Hi Andrea,
Thanks for your thoughtful post. I wasn't going to say anything more on
this thread, because I just repeat myself after awhile, but since you took
the trouble to write, I will answer.
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.
ANDREA:
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.
If someone asked me "Does nature work by abiding to laws?" I would be flat
out lying to myself if I said "no". I'm not saying Newton's or Einstein's
are the exact ones nature uses, but surely these are on the right track.
You need to explain to me how I deluded myself into thinking this way. If
all you can say is "this is the behaviour of things" and be done with it,
then you really haven't said much.
ANDREA:
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 point is you feel *something*. It amuses me that you and others seem
to be in some kind of denial about this force on your feet, trying to
explain it away with a technical argument, so that you won't have to admit
to the *direct, empirical evidence* for a feeling we attribute to gravity.
This is the very thing that MOQ says is more real that anything.
In answer to your technical question:
you feel an upwards force on your feet because there's an equal downward
force. The downward force that keeps you pegged to the earth is called
gravity. I'm sure that if I pointed out to you that this is Newton's Third
Law it would not impress you, because to you this is somehow just a
definition on some intellectual map. You can call Newton's Third Law
anything you want. You can call gravity anything you want. You can call
force anything you want. But if there were no equal downward force, the
upward feeling would propel you into outer space. Is there any part of
this you are sceptical about?
GLENN:
> 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.
ANDREA:
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).
I agree we abstract things, but IMO we abstract some things more than
others. It's a matter of degree. It seems reasonable to me that the
"magnetic field" is an abstraction that may not even have a counterpart in
this "dynamic" realm, but became reified in the "static" world. But it
doesn't seem as reasonable to me that birds and rocks are an abstraction
of something very different in "dynamic" reality from how we experience
them in "static" reality. I think it partly comes down to how different
you think "dynamic" reality is from "static" reality. It could be that we
perceive "static" reality as a copy of "dynamic" reality, but we do this
accurately only for the things our senses are attuned to through the
process of biological evolution. We've evolved to expertly sense the
things found on planet Earth on the scale in and around one meter and in
the time span of a day or so. What you call "dynamic" reality could be
just the things that are beyond these parameters, but not anything more
mysterious.
ANDREA:
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 think this is an excellent summary of Pirsig's ideas and goals.
GLENN
> 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.
ANDREA:
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.
First, the "so and so" you have glossed over is quite amazing. Galaxies
have billions of stars, untold planets, the potential for other
intelligent life, etc. And Mr. Astronomer created this.
Second, I'm trying to fathom what you mean by created. Maybe Mr.
Astronomer has amazing powers or maybe you are very dubious about what he
created. Perhaps all you really think is that he created a smudge on a
photograph. Or just the concept of all this. When I've tried to nail down
what other people here mean by "concept", they say it's an intellectualization that comes with all the properties of substance. So
this seemingly mild mannered notion of concept really has the astronomer
doing super amazing things.
Third, if Mr. Astronomer is a part of the universe that contains the
galaxy he just created, and the galaxy existed millions of years ago in
this same universe, then you have a contradiction.
ANDREA:
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?
It's perfectly reasonable for the character to be a roman citizen in the
context of the story, but since I know the story is fiction, I know the
character wasn't real at all, much less a roman citizen. If Mr. Astronomer
is like the author, and he creates a spiral galaxy like the author creates
the character, what you are saying is that the spiral galaxy only has the
illusion of being real within the "story" of the static universe. This
trick of levels is transparent for the novelist who can jump out of the
system but not for Mr. Astronomer. He's working within the system and
thinks everything is real. If everything's not real within the system,
then neither is he.
ANDREA:
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.
What motivates the astronomer to go to such extremes to delude himself?
Why don't we naturally think we create things to begin with? Why do we
have a perception of time if time isn't really there?
Glenn
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