Category: Pirsig

“Arrive Without Travelling” (AWT) is the first in a series of documentary films by Anthony McWatt about the work of Robert M Pirsig. Ant is to be congratulated on achieving his debut film-making milestone, the culmination of his own determined journey down a long and winding road, paved with intentions of many kinds.

[Post Note: The 2nd part “On The Road with Robert Pirsig” (OTR) is since published and reviewed here. OTR is probably most interesting to the public as a documentary of Pirsig and his Metaphysics of Quality. AWT is mainly of special interest as a record of proceedings and discussions around the 2005 Liverpool conference  … here, below.]

The major content of AWT was filmed at and around the 2005 Liverpool Conference, about which I reported at the time. If it achieves nothing else, the film nails any lingering suggestion that Bob’s relationship with his “fans” is anything remotely close to being a celebrity guru with his acolytes. And that’s not just in the relaxed participation and conversation recorded, but also in the fact that Bob makes it abundantly clear that despite his own creation of the rhetoric represented by his two books (ZMM & Lila), the philosophical ideas originated with “his mentor” F S C Northrop, and no-one, not even Bob can teach or define the dynamic quality at the core of that Metaphysics of Quality. That requires enlightened and enlightening participation in real life. “Ideas have their own evolution.” as Bob says.

As well as a large part of the papers presented and a number of interviews with Bob and the participants, perhaps the most important content is that informal footage and recording of discussion and free conversation, with the shy and reclusive Bob as simply one of the participants, relaxed amongst friends. Participation again is the key component. The publication as a film allows more more people to participate, albeit once removed from the original.

A few caveats about this review, in the interests of balance, before I proceed. Firstly, as a participant at the conference myself, I am an interested party, but I have to say that I find my own recorded contribution almost excruciating to watch, even edited down by about one third. Secondly as a matter of taste, the use of the psychedelic Beatles clips as links and overlays, has obvious relevance to the Liverpool location and the hippy age in which much of the thesis was developed, but I’m not entirely sure the effect will prove net positive. Thirdly, it was a surprise to find that this first in a series of documentary films, is in fact a full 100 minutes feature length, with extended recordings of the conference proceedings. As a record of the event and contributions, it is invaluable, but time will tell if the format can attract and educate new interest in the subject matter.

Extracts from the talks by Mati Palm-Leis, and Khoo Hock Aun are included, and Gavin Gee-Clough’s paper is included almost in full. [Conference Papers]

The highlight of the film, as it was at the conference, is David Buchanan’s paper “Fun With Blasphemy”, and Bob’s emotional reaction to it. Although David’s paper is published, it would still feel like a spoiler to divulge the punchline here. As I reported at the time, we were all fortunate that Dave’s delivery was recorded for posterity, and here is the proof, presented in full. Dave analyses perennial myths across many cultures, drawing on the work of Joseph Campbell, settles on the myth of Orpheus, and speculates on a possible Orphic screenplay and players to exemplify the MoQ messages, in contrast to earlier proposals to film narrative’s of the ZMM or Lila stories. The idea is genius in itself, reinforced by the specific Liverpool connection in his choice of creative muse. Go watch.

What moved Bob to label Dave as “cool” – in acknowledgement of a “cool” thread in the paper – was that Dave had struck upon something central to Pirsig’s own story. Enlightenment; Christ you know it ain’t easy, and most readers will know that Pirsig went through the occupational hazard of a serious mental breakdown en-route to creating his own enlightened work. [Timeline 1961] It transpires that Bob saw Cocteau’s film “Orpheus” during his descent into madness, just before he left Bozeman and moved to Chicago (featured coincidentally as locations in “Orpheus”) where he suffered his breakdown. In Bob’s emotional words “I entered that film and never really came out.” Dave had of course selected the Orphic myth, of entering an otherworld and returning enlightened for the very reason that it mirrored Pirsig’s own life journey. But little did we know [*].

As Dave says, it’s “the coolest thing that ever happened me.”
Electric moments of dynamic quality captured on film.
Get a copy from www.robertpirsig.org and enlighten yourself.

[*][Post Note – Though the parallel between Bob’s personal journey of enlightenment and the Orphic myth, and Dave’s “Mythos” agenda are well known, you would need to be a close reader of MoQ.Discuss back in 1999 to note that Bob had mentioned the Cocteau film before.
http://www.mail-archive.com/moq_discuss@moq.org/msg00786.html
But, little did we know how significant to Bob.]

You may have noticed a change of format of the blog pages, starting with the header ? Same theme / style, but much re-organized.

MOST IMPORTANT – for users of my “Pirsig Pages” – notice the updated note on the old Pirsig Pages redirecting you manually to the entry point for my new Pirsig Pages. Any existing links to and within the blog pages (including the new header links) are automatically updated. If you switch your Pirsig Pages link to the new “PHP” page – any future changes will be automatic too.

So, if you link directly or via “favourites” to my Pirsig Pages,
Please switch your link
from www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.html
to www.psybertron.org/pirsigpages.php

The link to the Pirsig Biographical Timeline is unchanged, and will remain so.

Further changes are taking place to add new blog capabilities, whilst simplifying the overloaded side-bar; to create some new pages to help organise and orientate through the subject matter; oh, and a new project – can you tell what it is yet ?

I see Sue Blackmore coined the idea of a third level of replicator above genes and memes, termed (so far) “temes” in her recent presentation to TED2008.

Not entirely convinced yet that this form of technology enabled memes are fundamentally different to memes. As she says herself, in discussing whether “artificial-meme” might be a better name “But really they are no more artificial that we are.”

Meme’s have benefitted from being technology enabled since the printing-press or maybe even the tabula-rasa or papyrus scrolls – whatever  – maybe even the use of myths and symbols in story-telling ? This is really just a debate about what technology is, and our parochial human perspective of intelligence and communication.

It’s really the same debate as to whether Strong-AI need be considered “artificial” if it is indeed “intelligent”. The artifice is in a non-human-bio-physical substrate brain, and the debate as to whether such an intelligence is possible without a substrate that is actually living – artificial life. I’m beginning to believe the latter – that AI may prove impossible without AL (which would be wonderfully consistent with neither actually being “artificial”, and with quality evolutionary theory and experience of life before intelligence to date.)

Anyway, the term may be useful pragmatically; as we so often find “fundamental” definitive distinctions are rarely black-and-white anyway.

An aside … joining up the dots increasingly between Quality (a la Pirsig), Wisdom (a la Maxwell), Inclusionality (a la Rayner), and more recently IdentityTheory, and find the convergence between The Edge / Third-Culture and TED becomes ever greater. These latter two initiatives are on a much grander scale than the former 3 or 4, but the agendas converge – “Third-Culture” is as good a catch-all umbrella as any for these syntheses of classically scientific and traditionally romantic understandings of humans in the cosmos.

Tickled me that this “Wisdom Research Network” initiative, associated with the Wisdom Research programme at Chicago University, is now in 2008 called the “Arete Initiative”.

Chicago >> Arete
>> Pirsig >> Quality
>> Values >> Maxwell >> Wisdom
>> Rayner >> Inclusionality >> Fluid >> Dynamic Quality …

… is it just my mind that works this way ?

[Post note. Apparently not …

I see Pirsig picked-up on the Chicago education thread (see comment referring to a Robert Birnbaum interview with story writer Joseph Epstein, Jew to Jew as it were.)

Bob refers to this quote :

 … like a lot of serious booksellers, he was a failed Ph.D. He was a failed Ph.D. in philosophy from Chicago. A student of guy named Richard McKeon who left corpses all over the city. Pascal would not have gotten his Ph.D. from McKeon. Aristotle wouldn’t have. Nobody. He was a miserable character and he made it so hard for everybody. It’s like you and I trying to get a Ph.D. from Martin Bormann.

Understandable given Bob’s legendary relationship with McKeon (see ’60 to ’63 in the Timeline). My favourite is in the next paragraph :

 … I have come to think that a good student is not that impressive a thing to be. A good student can tell you seven reasons for the Renaissance. Big fucking deal. [laughs] He can tell you that materialism is naturalism. Because in order to have naturalism you have to have three things that satisfy materialism and so on. I sensed, in my crude kid way, this really wasn’t where the action is.

How true. Actually the interview is a good read … much on the “church of reason” in education and on “education in culture”. Can see why Bob liked it. Wise words.

PS .. and Arete ?  Bob uses this Greek term for “excellence” in his thought processes of arriving at his Metaphysics of Quality, and his boat in the book Lila, he named “Arete”.]

Thanks to Dan Glover for posting this Mundaneum link on MoQ-Discuss.
(And to Ron Kulp for this documentary link to the same subject.)

I’ve blogged several times previously on the similarity of blogging to the approach Pirsig used to organise his ideas, and how this is a generic metaphor for the interconnectivity rather than atomism of knowledge itself.

Pirsig, like this much earlier Mundaneum approach, involved gathering “useful facts” as simple index cards (a page, a post, in blogging terms), but the crucial thing is that these “atoms” contain links to other indexed atoms, and in fact some atoms are nothing but links – meta-atoms, subject headings, organisational nodes, place-holders, what-have-you – little or no content of their own.

Partly this also mirrors the context and story-telling emphasis of modern knowledge management – recognising that sources (individual first-person people / conversations / anecdotes) are context that is at least as important as the content of “knowledge” in any objective sense.

Note – the original Mundaneum link is from the “Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society” web site, which itself is a blog and has some wonderful links in its side-bars. A new source of exploration for me.

Several different threads here. All mentioned before – reading Sam Harris “End of Faith” itself, a discussion thread on MoQ.Discuss with End of Faith title and several spin-off threads, and a discussion thread on Chairman Parker’s Blog.

My position can be summarised quite easily.

Tolerance of (misplaced) religious faith is as dangerous as extremes of faith themselves; Harris is right in his warnings, and his analyses are much more sophisticated than the deliberately attention-grabbing headlines. We need to remember that this argument is about faith – bases of belief – rather than God per se. Nothing wrong with Dawkins / Dennett et al position in explaining religions in the scientific terms of evolutionary psychology / memetics either.

The problem that remains is that in this debate the scientists (Dawkins archetypically) are blind to the fact that much of science really is a (not-quite religious) belief system too – the bases of science are not as objective and value-free as science’s model of itself – a scientific “article of faith” almost. The “scientific neurosis” in Nick Maxwell’s terms. In Dennett’s terms the intellectual honesty is simply about exposing both religious and scientific faith to the same scrutiny and questions of evidence, not limited by either protagonists choice of weapons in that argument.

The reason this is such a big subject – a global issue, rather than just a problem for science itself – is not just that science-based technology is exponentially behind so much global activity, but that scientific thinking is a dominant meme in western (and western infected eastern) global economic culture, in all manner of debate, analysis and decision-making. Dominant, in direct competition with a god-based religious faith meme that is. In the Dave Gurteen reference in the previous post, I mentioned the “pedestal” idea. Whoever is perceived as “winning” is a natural target from those who are competing. This dichotomous winning / losing mentality is part of the Newtonian objective / logical-positive / cause & effect world model that says conflict is built-in to the dominant process – if you want an argument, or a war if you prefer, you can always have one. Test and critical analysis are fundamental to the methods of proof of knowledge, but they are not the sum total of wisdom in applying and using knowledge to make progress, solve problems or exploit opportunities.

Despite the hype, what the internet revolution (exponential evolution really) is exposing is how much progress can be made through transparent collaboration, and visibly interconnected communication.

That much seems clear, but we need values and wisdom to recognise progress, so there are important aspects of the issues still open to debate. One is the basis of values (ethics) – which for me are also part of the evolutionary psychology story, rather than any tablets of stone.

Another is teleology – purpose – if the direction (axis) of progress, betterness, can be agreed, there are still questions about what is driving it – is there some direction (agent action) towards this ultimate purpose. Natural explanations of this are the principle reason I take an interest in the Anthropic debates.

Related, but quite distinct is first-cause. Causation and the psychological impressions of both time and purpose, are one set of things, but any metaphysical explanation of the whole cosmos runs into a first-cause question – the something rather than nothing question.

Here the God answer runs into the “but where did God come from ?” question. In fact any positied first cause theory – even a scientific one – runs into this, and most importantly however much it is debate, my contention is that any hypothesis here must by definition be untestable in any direct empricical way. The right kind of answer here is a convenient, pragmatic one. The answer you choose doesn’t pre-empt any possible answers to questions in the experienced real-world domain, so no-one need be offended by anyone else’s answer here. God, it, the cosmos, the stack of turtles, always existed is as good as any answer. Mu too, makes the additional point that it is not a question even worth asking, let alone debating an answer, other than to discover that it is indeed that kind of question. The problem arises when some believe their answer here is somehow a fundamental answer to all other difficult questions of cosmic mysteries, particularly the aparently purposeful teleology. Err no; the first cause question is a special class, and not a short-cut to all other answers.

I’m an atheist – though in Harris terms, the distinction between atheist and agnostic is immaterial to a real atheist, and only really matters to a theist looking for an argument. I qualified my opening statement about religious faith with the caveat “misplaced” because, even though the first-cause “God” is a convenient fiction like any other first-cause – the question is the fiction, not the answer you choose – there are babies in the bathwater of theistic faith that need to be preserved. Not least that the religious traditions have indeed preserved (in those tablets of stone) many traditional (ie long-lived but evolving) values and ethics – which have no more fundamental basis – and a much more fundamental concept of collaboration – eudaimonia – love if you like, as an antidote to competitive conflict.

It’s the end of faith, in either god or science, being the tool of choice in making human progress. When all you have is a hammer, all screws look like nails. The power-boater may think he is driving his point home, whereas the sail-boater knows he is steering a course through life’s choppy waters. When all you have is a choice between objects, all decisions look like matters of faith or science. When you have a more fluid-dynamic inclusional view of the world as our oyster, that oyster can work those grits of difference into pearls of wisdom.

[Acknowledgements to Sam Norton, Alan Rayner, Ted Lumley, Nick Maxwell, Robert Pirsig, as well as those explicitly mentioned. – I’ll grow this into a properly referenced paper.]

Having noticed that the content of the “Taking Science on Faith” post below, provided to me by Gary Wegner, was also in the current edition of The Edge, I see that it is also covered in the comment thread to the Daily Kos post reviewing Paul Davies “Cosmic Jackpot” … The Edge and Paul Davies being the connection.

That’s the Anthropic Principle thread that wound Island up, though I have to say the piece reads as a reasonable if sceptical summary, despite the clamour of self-congratulatory closed minds in the ensuing thread. That post of mine was of course prompted by Marsha picking up the Daily Kos article on the Pirsig Metaphysics of Quality discussion forum … Pirsig being my connection with Gary in the first place

I’ve mentioned many times that “meta” is an important concept – the word itself seems to come and go with fashions. “Meta-X” equals “X concerning X”

In my agenda here it is a way, in this Subject / Object oriented world, of taking that one step back from the apparent objects and focusssing on the objects (processes) by which they arise and interact … less risk of “reifying” the objects themselves.

Ant drew our attention to this new “Meta-Q” blog by Caryl Johnston, in Philadelphia PA. Meta-Q signifying Meta-Quality, and very much looking at the place of Pirsigian Quality in an educational / academic context.

By (Pirsigian) defintion, Quality itself is undefinable, and attempts to do so of limited value and ultimately counter productive. Meta-Quality is a concept I like – definition through the processes and interactions through which Quality arises – rather than direct definition of Quality itself.

Less than a month in the blogosphere, but several interesting looking essays there already. Added to the blog roll so I can read at leisure and post some more specific comments in due course. Caryl describes the Pirsigian (Metaphysics of) Quality agenda as an attempt …

… to raid the encampment of philosophy, which has become entrenched in the subject-object dualism of modern rationalism and fortified by the spoils dispensed by universities, government, and economics, to capture its real prize: an orientation that makes sense of the world, makes a difference in how one lives, and does justice to all levels of human nature.

Addressing the problem of the “subject-object dualism of modern rationalism”. Absolutely. Sounds like my manifesto (in the header).

(Post note : been browsing around and Caryl has multiple blogs – all very interesting. She concludes another essay with …

We need to re-dynamize ourselves
�” by remembering the paradoxy in orthodoxy.

Well said. And talking of the paradox in the orthodox, conflict with the static, I’m reminded of Pirsig’s own words in the Baggini nterview … )

Dynamic or static, both are absolutely essential, even when they are in conflict. As stated in LILA, without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last. Dynamic liberals and radicals need conservatives to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded change. Conservatives also need liberals and radicals to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded stagnation. This also holds true for philosophy. My feeling is that subject-object way of interpreting the world is stagnant and inadequate for our time, but without that base of subject-object understanding to build from, the Metaphysics of Quality, by itself, has no value either.

 

Series of two articles and letters to the editor in the NY Times, and a SlashDot thread …

Dennis Overbye “Laws of Nature, Source Unknown”

Paul Davies “Taking Science on Faith”

(More of the same by the same authors in the latest “Edge“)

Letters to the NYT Editor “Scientific Method; Evidence not Faith”

SlashDot “Where Do the Laws of Nature Come From ?”

Forwarded by Gary Wegner, picking up on Pirsig’s “Ghosts” theme on “scientific laws” in Chapter 3 of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Robert M Pirsig

“feigning twentieth-century lunacy”

just like everyone else.

Gary highlights this “SPUN1352” response in the SlashDot thread …

There are three basic approaches to this existential dilemma. First, decide based on arbitrary experiences that one particular explanation is right. Second, decide that no particular explanation matters since you can’t know which one is right for sure, and get on with your life. Third, go batshit insane.

Buddha was asked a number of questions by a wise philosopher of the time, such as “Is there a soul,” “Is there a God” and “Is there life after death?” Buddha refused to answer because the answers aren’t important. If they are important to you, there is a more basic question you should be asking first, which is, “Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?”

You will find the answer to this is always some variant of, “Because I’m afraid of dying and knowing the right things will help keep me from ceasing to exist.” So the question becomes, why am I afraid of dying? And the answer is almost always something along the lines of, “Because I see myself as fundamentally separate from the Universe, and when I die, I’m gone.”

This is based on the fact that mind has privileged access to some of it’s own internal state. No one else seems to know our internal worlds, and so we fear that when we die, those worlds will be lost. Worse yet, as we believe we are the only ones who can put them in their proper context, when we die, they might be misinterpreted.

Well, buck up. You aren’t separate from the universe. You are not a subject, observing the objects. You aren’t a little man sitting in your head looking out through your eyes and hearing through your ears. The sense of self is just another sense, just another track in the recording. No one is listening because there aren’t any such things as individuals to observe.

Is that confusing or upsetting? Then you are stuck in dualistic thinking, and will always be, in some sense, scared of death. If you can let go of dualism and realize that there is no subjective observer separate from the objects observed, but that observation still exists, then you will be free and it won’t matter one bit whether we are living in a simulation, or even whether there is a God, a soul, or an afterlife.

Interesting final quote – see my last Dawkins “Talking Point” piece, where I think I quoted Dennett that, to an atheist or agnostic, the question of the existence of god can be of no pragmatic consequence. But so much more in there … more later.

If you ask the wrong (existential) question …

… the answers aren’t important.

[Post Note – It occurred to me that the quoted expression “Why is it important for me to believe that I know the answers?” is in fact a meta-question – a why-question about why-questions. See next “meta” post.]

Made a minor correction to my Pirsig timeline when Jim Williams pointed out I’d mixed up second wife Wendy with first wife Nancy in 1976. Ooops.

Coincidentally, and much more exciting, Toronto Star journalist Mark Richardson has agreed a deal with Knopf (Random House, hardcover) and Vintage (paperback) for publication of his “Zen & Now” story of his own Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM) road trip, into which he has woven much newly researched detail of Pirsig’s biography. Due in September next year; 2008 is the 40th anniversary of the orginal ZMM road trip.

Pisrig fans and scholars will find much new interest in detail background to the schizophrenic enlightenment behind ZMM and Lila. I wish Mark every success with the publication.

See also Henry Gurr’s news item for November 2007.