Glen , Platt, all
Glen, I've watched your exchange with Platt in this thread over the
weeks and your points are logical and well taken but I think in the
broadest sense you've missed the point. By and large, ZaMM and Lila are
primarily a critique and/or condemnation of philosophy for its failure to
perform its role of providing simple, understandable, and useful ways to
integrate an ever expanding and changing base of knowledge into our
everyday lives. They
are a cry for the need to develop or redevelop a common foundation that
explains the nature of being or reality such that one could expect a
majority of people in the world to understand it. But over the course of
the last 2000 years rather than philosophy performing this integrating
function it has pursued ever narrowing, more specialized, and esoteric
paths such that now philosophy's interpretation of reality is something
expressible only in symbols that require university level mathematics to
manipulate and only a handful of the world's most advanced physicists
can understand.
When he argues in one breath for science and the next against, or
similarly for religion, intellect and other areas, what he is trying to
show is that without some method to resolve these disparate vectors
numerous incoherent, skewed, and potentially dangerous views of reality
have, can, and will
continue to develop, to the detriment and possibly the demise of all.
Now this is by no
means an original concept. Great thinkers, of all times, have made much
the same plea and proposed their own solutions. But as Platt has often
said, Pirsig is the first, that anyone in this forum has ever heard or
read of, that proposes "values" or "morals" or "qualities" are the
"common denominator" on which such a foundation could be built.
When for instance, science proposes and then tries to "prove" that
"everything" is composed of tiny physical thingys, first ether, then
atoms, quarks, quantum vacuum, or holographic wave interference patterns
this is good, right, and moral. However when philosophers, scientists or
otherwise, interpret these findings into a philosophy such as
"scientific materialism" and promote it as the ultimate view of reality
it is bad or immoral. It is bad not because the underlying science is
bad or wrong or untrue but because it is too narrowly focused, it
confuses the parts with the whole. This type of view proposes one truth,
when we experience many overlapping and often contradictory ones.
Let's for a moment assume that philosophically "scientific materialism"
is true. Let's also assume that you're one of the "handful of the
world's most advanced physicists that can understand. something
expressible only in symbols that require university level mathematics"
Your old junker craps out on the freeway five minutes before you're due
to start teaching your 10 AM doctoral class in "Advanced Flubberology"
at SMU. (Scientific Materialism University).
Possibly you could explain how this world view or one similar will be
useful in getting you to class on time, getting the junker towed, racing
to the car dealership after class, selecting and purchasing a new
junker, and getting home on time for supper at six so your wife doesn't
eat your ass out for being late again. And when at nine as you pull in
the drive how usefully will it be in conveying your experience to her
when you pull out your yellow legal pad and proceed to fill it up with
omegas and thetas ? Will she understand ?
3WD
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