RE: MD Pirsig the postmodernist?

From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 19:18:31 GMT

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    Hi Platt, thanks

    I don't have a problem with the notion of Truth as being a fully meaningful
    word, that supplies the useful meaning to the "true" that we use in
    sentences. I don't see how we can use "true" in sentences without there
    being a notion of Truth in an ultimate sense.

    And I think I've got one, an Objective Ultimate Truth that no one could cast
    doubt on:

    I think it is ultimately true that we will never know everything, both in a
    general sense and about any specific thing. I think it can be logically
    shown that there will always be more to know, because we can always invent
    new questions about anything, even ridiculous ones, and we can also keep
    asking the same old questions over and over again to see if the answer is
    still the same.

    So that's an ultimate truth, and from that ultimate truth, we have a
    foundational meaning on which we can build card houses of relatively
    uncertain truth. We can be certain that we will never be certain of
    anything but that. I claim that as the one and only Ultimate Truth.

    Unless perhaps, death is a form of certainty. If we were all dead, there
    would be no more questions, so the cycle of not knowing would end. And it
    is possible that consciouness is caused by uncertainty itself, it is the
    asking of the questions that continue uncertainty and so continue to give
    real meaning to ultimate truth.

    Uncertainty of course is related to my favorite word Expectation, otherwise
    Expectation would be Will. Will * Uncertainty = Expectation. And the
    moral quotient of expectation (what is expected of us) is to answer the
    questions in order to reduce Uncertainty so as to bring Expectation as equal
    to Will as we can, while at the same time asking new questions so as to
    continue conscious life and supplying ultimate truth with its meaning.

    Johnny

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