Re-reading Michael Talbot

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.)

Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield – Note to self – must read some Owen Barfield – for starters …
The Owen Barfield Website
Owen Barfield and C S Lewis [Quote] Most notable of his works are perhaps History in English Words, Poetic Diction, Saving the Appearances, Unancestral Voice, and Worlds Apart. Barfield also wrote a fairy tale, The Silver Trumpet, as well as a book about C.S. Lewis, whom he met and became a life long close friend at Wadham College, Oxford. [Unquote]
The Case for Anthroposophy by Rudolph Steiner with intro from Barfield.

Collecting Rorty Links

Wild Orchids and Trotsky – readable witty autobiographical essay (blogged earlier)
A Talent for Bricolage – Joshua Knobe’s interview with Rorty
Richard Rorty’s homepage at Stanford – limited site, but comprehensive bibliography
Terry Eagleton on Rorty – DeLong’s review of Illusions of Postmodernism
Google’s directory listing for Rorty
Web Companion to Pragmatism includes interviews with Rorty, Putnam and Quine and more
Quine / Rorty audio interview at The Connection
A conversation with Richard Rorty by Scott Stossel

I digress
John Searle interviewed by Reason Online

Hemingway read Northrop

The library in his house “Finca Vigia” in Cuba includes F S C Northrop’s “The Meeting of East and West“. This image from the site by Hilary Justice.

Northrop is the red one in the middle.

The brown one to the left of it is “The Good Soldier Schweik” by Hasek, which is a longer story, but I have my Dad’s 1952 Penguin paperback:

Pirsig ZMM Journey Route Map Updated

Pirsig ZMM Journey Route Map Updated – Thanks to a great deal of information from Henry Gurr I’ve been able to correct and update the ZMM route details as part of a general update of the Pirsig Pages and the biographical timeline.

Henry’s site has many more photographs and location details than I can link to and his site is well worth a visit.
(Is that you in the photograph at Crater Lake Henry ? – link updated)

Now I hope to concentrate on questions relating to Pirsig biographical details. Watch this space.

Reading List Update

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

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 ?