Hi Glenn, and all,
As many others replied to your points like I would, 'll keep the first sections of this
message short. Then I'll add one on your claim that Pirsig "does not believe nature exists
independent of human thought", which, to me, is the new relevant point to this discussion. I
think it gives us an opportunity to get into this issue a bit deeper, and would like to know
an opinion on the second half of this message from elephant and others, if you will...
Glenn:
> But it's not so straight-forward as this. Nature herself seems to have "known" this law long
> before Newton did, not as
> mathematical terminology, not as a maggot inscribing the formula in an apple, but in an
> idealized sense. When gravity pulls apples and stars and planets and whole galaxies around,
> it uses this law (or something very close to it) to decide how much pull to give them. The
> fact that we observe elliptical galaxies and binary stars thousands of light years away
> strongly suggests that the law of gravity described by Newton was in force long before
> Newton lived.
In my view, you are doing that very mistake I was talking about when I mentioned physical
laws. That "nature pulls apples and stars and planets" is something that has no scientific
meaning; even less meaning can be attached to the idea of nature "knows" or "uses" laws or
"decides" based on laws. I think if you try to rephrase this in any reasonable way, you will
come out with something like "this is how nature works", and that's all.
> My previous agreement with Andrea about gravity not being empirical was incorrect. The
> feeling of force on your feet when you stand up is qualitative empirical evidence of
> gravity. When you weigh yourself on a scale, that is quantitative evidence. If you weigh
> yourself in an airplane travelling at 40,000 ft, you'll weigh a little less. In outer space
> you will be effectively weightless.
This is a perfect example. You charge your feeling to the force of gravitation because you
learned Newton's theory. Otherwise you would have a feeling and nothing to charge it to. (And
by the ways, as others pointed out, you actually feel an opposite force to that of
gravitation; like, on the Tilt-a-Whirl, you feel you are pulled outwards, whereas the force
that the T-a-W applies is one directed to the *center* of the circle. So you're believing
there is some force because you experience the opposite. Could you do that without an
intellectual map?).
> The proposal that the force equation for gravity is a definition is misleading. Definitions
> serve to describe standards and conventions and they convey a precise meaning in a lingual
> shorthand. They don't say anything about how nature works. For example, a meter is a
> definition whose sole purpose is to set a standard for a unit of measure applied to space.
> The actual length of a meter is completely arbitrary. It doesn't say anything about how
> space works. The same is true for units of mass and units of time. Examples of true axioms
> of nature are space, time, and mass but *before* we've applied any units to them. The force
> equation for gravity above shows that it is derivative of these other
> axioms of nature and the principle it conveys is independent of the particular units we
> choose. It says something quite
> extraordinary about the way nature works and the way it worked at least thousands of years
> ago. It says the force a massive body exerts on another massive body is proportional to the
> masses of the bodies and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.
> This is the law in its idealized sense. There is no math here until you apply numbers, and
> there can be no numbers until you apply units.
>
> Of course the force of gravity is not the only force. When you are walking around an
> amusement park and your chum gives you a friendly shove, you experience a force on your
> upper arm. Your friend is responsible for imparting this force. When you ride the
> Tilt-a-Whirl, you feel a force against your side as you are slinged around. The Tilt-a-Whirl
> apparatus is responsible for imparting this force. When we walk between amusements, we feel
> a force on the
> bottoms of our feet. It is natural to assume that something is responsible for imparting
> this force also, even though we cannot see it with our eyes. We call it gravity, but
> obviously this is not the same as the law of gravity. While certain proposed models for
> gravity, such as the gravitational field and gravitons, have reified gravity as those things
> to a certain extent, it's hard to comprehend how the law of gravity reified gravity when you
> can plainly experience that force yourself.
>
> Before Newton people also experienced this qualitative force on their feet. It was explained
> that man was imperfect and destined to be stuck to the imperfect earth. When things of the
> earth were tossed into the air, they came back to earth because they sought their rightful
> place on earth, being made of the earth. The moon didn't fall to earth because it was not of
> the earth, and its motion was explained by its being attached and turned along a concentric
> shell by an unseen god that existed outside the shell.
>
> So far none of this is radical. It's just a general description of what people believed in
> those days. The standard interpretation today is that these beliefs were wrong and based on
> ignorance and folks like Copernicus and Newton set the record straight when they discovered
> how the heavens really operate.
>
> The radical parts of Pirsig's belief are the consequences of saying Newton's law was created
> and not discovered. This means Newton's law was *not in effect* during the time of Ptolemeic
> belief in concentric shells or at any time before that. And neither was gravity. What kept
> people glued to the ground in Ptolemeic times were their beliefs for why they should be
> stuck to the ground, and nothing more. Remember that Pirsig says our concepts create our
> "so-called" reality, (true reality is dynamic and flowing) not the other way round. Pirsig
> doesn't believe nature exists independently of human thought - nature is created as new
> beliefs are invented about nature - nature itself is just in our heads. And I disagree.
Pirsig believes there is an unknowable, dynamic reality, and a static reality. The static
reality we create. Dynamic reality is the mysterious place where all experience comes from,
something prior to all descriptions and patterns in our minds. Nothing is or can be known
about this place. Experiences come out of this nothing. Anything can come out of this source,
since we know nothing about it. Our effort as humans, which is formalized by science, is
trying to filter what comes from dynamic reality, and abstract it, until we can write down
expected relations between multiple or subsequent events that come out of DQ to touch our
senses. It seems that to be able to write rules, we must abstract and filter. That has to do
with the fact that we expect to write down rules in some language, and language is discrete
and can't really capture anything that comes from this, so called, dynamic continuum. If you
are not satisfied with these "discrete" and "continuous" things, well, it's just a metaphor:
language is simply not enough. So when we create a rule, that rule does not apply to reality
per se (the unknown dynamic reality "out there"), but to a projection of that reality where
many things have been abstracted out. In most cases, we do not even know we are abstracting
out something, and it may take a very long way to realize we did (relativity versus Netwon's
law).
Pirsig as a mystic both acknowledges that reality is ultimately unknowable and that what we
call "reality" (and write laws about) is our creation, in the sense that it is a deliberately
simplified and flattened projection of what we experience. As a modified mystic, he does not
throw away science. He does something different and new, and, to me, this happens to be one of
his major contributions. He points out that even if we *have* to abstract to understand and
master, this does not imply that we must necessarily abstract out *value*, quality, the good -
what science did until now. He suggests that we can provide ourselves with tools to reason
about quality just as we have intellectual tools for mass and weight. And of course, the
quality we will be talking about will not the the "true" (Dynamic) quality but an abstraction
and simplification thereof (static quality).
> I disagree because scientific historical evidence, such as the shape of ancient galaxies and
> the age of rocks on earth, contradict his belief. If you insist on holding fast to this way
> of thinking in the face of this evidence, you end up saying things like:
> - spiral galaxies are themselves beliefs concocted to further the cultural illusion that
> Newton's theory is correct or
> - spiral galaxies are themselves beliefs concocted to further the illusion that things were
> discovered or
> - old rocks are beliefs that support the notions of time and history, which are also just
> human beliefs.
Not at all. Yes, spiral galaxies are something we created in the sense above. Also, no one
could deny (nor support) that there is something in the "true" universe that somehow
corresponds to what we now call spiral galaxies, and that was already there billion of years
ago. This "true essence" of spiral galaxies (which is something different from our idea of
spiral galaxies) is something that belongs to that unknowable realm of dynamic continuous.
Unknowable.
This is the simple version. Then you may realize also "time" is our creation - and that makes
things a bit harder - but let's skip this part now; let's keep time, and try to get rid of
other delusions.
Try this: Mr. Astronomer creates spiral galaxies. The spiral galaxies created by Mr.
Astronomer are so and so, have this shape, and were there since the big bang. I think this has
absolutely nothing wrong to it.
If this upsets you, in my opinion you are confusing two uses (or two levels, two modes of use)
of the "exist" concept. Take this analogy: I write down a novel about a character that lived
in the Roman Empire. Could you say that I'm doing something absurd because since the character
was created in 2001, he couldn't be a roman citizen?
You may think that the case with Mr. Astronomer is different. But it's not. A galaxy, by
definition, is not something that is created by an astronomer. It is a natural phenomenon.
Thus the astronomer creates a concept of something that, by definition of that concept, is
something that existed long before himself.
We have something subtle here, but I would be happy to discuss it deeper if you'd like to.
Yours,
Andrea
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