Hi Glenn:
I very much appreciate your remarks concerning my post
"Consciousness Explained." Writing it was easy--too easy. Even as I
finished writing it I began to feel a vague discomfort. Later I
remembered something I had read not long ago that a theory that
explains everything explains nothing.
When you pointed out that Hameroff's mysterious self-organizing
ripples were as indefinable and mysterious as DQ, it struck me that
anyone who posits some inscrutable force or experience can attribute
to it whatever powers are necessary to explain whatever mystery he
chooses to solve. Seen in that light, Pirsig's Quality is like God, Atman,
Brahman and similar supernatural powers imagined to exist to explain
the unfathomable, assuage the paralysis of doubt and comfort those
afflicted by harsh reality.
Well, if DQ is God in disguise, one has to give Pirsig credit for bringing
Him to the fore with a new look sans throne and scepter and stripped
of Christian and Jewish baggage so inimical to scientists, humanists
and post-modernists of all stripes. After spotting values as the missing
link in the scientific explanation of the world, Pirsig brought forth Quality
to explain values, morals, ethics, evolution and everything else. To the
mix he added a tinge of Eastern religion to keep the New Agers happy
and voila, a philosophical cocktail with enough potency to lubricate the
MOQ discussion group evermore.
Well, that's the cynical view of religion, the MOQ and all other
explanations of experience that invoke a connection to a higher power
of one sort or another. To the cynic, phlogiston is phlogiston. The trick,
cynics point out, is to accept some premise on faith, i.e., omnipresent
Quality, then spin a rational web around it, relying on the ability of the
human mind to rationalize and sound plausible under any and all
circumstances, as proven daily by the pronouncements of priests,
politicians and proponents of drug induced nirvanas.
Thanks to you Glenn, I'm reminded that just when I think I have it all
intellectually figured out, I'm fooling myself. There will always be a
gaping hole in our efforts to explain reality if for no other reason than
we cannot stand outside of it to see all of it. Our models omit the mind
that created the model. If that isn't enough to give pause to those who
think they can explain what makes the world go around, they should
remember that at the bottom of physics one disappears into the hole of
the Uncertainty Principle, and at the bottom of math and logic an even
larger bottomless crevice called the Incompleteness Theorem stands
ready to swallow all who claim to have the answers.
Yes, I can easily become convinced of the futility of believing anything
outside of what science can tell us. Any philosophy or worldview can be
shredded by both intellectual and emotional attacks, usually combined
for added force. Even science is under fire by the guns of the post-
modernists who claim as a fact that there are no facts. The more I try to
get it all down pat, the more I realize the effort is a chimera.
Except for one thing. Beauty. It was beauty that began my quest for
answers years ago, and it is still beauty that sustains me through the
swirling darkness of doubt. When words fail, beauty begins. It renders
explanation and understanding besides the point. If someone tries to
insert beauty into the naturalistic world of science by claiming it arose
because of its survival value, I point to those in science who find it
surprisingly and inexplicably in the world of fundamental physics.
It is beauty (and its companion, art) that originally attracted me to
Pirsig's Metaphysic of Quality, for I associate quality with beauty. The
error and folly lies in the attempt to verbalize what can’t be. Pirsig
admits as much. Writing philosophy-then arguing about it--is
degenerate.
Ahh, but being human, we do it anyway. To borrow a phrase, the only
person who doesn't pollute the beauty of the world with intellect is a
person who hasn't yet been born. The rest of us have to settle for being
something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar ladies and
trying to solve the unsolvable is part of life.
So I wrote "Consciousness Explained." But in truth, Glenn, I too am a
"mysterian."
Platt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:25 BST