From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu Aug 25 2005 - 11:44:15 BST
All:
To me the hoax illustrates the pitfalls of philosophy in general and
metaphysics in particular.
In a confessional post addressed to Glenn Bradford some time ago, I
admitted that I had fallen into the pit of thinking I had uncovered the
keys to reality with the help of Robert Pirsig and friends.
I repeat that confessional here because I think it may help to shed some
light on why I and perhaps others were taken in by this elaborate hoax.
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."
End of confession.
Of course, I promptly forgot this and went merrily on trying to solve the
riddles of the world anyway. The hoax and the hoaxers have done me a favor
by reminding me of how my thoughts can lead me down the primrose path of
ego-satisfying certainty in believing I can explain the inexplicable.
Platt
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