Hi Elephant, Rick, Glenn, and all gravitating around this threa
if I may jump in... I always thought what Pirsig meant with that statement about gravity was
much simpler... that is, that the "law of gravity" (not gravitation) is something in the eye
(mind) of the (post-Newtonian) observer of falling apples and such, and that no such thing was
in the eye (mind) of the (pre-Newtonian) observer. This makes the worlds of the pre- and
post-N. observers different; both see apples fall, but the latter sees them fall according to,
and due to, the law of gravity. Newton created an intellectual pattern that was put into our
own minds when we went to school, and it became part of the way we see the world. With that, I
also think that Pirsig rejects, or is not interested in, the idea that the "real" world is
something that exists apart of the "world we see"... and that our perception of the world,
that is all we can actually call world at all, is necessarily a function of the maps we
have... so "inventing" the law of gravity changed the world for all of us (who studied
Newton's law at school).
As a side note, IMHO, it makes no sense at all to say that gravitation existed before Newton.
Gravitation isn't even an empirically observable something. Forces (such as gravitation "is")
are an abstraction used to formulate shorter sentences about the (empirically observable)
behavior of "things".
Probably something much simpler than you seem to see in Pirsig's words, and I of course am
ready to understand I'm wrong....
Andrea
gmbbradford@netscape.net ha scritto:
> Hi Elephant, Rick,
>
> Rick observes that your analogy "confuses the measure (law of
> gravity and clock) with the measured (gravity and time) and thus appears
> absurd when you draw it to the conclusion that you do."
>
> The only reasonable conclusions that can be drawn from the clock argument
> are:
>
> My new alarm clock uses the same conventions for measuring time as my
> grandmother's clock built in 1850, and grandma's watch must be a fine
> timepiece if it still works as well as a new one.
>
> ELEPHANT:
> I've recently bought an alarm clock.
> It tells the time.
> I have a french clock from 1850 that I inherited from my grandmother
> It also tells the time.
> The old clock and the new clock are (nearly) in accord.
> Therefore:
> My new alarm clock is the *very same clock as* my grandmother's clock built
> in 1850.
>
> I think that takes care of that variation.
>
> For this to be a good analogy, you have to come up with something that is
> more similar to gravity than clocks. To justify by analogy that your
> argument is effective in throwing mine into doubt, you have to show that
> it's nearly as easy to tell gravities apart as it is to tell clocks apart.
> While it's common knowledge that there are billions of different clocks,
> created by people at different times throughout human history, it's not so
> obvious that more than one gravity ever existed, created at different
> times in the history of the universe (much less by humans).
>
> GLENN:
> > 4) your argument shows that two clocks are in accord in the present. You
> > didn't show that the clock, as it ran in 1850, was in accord with the one you
> > recently purchased. My argument effectively sees back in time and makes a case
> > that gravity was behaving in accord with Newton's law at different junctures
> > in history.
>
> ELEPHANT:
> No. You didn't simply claim that the universe was behaving "in accord with"
> gravity before newton - because that's a claim I have absolutely no trouble
> with. What you argued was that "gravity itself" existed before newton. Now
> that's the claim that I've been arguing against, and the clock business is
> an argument against your support for that claim. In fact, the preamble to
> that clock argument was the really important part of my last posting on this
> thread - the bit where I argued that it didn't make sense to talk about
> observing gravity itself in the ancient galaxy, but rather more sense to
> talk of observing that an ancient galaxy that was *in accord with* gravity.
> You seem to have agreed to that bit, given your interest in the clocks
> business and your use of my vocab ("accord"). I have to say that, from your
> point of view, this is a mistake. If you are to challenge my argument
> anywhere, it would have to be at this point. The appositeness of the clocks
> analogy follows directly on the assumption that what we observe is
> concordance with gravity. Which you appear to accept. You therefore have
> absolutely no justification for your thought that observing concordance
> between clocks is any different from obseving concordance between the world
> and a physical law.
>
> What makes my argument persuasive is that the the spiral shape suggests the
> same law is at work, and the law of gravity is bound up in gravity itself.
> It seems reasonable to expect that a different gravity would operate by a
> different law, and yet we don't see a different law.
>
> The law of gravity is the only property of gravity we know. If different
> gravities operated by the same law, they would be indistinguishable and so
> there wouldn't be much value in believing them to be different.
>
> The clock argument is not persuasive because there are many different
> properties of clocks, and you are not limited to the property of their
> "accord in what time they tell" to discriminate one from another.
>
> Glenn
>
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