Category: Uncategorized

I’ve taken the frontcover shots of the books I’m reading or have recently read off the side-bar – just too much slow graphical content for the home-page. I must construct a separate bibliography page soon.

Currently I’m still working slowly through F S C Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West – full of good stuff, and I still haven’t finished George Lakoff’s Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, though I think I’ve got the essence out of it – a lot of common ground with Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, which I did complete.

Just to complicate things I’ve also started Murray Gell-Mann’s The Quark and the Jaguar, brilliant and very wide ranging – that’s a polymath I guess, and Mario Livio’s The Golden Ratio – not noticed any improvement on Walser yet, and also Jack Kerouac’s On The Road – obligatory pre-cursor to Easy Rider and ZMM. Must also investigate Marshall McLuhan and William Gibson soon I guess as well as finding some more accessible Richard Rorty. So much catching up to do.

Science and the Humanities – A plea from Robert M Young, Professor of Psychoanalysis at Sheffield Uni, and co-editor of NIBBS – Human Nature Review. [via David Morey on the MoQ Discuss Forum] In conclusion he writes ….

[Quote] In my opinion psychoanalysis, seen as a discipline in the humanities, is centrally complementary to biological approaches…. Among the most Socratic books I have read are two which I have recently had occasion to re-read and give to my children. Both are about many things, but the first looks centrally at what’s gone wrong with our conceptions of the relations between the technical and the world of values — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). The other is not as celebrated. Seventeen years after Robert Pirsig wrote Zen? he wrote Lila: An Enquiry into Morals. The central question in the book is whether a derelict, feckless, mendacious wreck of a woman had value. Throughout the book the issue hangs in the balance. I want to live in an academic world in which it is thought important and even natural that students in science, technology and medicine should read and reflect upon those books. [Unquote]

Like Dr James Willis and Bruce Charlton, he sees enormous significance of Pirsig to every day life of science, technology and medicine. Interesting too are the number of respected, best-selling science writers who pay homage to the superior quality of thinking by those writing in the arts and humanities (Pinker, Dawkins, Gell-Mann, Dupuy, etc.) Will we ever find a way out of the enormous blind-turn taken by the post-Socratic western world ?

Quality = Fitness = Good = Zen Tao
Quality is what works
MoQ = Pragmatism
QED

Zen Happiness – I linked before to this page by Francis Heylighen at VUB, and noticed it referred to his 1992 paper on Maslow. As you know I’ve been observing parallels between Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and motivations, and Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ), and Heylighen’s evolutionary cybernetic philosophy seems to account for both.

Apart from this effective re-statement of my own thesis [Quote] The general problem is that if holism as a reaction to reductionism is understood in a too simple-minded way, then any type of scientific analysis, of precise, formal modelling becomes meaningless. [Unquote] He also says …

Quality [Quote] The state of ultimate well-being as conceived by Japanese Zen Buddhism, “satori”, seems quite similar to “self-actualization”, especially in its emphasis on the openness to experience, the not deficiency-motivated behavior and the transcendence of dualities, and this reinforces my tendency to believe in Maslow’s statement about the culture independence of self-actualizing behavior. [Unquote]

Dynamic Quality [Quote] Self-actualization, on the other hand, may be called a growth need, in the sense that deviations from the previously reached equilibrium state are not reduced, but enhanced, made to grow, in a deviation-amplifying positive feedback loop…. The “goal” of an autonomous system is not a fixed equilibrium, but a dynamic process which continuously reconstructs the system’s identity…. Self-actualization is reached when all needs are fulfilled, in particular the highest need. Because of the positive feedback, self-actualization is not a fixed state, but a process of development which does not end. [Unquote]

Good reviews from NIBBS – Myths We Live By by Mary Midgley [Guardian / John Turney]
Natural-Born Cybogs by Andy Clark [Metpsychology / Neil Levy]
Quest: The essence of humanity by Charles Pasternak [New Scientist / Brian Fagan] [Quote] Even plants have quests – for the sunlight that fuels their growth. Humans, of course, have enhanced searching ability …[Unquote] Or, as Peter Gabriel put it, “The forest fight for sunlight takes root in every tree.” [See dysteleology post earlier]
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti and Carol Stewart
Nature via Nurture by Philip Gerrans [F2 Network / Matt Ridley]

Some great posts recently from Seb, on semantic web ontologies and on tools to link different feeds and forms of information with a consistent metaphor. Particularly liked …
[Semantic Web Ontologies][W3C Philosophy ?][Streams, Pools, Mountains & Lakes metaphor]

Intrigued by Seb’s eclectic list of “dead” people, which includes Abraham Maslow, as well as Curt Cobain and Bertrand Russell. The Maslow link is a good one. Three related issues here for me ….

(1) Maslow / Pirsig parallel worldviews.
(2) Evolutionary psychological aspect of “ontologies”.
(3) My lack of tools to experiment with these modelling ideas.

Dysteleology – A word I’ve been looking for – courtesy of Paul Kelly and Jean-Luc Delatre. The MoQites keep accusing me (in a roundabout way) of Nihilism. Dysteleological seems closer.

Philosophy of Technology Reading List – From the UIUC (Uni Illinois at Urbana) – eight years old, but interesting nevertheless. (Marx, Wiener, Heidegger, Baudrillard, Herrigel, Pirsig, Buckie-Fuller, Foucault, Penrose, Theroux, to name a few)