ELEPHANT TO RICK & GLENN:
I disagree with your 'big deal out of nothing' thesis.
RICK WROTE:
> Hey Glenn,
> Great stuff... You've hit on a part of ZMM that has always bothered me as
> well. Especially these two:
>
>> 1. The source of hypotheses is not nature and not even man.
> 2. Hypotheses make themselves known through intuition.
>
> It has always seemed rather obvious to me that the principal source of
> hypotheses is analogy. For example, a modern doctor faces the problem of how
> to unblock a microscopic artery in a patient with poor circulation.... the
> doctor may be reminded of how plumbers clear out blocked pipes,using an
> ordinary plumber's snake (perhaps this analogy came to him through intuition,
> perhaps he witnessed a plumber at work and was inspired) Now the doctor has
> the hypotheses that he may be able to clear the artery by "snaking" something
> through it... obviously a real plumber's snake won't fit in an artery, and
> there are numerous other complications and differences between an artery and a
> pipe, so the doctor goes about adapting the plumber's solution to his own
> needs through further refinement and research, etc. etc.
> It never has seemed all that mysterious, and I think you're correct in
> charging that he has made a great big deal out of nothing....
ELEPHANT:
Analogy, and indeed metaphor (which is what we are really talking about
here) are every bit as interesting as Prisig makes them out to be. A 'big
deal' if ever there was one.
How can analogy or metaphor be a 'source' of a hypothesis? Have you met a
thinking analogy with a tast for beer, and gone over the finer points of
relativity with the drunken sot? No.
What's such a big deal about metaphor (eg electricity as a 'current') is not
that it is a 'source' of anything in particular, but that we are able to
*use* it to come up with entirely new hypotheses and ways of looking at the
world - even to come up with new questions. And the the big deal, for
Prisig, is that we find ourselves deploying these skills in metaphorical
description, not at the prompting of any discrete object in nature or even
within ourselves (such would be static patterns, ie settled opinions), but
in response to Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the 'source', if
anything is, of these inventions, because the static patterns are just that:
static. That includes 'man': it includes 'me': 'personality'. I cannot
claim the inspiration for myself because 'myself' is a static pattern, a
lifeless construct. Prisig is here saying much the same as michelangelo,
attributing the spark of inspiration to the divine (the mystically real).
And he is pointing out that advance in science depends on artistic
inspiration from the divine (mystically real), and that science is therefore
an art. He is also saying something rather like the Philsophy of G.E.Moore:
he is asserting intuition as the only access to The Good. To my mind, every
one of these claims, all of them contained in the 2 points you list, is a
'big deal'. Everyone of them is revolutionary, with the intellectual
ancien-regime, and conter-revolutions, rampant all-around.
'Just obvious' is about the last thing they are.
Pzeph.
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