Hi Struan, David Lind and all,
Agreement at last - phew. . .
STRUAN
> I have always supported emotion and intuition as
> you should well know. I have never even suggested that being irrational is
worse than being rational
> and, indeed, go further and say that emotions and intuition are far, far
more important in my life
> than reason. I'm a jazz musician for goodness sake! Where did that come
from?
. . . well almost. My only reservation is in the possible suggestion that
emotion and intuition are opposed to rationality.
(To be fair, Struan doesn't exactly say that). My own view is that emotion
and inutition are a PART of rationality. (There is a link on the web site to
the work of Rosalind Picard, a leading proponent of this view in the
artificial intelligence world).
Some people think that Pirsig proposed replacing rationatility with
something more subjective. I consider that he merely recognised that
rationality isn't the emotion-free intuition-free beast many people consider
it to be.
Struan, do I take it that you will agree to including emotion and intuition
as part of your "X"?
DAVID LIND:
>Question: Is there a metaphysics or philosophy that deals with the
>idea that "only that which can be measured is real"? I was introduced
>to this idea at a workshop and it is what I think of when I hear all
>the stuff about SOM. It seems that's what Pirsig was talking about
>when he mentions SOM - the idea that if you can't see, feel, hear,
>touch or taste it - it isn't real.
This refers to empiricism. As soon as what you feel is extended to include
emotion and intution, then this is the radical empiricism that Pirsig
subscribes to.
David Lind also continued the free will discussion. I think that Pirsig's
books made offered us very little on this issue.
I believe that this issue is beautifully illustrated by the apparent
contradictions between mechanics and thermodynamics, as I tried to explain
in my "Causality" essay on the web site. The essay doesn't mention Pirsig a
single time, but I believe that his influence will be obvious to people who
have followed discussions in this forum.
Jonathan
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:00:36 BST