Category: Pirsig

Updated Dusenberry Link – The link to Dusdenberry on my Pirsig Pages, Bozeman College Page has been changed. (This is the new link I need to incorporate into the page.)

Re-reading Michael Talbot – (Can’t believe it’s 3 weeks since I last posted – been so busy with the day job recently – anyway ….)

I’ve re-read Michael Talbot’s “Mysticism and the New Physics” in the last few days – it’s only 130 pages plus afterwords. This was the first book I read that explicitly linked the two concepts in its title. He completed writing it before Capra’s “Tao of Physics” in 1976 (which I’ve not read yet), but didn’t get it published until 1981. Apart from a survey of all things “out-of-body”, Zen and Tantric, it builds on John Wheeler’s (Princeton) work on the philosophical consequences of Quantum Physics. It remains an amazing eye-opener – the book that led me to realise perhaps I really should read Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – the rest is history, though the two books couldn’t be more different.

One thing that I didn’t realise first time round, and as a result I owe the British Computer Society Quantum Computing group an apology, was the significance of Holography / Holochory. [See here] [and here] When I first read M&NP, I took Talbot’s reference to the world “out there” being a hologram, ripples of interference in the ether or quantum foam, as being purely metaphorical. Of course the BCS is majoring on Holochory as a fundamental physics behind information and consciousness.

The other thing I didn’t notice was the reference to Brian Josephson (Cambridge Physics Nobel Laureate – whose work I’ve blogged about many times, corresponded with and briefly met earlier this year [See here] [and here]), amongst many other impressive references from the world of physics.

(Oh yeah, and only yesterday Steve Coppell was eventually named as Alan Pardew’s successor at Reading FC.)

On holiday, sailing in Greece.

Met John Flynn and son David. John works for EMIL (ex EEEL) ExxonMobil in New Malden UK. A long term customer of mine at Foster Wheeler, Reading, UK, down at Esso Fawley. He regularly works with Richard Carroll, someone I employed during my 22 years at FW. Small world.

Also met Hillary and Darren from Epsom (both under 30 !). Sylvia may have persuaded Darren to come to Reading FC to see some real football (England v Lichenstein, who ? tonight). A very lovely couple. I got them and others into a conversation about Northrop’s Meeting of East and West, (which I’m reading by the pool when I get the chance), and Pirsig’s ZMM, and all things human and linguistic about what really matters – poiitics, religion, metaphors dead and alive, metonyms, weak and strong homonyms, aphorisms, euphemisms, rhyming slang, etymology, philosophy, the lot.

Oh yeah, and Alan Pardew resigned as manager of Reading FC this very day.

As you know, I’ve just started reading Northrop [Previous] [ Previous] and already hooked because he is straight into the pragmatic effects of the Catch-22 of the recursive argument about how absolute can a metaphysics be that includes it’s own definition. [Quote] the basic paradox of our time [is that] “sound” theory tends to destroy the state of affairs it aims to achieve [Unquote] (His scare quotes, not mine). As good a statement of the Catch-22 as any I’ve heard.

Some interesting and directly Pirsig related points too …

Chapter 7 is all about culture and Greek science. The main references are McKeon, Hutchins and Adler, right from the opening para. (I skipped to Ch7 from Ch1 after stumbling across the references at the end !). Not only is it about these people, it’s about Hutchins switch from “legal realism” (dialectic with value based inputs) as Dean of Yale Law School to “what is needed is more adequate scientific grounded [Aristoletian] philosophy” as Dean of Chicago University. In fact he was looking for an objective “idea of the good”. A metaphyisics of quality perhaps ?

Interesting that a Pirsig [see timeline] who reads, and is thoroughly influenced by Northrop aged 20, on a troopship in 1948, is shocked (nay, incensed) to find out about McKeon and “the Hutchins mob” [after Rorty] at Chicago University, aged 33 during the summer of 1961, after he has been accepted there and interviewed by McKeon.

Just received “The Meeting of East and West” by F.S.C. Northrop (MacMillan, 1946, 1st ed, 2nd impression) (just said that) and what a book. This is the volume that so influenced Pirsig on his troopship return from Korea in 1948. The book that turned a lateral drifter into pursuer of something important (ZMM25 p124). Anyway, I read the intro and first chapter before getting out of bed this morning.

Given that I got on this knowledge modelling lark from an ISO Information Standards angle, it’s spooky to find the entire volume prefaced with the quote from Chinese philosopher Mo-Tih “Where standards differ there will be opposition. But how can the standards in the world be unified?”

Given my obsession with the Catch-22 of my manifesto, it is even spookier for me to find the opening sentence is “Ours is a paradoxical world.” In fact I’ve already counted the word paradox 4 times in the first 6 pages. As I’ve been discussing with Matt Kundert recently, this paradox would be joke, non-existent meta-physically, if we were not so culturally hidebound by the linguistic metaphors of apparently rational decision making processes. As Northrop says, “The paradox appears in a purely verbal, but none-the-less important, form ….”

Of course this is a book written during and published immediately after WWII, so questions of world harmony were topical. Topical !? I keep saying nothing new under the sun – it was ever thus – and Northrop talks of “ever present” issues.

A very promising start.

On-line Rubaiyat – Via Rivets, but relevant to Pirsig too.

Will The Real Chairman Please Stand Up ? Another one for Pirsig research purposes, Richard McKeon, allegedly the “Chairman” in ZAMM. Interestingly the Chicago University pages show up many interesting Pirsig links.

This one includes the [Quote] From your point of view, they’re insane, and from theirs your insane. Let’s just admit it, we’re all crazy. Remember, all arguments against this are defensive, they’re just reason defending itself in its own terms. Even if we lose the rational discussion, it only proves the analogy to fighting. [Unquote] An interesting re-statement of the ubiquitous Catch-22.

I last rounded up on this stuff back here. And just before this I linked to the abstracts from Quantum Mind 2003 held in Tuscon, Arizona in March this year.

The original BCS Cybernetics Group stuff I linked to earlier is being taken forward in the CASYS’03 conference in Liege, Belgium in August under the title “The Universe, The Nothing That Is”. Sounds like the BCS emphasis is on Information Processing (QIP) in the sense of how the mind actually works, as opposed to the David Deutsch / Oxford-led commercial QuBit quest for creating computing devices based on Quantum effects, though this too seems to have expanded again in collaboration with Cambridge.

The title of one paper from John Wood (?) includes the words Quantum, Synergy and Quality – could that be quality in the monist Pirsig MOQ sense ?