Hi Peter, Jonathan, Sasu and all:
Peter, sorry to be late in answering your fine post of Sep 11.
> Platt,
> Whilst whole-heartedly sharing your suspicous attitude of any proposed
> entity which turns out to be indefinable, such a "fields", I should point
> out that Steve Brand wasn't actually referring to such nebulous entities; he
> was actually referring to quite specific entities, but was primarily
> interested (in this particular observation) in the similarity between
> specific processes occurring within quite reasonably defined fields. The
> observation that humans use metaphors of this nature at quite a fundamental
> level, to understand the world, is potentially enormously iluminating. The
> "as above, so below" - type of observation may be related to a very general,
> potent-but-flawed, conceptual tool which humans use because of a basic
> propensity to form the type of neorological connection-system which relies
> on this sort of comparison. If I'm right, it is primarily responsible for
> our ability to make sense of the world at an absurdly impossible
> developmental stage on the one hand, and is the source of very many
> wrong-headed notions and unquestioned preconceptions on the other; two sides
> of the same coin, really.
> Nevertheless, the basic thrust of what you were saying here holds good for
> me; as a psychologist, I am deeply indebted to the Gestalt psychologists for
> their illuminating perspective which came out of a reaction against the
> highly mechanical view of human perception espoused by the behaviourists.
> But I still haven't a bloody clue how one may define the rather abstract,
> ephemeral concepts they proposed - I've no idea what they were talking
> about! (well, I'm exaggerating a bit).
> But the point here is that ALL concepts should be treated with such
> suspicion. I know this sounds like looking a gift horse in the mouth, but
> what I'm getting at is simply that prescriptive dogma is just that, whether
> it is of the sort which we might find palatable, or the opposite. And
> anything which is declared as "True" is automatically elevated to the
> category of "prescriptive".
> And in this sense, "Quality", (capilatisation and all), may have more in
> common with, say, "Nazism" than most of us would care to admit!
> And my personal estimation of what Pirsig was trying to get at when atacking
> the sacred cow of "science" was exactly this similar point: that "science"
> as a world-view may well have proved to be jolly usefull, but we shouldn't
> let that fool us into thinking that such utility 'proves' that it is
> therefore "absolutely true". this in turn can be taken as an argument
> against empiricism ('radical' or other); but only if one is stipulating that
> 'proof' is that which establishes the 'proved' as ABSOLUTE. So if one does
> away with the 'absolute' as a useful concept, one does indeed seem to be
> left with vague, pop-science-type "field-thingies", or wishy-washy "anything
> might be right / all things are equal" relative-type non-judgements....
> Unless one draws the line somewhere, and says something to the effect of
> "that way lies the abyss, so I'm going to dig in and treat some particular
> level of concept as 'effectively absolute', and I shall strive to have
> absolute faith in it, and treat it as concrete". My feeling is that the
> whole of Pirsig's intellectual fireworks were dedicated to addressing this
> very dichotomy; in proposing "quality" as the fundamental bedrock of the
> universe, he was actually proposing a vague, indefinable "something" or
> "field", which is by its very nature scientifically un-disprovable.
I'm not sure I understand everything you say since I'm no
psychologist, but I agree with those portions I do understand,
namely to treat all absolute concepts such as "fields" and "Quality"
with a grain of salt, but realize that such grains are necessary if we
are to think at all. I've been down the road with Jonathan on this
matter of absolutes before, pointing out that to say "There are no
absolutes" is self-contradictory because if true, then it is itself an
absolute and therefore false. Personally I love such paradoxes
since they suggest the futility of using rigid rationalism to
understand matters beyond the mundane concerns of natural
science.
>Now, OF COURSE one would have to step outside science to
>make such a
> proposal, and of course therefore one is implicitly curtailing the capacity
> of a scientific world-view to provide comprehensive explanation of the
> universe, and of course this may just offend those who identify closely with
> the scientific professions ( I'd remind us all of George Bernard Shaw's : "
> ..every profession is a conspiracy against the laiety"). But the fact
> remains that science's main claim to comprehensivety lies with the notion
> that, as it were, 'all may eventually be explicable by dint of assiduous
> application of scientific method'. In other words, empirical PROOF of the
> efficacy of scientific thinking lies in the future. Which amounts to
> mysticism as surely as self-avowed mysticism!
Yes, the methods of science cannot establish the value of the
methods of science. In other words, while science can explain
much of what we experience, it can't explain why its explanations
are good without going beyond scientific explanation. That's the
kind of connundrum that led me straight to Pirsig.
> So, we're damned if we do, and damned if we don't; either way,
>we end up
> relying on SOMETHING which is vague and indefinable.
> Personally, I prefer the vague "quality" to some of the alternatives, in
> terms of perceived utility; moral, practical and aesthetic. By the same
> token, though, I have to admit that I could not possibly elevate this
> concept to some sort of "universal objective truth", only to a level of
> "objective-with-respect-to-me".
> In this way, I can believe in something 'objectively true' but not
> necessarily 'absolutely true'.
> And this sidesteps the quandaries engendered in 2-and-a-half thousand years
> of western cosmological thinking, which quandaries Pirsig ( or at least
> Phaedrus) was railing against.
Yes, the idea that "Mine is the only world" solves lots of problems.
But you gotta love Sasu's "Remember you are unique, just like
everybody else." Or how about, "Events believed to be real are
really not real but we believe them to be real because we believe
everyone else believes they are real."
> But, when push comes to shove, 'absolutely' proving OR
>disproving the notion
> of DQ remains logically impossible.
Yes, absolutely! (-:
> You can actually boil this own a bit further, and call an atttude a 'belief'
> or even 'faith', or, in the economical parlance of science, a 'method'.
> Which is how techniques such as meditation are sometimes described by
> proponents.
> Either way, we seem to come back, albeit unwillingly, to a sort of
> mysticism, but not one which argues against science per se, merely against
> the inclusivety of the scientific viewpoint. But what scientist worth their
> salt ever argued for an all-inclusive capability on behalf of science? -
> science never pretended to address love, or music (my own field of side
> interest), art,, feelings, subjectivety, etc., etc. So various persons'
> interpretations of Pirsig's intentions as 'inimical to science' may not be
> all that useful, in the long run.
> On the other hand, "quality" is no less vague than various other entities.
> Use it when it's useful, and discard it when its not...?
Trouble is you (absolutely) can't discard quality. "Utility" is a quality.
"Truth" is a quality. Since one must make choices to live, and
since one always chooses based on what one sees as quality,
there's no escape from this "entity," vague though it may be.
Platt
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