion that was 'objective
reality' at the time.
MARTY:
Imagine that some time in the future we discover that what we call "light"
is really consciousness and that our definition of what constitutes a being
changes to include what we now call planets and stars. Or we discover that
what we now describe as objects are actually entities that exist on
different plains due to their density and vibration levels. I agree that
both of these propositions sound crazy today, because both are way outside
of science and what we now consider a true picture of reality.
If we insist on maintaining that science can never become supplanted by
something else, we will probably never agree that gravity didn't exist
before Newton. But if you can see that science, even thought it works and
is very useful, may only be a concept, you can begin to see that other
explanations (as static patterns) may surpass it and "change reality" in the
future.
What you are imagining as a future cosmological view does not sound
much different from the ancient view, where planets and
constellations were named after gods because they were thought to
*be* gods, sentient and conscious. The other view sounds like New Age.
If these are going to be the new static realities of the future as we
evolve toward Dynamic Quality, then I will be disappointed and have
grave misgivings about the thing that has supplanted science. For me
it would mean that our views of reality are like fashion, coming and
going in a cycle that is not really going anywhere.
I realize it's an unreasonable task for you to come up with something
that sounds novel and revolutionary for a future cosmological view
and that all you can really do is recycle crazy sounding or debunked
ideas. But Pirsig is suggesting that we do this very thing, that we
give these old ideas another look.
Glenn
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