Re: MD TIME TO BURY SCHROEDINGER'S CAT

From: glove (glove@indianvalley.com)
Date: Mon Feb 01 1999 - 17:49:37 GMT


>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.

Glove:

This makes very good sense to me Jonathan, and I agree with your 3 part
summary.

>--------------------------------------------------------
>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?

Glove:

This is very interesting Jonathan. Perhaps the reason is that it doesn't
matter at all which brick we focus on, it will still give us an overall
picture of reality by acknowledging the undifferentiated complement to
actuality of that brick we happen to choose...Dynamic Quality. I agree it's
time to bury the cat (it's beginning to have a distinct odor) but before we
do, let me share a very interesting website with you all at:

http://www.TheWordIsTruth.org/

If anyone is interested, let me know via private email and I can forward you
a synopsis of the site I received from Doug Renselle, which is rather long
and so I hesitate to send it via this discussion group as I know many of you
are very busy.

The cat is dead, long live the cat!

Best wishes,

glove

MOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org
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