1. TIME TO BURY SCHROEDINGER'S CAT.
2. COMMENT ON HOLISM vs. BRICK BY BRICK APPROACH
Hi LilaQs,
Horse wrote
>Considering the cavalier attitude that a number of contributors to this
forum display
>towards the Charter and Rules ...
Quite true. The huge number of posts has become so overwhelming that I
cannot possibly go through it all finding the stuff which needs to be
quoted and developed. I'm sure that it contains some stuff as beautiful
and meaningful as Shakespeare's plays, but finding it among the morass
would involve at least as much work as rewriting it. (Hey Maggie -
that's another Maxwell's demon!).
So I am going to be rather cavalier and patronising by summarising the
whole "Shroedinger's cat" thread in a couple of sentences which cover a
good chunk of what I've been writing to the squad for several months:-
1. Perception is recognition of a MEANINGFUL pattern which can be
admitted to a picture of reality.
Unless recognised as a pattern, no entity exists.
2. Perception is SELECTIVE. The pattern perceived is SELECTED from a
huge number of observables. Without this selection, nothing can be
distinguished from anything else and thus nothing in particular exists .
3. Perception is INTERPRETATIVE. To be admitted to reality, a perceived
pattern must be interpreted in such a way as to be integrated with other
perceived patterns.
--------------------------------------------------------
Diana (28 Jan):-
>Remember the section in ZMM where the student comes to Pirsig when
>she can't get started on her essay. He tells her to forget trying to
write
>an essay about the whole town and just describe one brick on one
>building and take it from there.
There's a great irony in this. The "one brick" approach is classical
(SOMist?) scientific method. By concentrating on one brick, one
sometimes misses the fact that it is part of an arch. Remove that brick
and the whole structure collapses. You can only understand the pattern
of the arch by considering interactions between bricks (the holistic
approach). A second "problem" is in choosing the "first" brick. Why
should it be top left? Doesn't that display an ethnolinguistic bias? Why
not top right? Alternatively, why not the brick with the lightest
colour, or the one with the straightest edges? If Phaedrus has taken a
"Quality" approach, he would have told the student "write about whatever
seems most worth writing". Narrowing things down by systematically
imposing arbitrary constraints is an anti-Quality approach, but a great
way to overcome stuckness. Why should that be?
Jonathan
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