What, Why & How do we Know ?
Here at Alma Books, with a new photo of Pirsig. [Link via Ant McWatt]
The Positively Pirsig post below referred to an upcoming book by David A Granger of SUNY. David Harding posted a link on MoQ-Discuss to a David Granger paper on Dewey and Pirsig published on the scholarly journal site “Project Muse”.
Turns out to be an excellent paper. Right to the point about Pirsig’s indirect teaching approach to Quality in his Bozeman days being a real example of Dewey’s later ideas on aesthetics leading science. Shared the link with Friends of Wisdom too.
Art, [Dewey] tells us, is best seen more liberally as “a quality that permeates an experience,” whereby, in any number of life contexts, the meanings of objects and events become “the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or ‘impassioned’ experience” …
Modern preoccupation with science and with industry based on science has been disastrous; our education has followed the model that they have set. It has been concerned with intellectual analysis and formularized information …
It is disastrous because it has fixed attention upon competition for control and possession of a fixed environment rather than upon what art can do to create an environment …
It is disastrous because civilization built upon these principles cannot supply the demand of the soul for joy, or freshness of experience; only attention through art to the vivid but transient values of things can effect such refreshment.
Very promising stuff. Look out the re-release publicity for Pirsig’s “Lila”, and the later publication of the Granger book.
Saw Muse on Sunday night at the Tabernacle in Atlanta. (Was due to see them last weekend in Chicago too, but Tornado weather meant our 500 mile flight to O’Hare was delayed, cancelled, re-routed and re-scheduled via Dallas and Des Moines took 32 hours and an overnight stoppover, so I missed the gig.)
Their Atlanta set was
Take a Bow
Hysteria
Supermassive Black Hole
Butterfies and Hurricanes
Starlight
Forced In (?)
Bliss
Feeling Good
Soldier’s Poem
Invincible
Plug In Baby
New Born
Stockholm Syndrome
____________________
Map of the Problematique
Time Is Running Out
Knights of Cydonia
Significantly different from the Chicago playlist. Great final six, all anthemic for maximum audience participation with projected chorus lyrics for Cydonia. Not my favourite of the new numbers, but it worked. The highlight had to be Map and TIRO. Map is firmly my current favourite, can’t stop hitting the repeat button, particularly as the next number on the CD is the low key Soldier’s Poem.
Sound not too good, plenty loud and plenty of gut-curdling sub-bass, but the lead guitar and synth / keyboard voices and vocals too indistinct in the mix. Pretty static audience until the final six. Another excellent performance though.
Even the simplest games have strategy, but they are nevertheless psychological, about guessing the level of your opponents imperfect knowledge of the strategy. Via the BBC’s 100 Things page [via Rivets]
Aha, and here is the Scoville Chilli Scale. Didn’t that story originally indicate the hottest natural Chilli’s were grown on a farm in the UK ?
Ant tipped us off that Robert Pirsig had been interviewed for The Times to coincide with the re-release of Lila in the UK, and the upcoming publication of David Granger’s book “Dewey, Pirsig and the Art of Living“. Here is the Times Online article by John Freeman.
Excellent optimistic interview “”I think this philosophy could address a lot of the problems we have in the world today” he says, leaning forward, tapping the pad of paper. “Just so long as people know about it.” Says Bob.
(Lots of the biographical summary looks straight from my pages, and in fact Bob confirms John Freeman did his homework using the timeline.)
(I think I blogged this earlier review of 60’s & 70’s that mentions ZMM, Bob’s first book.)
A riveting read, the recordings and transcripts from the Norad Tapes (North-East US Air Defence) during the 9/11 attacks, annotated by Michael Bronner producer of the movie “United 93”.
Truth is so much better than fiction or spin in this case. Should leave conspiracy-theorists with little doubt about cock-up-realities. Restores your faith in humanity, all except Cheney’s “dark bravado” that is. BTW where is he right now ?
Upgraded to WordPress 2.0.5 yesterday and installed Akismet comment-spam-killer today. And it all seems to be working. Long overdue, I was running at 70 odd per day, and it was getting very tiresome to filter by hand before allowing comments through.
One observation on the arrangement, I use WordPress s/w from WordPress.ORG hosted at Dreamhost.COM, but Akismet requires registration with services from WordPress.COM ? Anyway, as I say it seems to be working.
Following links in no particular order …
I noted Pirsig location links in Chicago at the weekend (Navy Pier etc.) and also noticed the Adler connection – the Adler Planetarium specifically, and wondered at the Robert Maynard Hutchins / Mortimer (Jerome) Adler “great books” and classical philosophy connection behind Pirsig’s nemesis at that Chicago University location, “chairman” Richard McKeon. Anyway, no direct connection between Mortimer and Max (Adler) other than a common name, common amongst Jewish immigrant fathers of their generation.
Anyway given that that was a dead end …. the interesting point was another cross-link to J S Mill – very influential on Adler (Mortimer) – and ahead of his time I suggested recently.
Couldn’t resist a cross-link to Intellectual Whores. Plenty of irony and humour in the site, but I daren’t stick my neck out and suggest this piece is a spoof. Serious or spoof it highlights the excluded middle.
Evolutionary psychology may explain how all real life (above and beyond theoretical physics and repeatable laboratory experiments) actually works and how it came to be that way, but that does not suggest how any individual or class of human(s) can “exonerate” itself from responsibilities. Understanding how and why those responsibilities evolved can indeed re-inforce why they are important and what makes some more important than others.
This is the usual explanation vs causality confusion IMHO.
This just in … a quote from Steven Pinker “An evolutionary understanding of the human condition, far from being incompatible with a moral sense, can explain why we have one.” … Even if it cannot reliably predict causal outcomes – but who can ? [Quote from John Brockman’s “Intelligent Thought” reviewed in Nature and publicised via his “Edge” site.]
Pirsig’s Metaphyisics of Quality – It’s Evolutionary Psychology, Stupid
Wilson’s Consilience – It’s Evolutionary Psychology, Stupid
Rand’s Objectivism – It’s Evolutionary Psychology, Stupid
It’s Evolutionary Psychology, Stupid
I realise I missed the boat, and that evolutionary psychology as philosophy came and went out of fashion some time ago, but all roads, even diametrically opposed ones lead me to the same place, which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the earth we inhabit (maybe even the universe we seem constrained to inhabit) seems close to spherical.
Matt commented in my earlier thread referring to Wilson, that Rorty’s problem with (scientists like) Wilson, is that they are mistaken to somehow suggest joined-up science replaces philosophy of any kind. I keep quoting Max Born, who apparently said “Theoretical Physics is Actual Metaphysics”. OK, so there is always a metaphysical boundary condition in even the most holistic scientific explanation of the whole world, but the boundaries between science and philosophy must be constantly re-drawn by scientific understanding, no ?
(BTW, my favouring science is purely pragmatic and contingent. Somewhere in that metaphysical hole there may be something that ultimately invalidates science in some sense, some sense hard to imagine naturally, but whilst science shrinks the hole and makes ever more consilient, joined-up, consistent explanations of the whole outside the hole, then it has the maximum value / quality of the available “belief systems”.)
Explanations of the “whole” need to include the spiritual and human nature aspects of reality, otherwise we have a humungous hole in our model. Part of Matt’s objection (on Rorty’s behalf) to Wilson was that it was arrogant for a scientist to suggest that (consilient, scientific) explanations of human nature were either necessary or valuable in any predictive causal sense. Pragmatically, Matt and Rorty would be right, given accepted knowledge of the current state of “scientific received wisdom”. But of course causality and predictability, are two hugely problematic issues, being addressed by both philsophers and scientists. Personally, I think philosphers’ progress with predictable causation is best in the areas that point out its illusory nature (see Paul Turner’s Buddhist view), which it is of pragmatic value to at least be aware, whereas scientists are advancing “complex recursive systems evolution” views of at least explaining it, with statistics and emergence as the closest things to predictability and causation.
OK, so …
I already, in my 2005 paper, referred to Pirsig’s MoQ as evolutionary psychology. Wilson’s neo-Darwinian angle on consilience is also easy to characterise as evolutionary psychology in a direct sense and the meta-sense. (ie at the top of the evolutionary pyramid, it is “our” intellect that is evolving, but part of that evolution of intellect is evolving our evolutionary explanations of the physical and biological layers on which it is built – that’s all I mean by “evolutionary psychology”. It’s awesomely consilient.)
You may have noticed, if you’re following MoQ-Discuss, that I’ve been reading Ayn Rand. Well if Atlas shrugged, Ian struggled. (Aside – I’m still only 400 pages through my 1000 page edition, and I have no prior knowledge of the main plot or point of the story.)
In summary – much of the plot (so far) is about big business, self-made men (and women), moral choices and “state” interfence. I said after 200 pages, lousy physics, lousy metallurgy, lousy engineering, lousy politics and nauseating sex, but OK business and OK morality. I didn’t mention the stilted writing (as Alice did below), the idiot-proof plot, and the transparent one-dimensional characters, but hey, I pressed on in hope and with suspended disbelief.
The science actually gets less believable, or at any rate more fictional – something close to a perpetual motion machine that creates dynamic (kinetic) power out of static energy (matter) – but hey, that sure is a business opportunity for the right guy or gal with the right access to the technology, motivation, funding, opportunity, freedom from state red-tape, etc. (A large part of the plot is about market distortions created by “bad” legislation – eg people trading in quotas and stocks making five times the profits of those in the primary industries – no, really ?)
I also said earlier that the Randian morals (expressed by her apparent heros and heroine anyway) were the triumph of the (individual) will kind. Little did I know.
Although the edition I’m reading (Signet Centennial paperback edition), has a deliberately sparse introduction, to leave the reader with only Rand’s text, I discover there is a 2-page summary of “The Essentials of Rand’s Objectivism” at the end. I thought it might be a laugh to read it, put me out of my misery anyway.
To be continued.