What, Why & How do we Know ?
Some thoughts reading Herrigel, still mid Dr Austin. Nothing new, just recognisable significance. (Kingston on-line to the rescue.) Basic stuff – Koans – learning documented Koans, learning documented answers to documented Koans, learning aproaches / concepts applicable to documented Koans, are all irrelevant; this is a meta-meta-meta-meta- … -meta-problem. (I did say this year’s word … Continue reading “Zen Lessons”
And there’s more from Dr Austin. Taking emergent as high and fundamental as low, he talks of higher level emergent properties having causal effects on the underlying structures, such that the emergent properties are “causal realities”. As in Pirsig’s levels of static quality, the high can control the lower, but the lower must only ever … Continue reading “Levels of Causality”
The plot thickens further … I’m now reading Dr Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”. Not surprisngly for a real US medic he spends a fair amount of time apologising for his mystic tendencies and acknowledging christian religious sensibilities, before he dares launch us into his Zen treatise. (I suspect 2/3 of this 800 page tome … Continue reading “Greeley Tangles The Web”
Just finished Kerouac on BA2027. Aren’t west-bound transatlantic flights a great place to read – 90% of the book in the one sitting. I guess I need to understand a little of the circumstances under which it was written – one drug induced sitting ? – published 1955 about 1947 to 1949 period in which … Continue reading “Off The Road”
Bought Kerouac some time ago; as the seminal beat-generation road story, it seemed de-rigoeur to have read it, since it forms part of the backdrop to Pirsig. Anyway I’m well into it at last. (Thinking out loud – Plenty of parallels with Pirsig’s mid-west already, though Pirsig’s timing does not overlap – his back-packing days … Continue reading “On The Road”
Not been in the Pick much in recent weeks, but went in last night intending to continue reading Midgley’s “Myths We Live By”, and ended up spending the whole evening in deep conversation with another interesting punter. Ex boat-builder, putative journalist, everything from simplistic rationale missing age old issues to world politics, taking in Pirsig, … Continue reading “Pickerell Strikes Again”
The Mindful Universe by Henry Stapp, from the quantum physics edge of consciousness. [Quote] It is often claimed that science stands mute on questions of values: that science can help us to achieve what we value once our priorities are fixed, but can play no role in fixing these weightings. That claim is certainly incorrect: … Continue reading “We Believe In Science”
Not sure whether these guys independently verified this stuff, but my Pirsig Timeline forms the basis of the biography of Robert Pirsig on the web site of the American Society of Authors and Writers.