From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jan 10 2003 - 14:16:29 GMT
Hi Kevin,
I very much enjoyed this part:
> As I see it, the real power of Pirsig's ideas is to empower us as
> fallible humans with incomplete data to stop being dominated by our
> doubts and start choosing. Exploding the notions that we are somehow
> distant from some Ultimate Reality and therefore incapable of Ultimate
> Knowledge is one of the central themes of his project. He says (as you
> are always wise to point out) that our immediate experience _IS_
> reality. In fact, it's all the reality we need to make all of these
> tough decisions. Not only can we feel comfortable that our immediate
> experience is enough to choose what is Best, but we can rationally
> justify such choices because reality itself is constituted of such
> choices. Pirsig provides a means of learning to trust our choices in
> spite of doubt.
>
> Waiting for the absence of doubt is moral paralysis.
>
> The absence of doubt is NOT the realization of Absolute Truth. It's
> merely an exercise in delusion. To lack doubt is to refuse to accept
> additional data. It's a closed system. It's incapable of change. It's
> unresponsive to DQ. It's dead. To assume Absolute Truth from all
> available data is folly at best and tyranny at worst.
Funny that you interpret Pirsig as saying that doubt and uncertainty are
inescapable aspects of our experiences and our choices we have to make.
I never interpreted Pirsig in this way, even though I encountered other
writers who point out to the same.
I tried to look up a theoretical argument in a book about this, but
couldn't find it, so here it is by memory. Basically, information
(measured e.g. by amount of entropy in and between systems) and
processing of that information is fundamentally linked to the notion of
'uncertainty', 'learning' and 'surprise'. Because we're uncertain of the
future, input from our senses always contains an element of surprise.
Without surprise, we're also unable to learn things. Only when we
encounter new and (partly) contradictory information, we are able to
learn and adjust our knowledge.
There's also (here I go again ;-) the ontological interpretation of
quantum mechanics. Basically, the fact that we can't measure the speed
(or 'momentum') of a particle simultaneously with it's location isn't a
consequence of our incomplete knowledge or our inperfect measuring
devices: it rather is inherent of the nature of the particle (and of
matter in general). The ontological interpretation says that the
particle *is* spread or smeared out across space (for example): it's
location isn't definite, it's in some real sense partly here and partly
there. So the uncertainty principle says that reality itself is
uncertain, or 'unfixed', or 'a set of potentialities', as Danah Zohar
puts it. Applied to our making choices: in choosing we make concrete
only certain aspects of nature's 'set of potentialities'.
Thus, in science there are converging tendencies to link classical and
quantum physics with information theory together in one framework. I
think that's encouraging; the immense amount of specializations one
finds in scientific practice today, might meet each other at unexpected
places. If they only would take time to read Pirsig (or/and Adorno, or
Nishida), a true synthesis of knowledge can take place. Or rather, a
coming back together of science and philosophy would be possible.
Perhaps.
Okay, thanks for your time, Patrick.
Greetings, Patrick.
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