From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 28 2005 - 20:33:15 BST
Hi Platt,
Nice post, but just a bit too cynical for me, even as a confession.
I think any of us (even those who recognise the pitfalls) can
recognise a quality argument. I for one am not prepared to write off
all intelligent debate about the MoQ as pointless, because the whole
of everything is a "chimera" anyway.
Pragmatically there is a huge amount of quality in using the MoQ as a
framework on which to hang all the other "incomplete" theories. You
know I'm a firm advocate of incompleteness, but that does not mean
that the incomplete knowable world cannot be explained by consistent
quality arguments.
I made the sefl-effacing (naive) claim to that crank, hanging out at
his local internet forum, whio believes he's found the secret of the
universe, but I'm not naive enough to believe it literally. I'm first
and foremost a pragmatist. It's all too easy to undermine arguments by
logical analysis, particularly the mystical arguments, but it's a
harder matter to synthesise something useful. (This is Pirsig's point
about philosophologists.)
I think we put the hoax down to experience and learn from it, but it
changes nothing about the quality that is (or isn't) to be found in
the MoQ. I believe with absolute certainty that we can (and must)
explain more than is currently explicable. The inabilty to explain the
inexplicable is just a tautology.
Ian
On 8/25/05, Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com> wrote:
> 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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