From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Apr 24 2005 - 06:10:46 BST
Excellent Scott, thanks, I suspected the two threads were connected.
I'm also a big advocate of "Nothing New Under The Sun" - Nagarjuna I
know only as general knowledge. I keep quoting Barrett, quoting James,
quoting Horace, quoting some 4000 year old Egyptian on that very
point. The stuff we're talking about post Pirsig, and he was post
Northrop, is not novel, merely suppressed in polite western circles
for millenia. [cue rant about establishemnt church - only kidding.]
You must have noticed one of my (many) annoying habits on this forum,
is to keep throwing in one-liners like "why debate binary opposites"
all the time, "the dichotomy you're discussing is false". It's also
part of the reason I get very sensitive to people talking about
science and pragmatism simply from the empirical testing / method
perspective. (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Defoe, Voltaire,
Dostoyevsky all understood this.)
Life's complicated enough without artificially simplifying it all the time.
I happen to believe (I didn't 4 years ago) that "science" has actually
got itself out of the "spacetime" box - the rational trap, (Catch-22)
as I call it - "Physics" is more than the "classically physical". You
or I, I don't mind which, seems due for another "Aha" moment. I think
we have something to build on.
Ian
On 4/24/05, Scott Roberts <jse885@localnet.com> wrote:
> Ian, Steve,
>
> Ian said:
> I used to worry about the apparent rational vs anti-rational and/or
> irrational debate.
>
> Zen / Pirsigian MoQ, is not a matter of rejecting rationality, it's a
> matter of rejecting "logical-positivism" (or similar) as the only
> valid kind of rationality.
>
> So rather than a "Flight From Reason",
> we have a "Flight To New Reason"
>
> Scott:
> Right, only it's about 1800 years old (Nagarjuna). More recently, Coleridge
> called it "polar logic", and more recently still, Nishida called it the
> logic of contradictory identity. It is related, I think, to Derrida's
> *differance". Franklin Merrell-Wolff described it as follows:
>
> "While in the State [of High Indifference, as he called it], I was
> particularly impressed with the fact that the logical principle of
> contradiction had no relevancy. It would not be correct to say that this
> principle was violated, but rather, that it had no application. For to
> isolate any phase of the State was to be immediately aware of the opposite
> phase as the necessary complementary part of the first. Thus the attempt of
> self-conscious thought to isolate anything resulted in the immediate
> initiation of a sort of flow in the very essence of consciousness itself, so
> that the nascent isolation was transformed into its opposite as co-partner
> in a timeless reality....It seemed to be the real underlying fact of all
> consciousness of all creatures." [Experience and Philosophy, p.286]
>
> The following is from a post from a couple of months ago:
>
> "The closest I have been able to come to what I think M-W is referring to is
> when I think about consciousness, in particular to its durational and
> changing aspects. To be aware of a change (say one note to another in a
> melody), something had to endure across the change. But to be aware of the
> enduring (both notes as one melody, or even one continuous note), something
> had to change. So conscious is not changing because it is changing, and it
> is changing because it is not changing. One can't get out of this
> contradictoriness with the idea that a part is staying the same while a part
> is changing, since that just pushes the problem back to the part that is
> staying the same: how can it be aware of change without changing, and if it
> is enduring through the change, how can it be changing?"
>
> BTW (to Ian in re the Access to Quality thread), this was my 'aha' moment
> that convinced me that science was hopeless in explaining consciousness. If
> one presupposes that consciousness occurs within the spacetime box, then the
> durational aspect of consciousness is impossible.
>
> - Scott
>
>
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