Category: Pirsig

Had the pleasure of spending yesterday with Henry Gurr and his son David (and Cinnamon, the dog) in and around Aiken, New Ellenton and Savannah River, South Carolina. (Thanks again Henry for the Carolina BBQ hospitality and local historical sightseeing.)

Most of us will know Henry through his passion (some might say obsession) for documenting and photographing details of the ZMM trip of Robert Pirsig for the benefit of future generations of Pirsig’s readers. Adding new detail and new photographs is continuous. Even the author has been heard to mutter “Not more questions Henry ?” The exercise says as much of course, about Pirsig’s writing process, as the extent to which detail of place is a natural mix of the literal and factual with added pastiche and invention. Henry’s work provides future generations of readers with the opportunities to experience that real sense of place, even as the locations are redeveloped over time.

Perhaps I / we should take a serious stab at the Lila boat trip project 😉

Of course personal projects suffer from the “Too much to do, too little time” syndrome, as I have fequently bemoaned. And that of course is where you discover the real value of meeting a person like Henry in the flesh.

As well as the intense stimulating conversations with Henry and David, on all things physical, philosophical, psychological and evolutionary – I hadn’t come prepared for the friendly “grilling” or the need to take notes in case of questions later 😉 – one discovers that Henry’s interest in physics as a university professor goes well beyond the theory.

You get a hint from the fact that Henry’s on-line interest in the Aeolian harp (an interest shared with Own Barfield) led him to build his own, but what that doesn’t pepare you for is Henry’s other projects.

“Interested” in the idea of naturally stable two wheeled cars ? Make your own, and no toy either; a 1955 Chrysler V8 based prototype with serious engineering, welded fabrication and road-testing practicalities. (Practical and stable ? It relies on the natural balance between the “castoring” in the steered wheel, with the mechanical advantage in the steering mechanism whereby, as in high performance motrocycling, one applies a small outward steer and the vehicle of its own accord leans into the corner and follows that inward curve. Don’t believe it will work – try it yourself, Henry did. Spookily my own first real engineering experience was “shimmying” in nose-wheel steered aircraft, particularly the Harrier, with all its weight on the centreline.) Anyway, I’m left with the mental picture of Henry as Anthony Hopkins’ Burt Munro.

“Interested” in ecology ? Design, build and inhabit your own eco-friendly house. Henry did / does.

I’ll not embarrass Henry the engineer, by further suggesting he’s a “craftsman” in say the sense of the welder in ZMM, however when it comes to appreciating that the relationship between the conceptual and the material, is in their practical whole, Henry is the real deal. Quality in action.

(And a gent too, for not mentioning I’d kept him waiting over an hour, as I had failed to make the correction for losing the hour driving over into the Eastern time zone, an error I only noticed on the drive home – oops Sorry Henry and David.)

Demonstrated today in Silicon Valley by Canadian company D:Wave Systems. Thanks to Magnus Berg over on MoQ.Discuss for the link.

I’ve been following Quantum Computing, not so much for the interest in processing power and super-computing applications, exciting though they may be, but because of the increasing importance of Quantum Information as a fundamental level of physics.

QI or Qubits are somthing I’ve seen as entirely analogous to Pirsigian MOQ “quality” (see also MOQ related links in the sidebar), neither zero nor one, neither subject nor object, but quantum information as some interaction of value or possibility more fundamental than matter itself. The people at the BCS Cybernetics special interest group (fixed link in my side-bar) have seemed to be the people most closely pursuing this philosophical limit to physics itself, drawing on Schroedinger, Dirac et al. But there are several other points of convergence with the Psybertron agenda (in the page header).

The Josephson junction technology involved in D:Wave’s hardware.

The original Stapp and Josephson link I made between quantum processing and oriental world-views.

The Josephson Mind-Matter Unification Project.

Josephson (and Stapp) contribution to the Tucson “Science of Consciousness” and “Quantum Mind” initiatives. I speculated previously that the origins of this Tucson initiative were very much parallel to the Einstein Meets Magritte initiative in Europe, at which Pirsig presented his “Subjects, Objects, Data and Values” paper, had common people like Heilighen and Joslyn in their inception at VUB Brussells.

I’ve blogged before “Too much to read, too little time” noting references picked-up during the reading I do manage to achieve – a reading list growing faster than the pace of possible reading. Not uncommon apparently – here a 1989 paper from David Lavery – “How to Gut a Book“.

Here quoting Thomas Wolfe’s, Eugene Gant

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad; the more he read, the less he seemed to know�”the greater the number of books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be.

Here, Lavery’s concluding paragraphs …

Book gutters, I would suggest, understand the book as an evolutionary phenomenon; we see them as repositories of memes. We crack them open in search of the memes encapsulated within.

When asked how it was that Native Americans were able to discover�”without the aid of modern science�”the medicinal properties of hundreds of indigenous herbs and plants, the Shoshone healer Rolling Thunder explained that the secret was quite simple: a medicine man addressed the plant and asked it, in the “I and thou” dialogue of his “concrete science,” what it was good for, what power it contained. We must learn, without embarrassment, to do the same with books.

Andrei Codrescu has suggested that we need to learn to

“use books as oracles.
Ask them a question: open them up.”

The same David Lavery, Owen Barfield scholar,  recommended by Pirsig for his Descartes “Evil Genius” project. Though that project blogged earlier, seems to have disappeared from his Mid Tennessee State Uni pages (He is currently at Brunel, London.) Here is the Descartes Evil Genius project on his current site. 

Anyway, back to the “book anxiety” piece … it has everything. American Indians, immediate experience, memes, Nietzsche, Borges, Escher, Voltaire, Mortimer Adler’s University of Chicago “Aristotelian pontifications” to add to the Pirsig and Barfield connections. Excellent read, to get reading in perspective. I may never sneer again at those “airport bookstall” summaries of the latest “essential reading”. 

Interestingly, different experiences but similar circumstances in reading Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus” and “Investigations” recently, both in an effort to read, in the original, people about who’m I’d already formed the opinion I needed, yet felt the guilt of not having read. As I already suspected, Rand had nothing worth saying; I already “knew” what Wittgenstein had to say, great though he was. Not so arrogant after all ?

In a similar vein after quoting Mark Twain

“School keeps getting in the way of my education”

and Voltaire

“The multitude of books, is making us ignorant.”

and Barthes

“After all, no author can choose to write what will not be read. It is the very rhythm of what is read and what is not read that creates the pleasure of the great narratives; has anyone ever read Proust, Balzac, War and Peace, word for word? (Proust’s good fortune: from one reading to the next, we never skip the same passages.)”

Thinking about writing myself, I have often wondered about a “tiered book”

The essential messages in a few paragraphs / pages, preceeding a longer treatise developing the arguments on the subject, preceeding a narrative / novel incorporating the message and its arguments. Why insult the reader’s intelligence ? I guess Pirsig was following the same line in making his “Chautauqua” (public lecture) explicit rather than unnecessarily hidden within ZMM and Lila. (Of course the flaw is that I may never have the skills to write the third part … but as a joint venture ? Love to do that with Lavery’s Evil Genius plot idea in fact.)

Another aspect Lavery discusses is scanning texts for epigraphic quotations … something I also do, in many cases as potential book or chapter sub-titles … though I gather so many that I long since stopped explicitly blogging them all. Perhaps I should re-start ? Actually, Lavery cites Owen Barfield as the source of his book gutting concept. If Pirsig’s Phaedrus was outflanking the entire body of western thought, Barfield’s Burgeon was raiding it in “Unancestral Voice”.

Who says you need to read all relevant philosophers in order to have a valid philosophic opinion ? Pirsig’s idea of the philosophologist as “critic”, but not philosopher seems validated.

Ah, and of course, in the footnotes a reference to Stanislaw Lem. Taking the “forget writing the book, just write your own review” idea to new Hofstadterian, Quinish proportions; write a book of collected reviews of imagined books. Summaries of the books you haven’t the time to write, let alone read. Make the book the subject of the book. A book-sized Quine. Brilliant. I already knew I liked Lem.

David Lavery’s “How to Gut a Book” is the most though-provoking read I’ve come across in a long time.

I posted about Wayne Booth previously , crossing paths with Pirsig and McKeon in Rhetoric at Chicago, and then again when he died last year.

Came across this excellent Wayne Booth article today, via Wilf Berendsen on Friends of Wisdom. Interestingly Wilf was picking up on the cross-discipline university approach mentioned by John Spencer at Liverpool Uni and mentioned his own involvement with Academia Vitae in Holland

The Booth article is 20 years old, and towards the end, has some “futuristic” predictions (already passed) about things that might happen in future education establishments. Some wonderful ironies, in a very interesting piece … just a sample here.

• business school professors founding centers for “decision research” and “cognition and communication,” with the purpose of discovering just how minds are changed;
• classicists studying the history of the goddess Peitho, the goddess of persuasion;
• cognitive psychologists repudiating behavior modification models and studying ways in which the mind performs “constructionist” operations that escape full formalization;
• “comparative religionists” studying how myths are made persuasive by embedding them in the factual;

[Post Note : the three rhetorics are :
Rhetoric-1 – what the author intends as objective facts and rational argument
Rhetoric-2 – more persuasive language added by the author
Rhetoric-3 – the approval of third-party experts in the author’s field.
The point being that we (honestly) rely on all three, particularly when we do not share the same specialist field as the author, and that therefore a sound understanding of how to evaluate all three rhetorics, and the intentional behaviour of the parties involved, if knowledge is ever to be regarded as true beyond a specialist field. Thus the network of expert approval (not just critical analysis) is recursive but nevertheless essential to the process, and that rhetoric is therefore a cross-specialist subject, as important as any in its own right.]

Instead of reading David Morey’s novel (which I had with me on our trip to the Gulf Coast over the Thanksgiving holiday) I finished Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” and got about half-way through “Philosophical Investigations”.

The latter so far just seems to continue casting doubt on the science (logic) of natural language, and of course logic is something he already debunked philsophically in the Tractatus – “All philosophy is critique of language” (4.0031) – “All propositions of logic say the same thing. That is nothing” (5.43)

The lingusitic stuff doesn’t so far seem to say much more than I’ve already read in Quine’s “Word and Object” – Gavegai, etc (and in Foucault, Derrida and Dennett ?) but I’m only part-way through.

Tractatus was generally a disappointment, but there were surprises, in that whilst following a very methodical structuring of dependent logical assertions, he was actually undermining the value of logic in real world philosophy, and there are some great one-liner jokes to boot. Methinks he must have had a wicked sense of humour at Russell’s expense.

After several dense pages of formal logical notation in 5.5 he concludes “This shows that there is no such thing as the soul” in 5.5421 – Brilliant.

(He is also obsessed by “colour” – the reality of experiencing it vs “naming” or “describing” it … I note that this is something he has also written on elswehere. A recurring theme in “mind” philosophy generally … “Mary the colour scientist” etc.)

Must write more when I’ve fully digested Wittgenstein. Apart from making reference to his mentor Russell, and thence Frege, Witt doesn’t sully himself with analysing the thinking of others – an arrogance he shares with Pirsig, no ?

[Post Note : Read a fair bit “about” Wittgenstein one way or another, despite only recently reading him in the original. I was browsing his Wikipedia entry, partly because I’m still following the conversion to faith / intellectual elitism angle for some reason I’m not yet quite sure of, and sure enough found that point confirmed for future reference. I wasn’t expecting to find this. Could I really have forgotten ? Yep, sure enough, there it is plenty about this in Edmunds and Eidinow. My copy is full of annotations I’ve never followed-up. When will I ever find the time ?]

Another interview promoting the re-publishing of Lila, pointed out by Ant and linked by Horse.

Actually a very sympathetic interview of the man by Tim Adams who recalls reading Zen and the Art at the age of 14. Lots of anecdotal recalls of biographical (and very personal) events behind the two books, including some worth adding to the timeline.

Update.
Even better, Ant has captured a copy of the full transcript here.

Just a snippet to store away, since I’m not really up on Hume yet.

Hume’s metaethics … his emotivist stance on the nature of moral judgment and … the assertion of rationality as part of that process is only an ad hoc attempt to somehow “independently” justify the moral conclusions we’ve already reached.

A recurring theme, but the context is a spoof Tim McSweeney monologue linked by Matt Kundert.

Latest BBC “In Our Time” is an excellent discussion on Muslim philosopher generally known as Averroes. Worth listening to in it’s entirety. (Ibn Rushd on Wikipedia)

Points of interest for me …

Etymology – I have a thing about spotting B’s and V’s but it’s so clear here. The patronymic family naming prefix “son  of” or simply “from” or “out of” in the Av, Ab, Ave, Aven, Von, Van, Bin, Ben, Ibn, (and all the European son / sen suffices of course) The whole B, V, M, Mp, Mb, N blur. The two versions of the name here are just alternate pronunciations of the same underlying concept of being someones child, and clearly just an evolution of the sound in the telling from Proto-Indo-European (Aryan) origins. But I’m no expert.

Ave … Roes / Rush
Ibn … Rushd / Rushdi / Rashid

(The other example that fascinates me is the R & T – rta / art / craft – combinations that Pirsig dwells on.)

Afterlife – as Aristotle’s continuity of intellect, in limbo in the Dante “Divine Comedy” sense, but also as a continuous (eternal) semantic web whose Platonic forms are merely intersected by temporary brains and individual minds.

Philosophy – as the definitive reading of religious texts. Supported by rationale that only the examined life can provide (“look around” says the Quran). Hierarchical interpretation from the head of a “church” down simply being different abstractions or metaphorical simplifications for different practical purposes. From scholars and theologians down to the “masses”. (Nice lead into St Thomas Aquinas later “scholastic” work.)

Fascinating. Nothing new under the sun.

Terry Bristol, Director of ISEPP (University of Oregon) introduced the concept of reality as Engineering into the Friends of Wisdom environment, which caught my imagination, because I’m an engineer and came to this space through engineering. (Notice, Linus Pauling and Bob Ulanowizc connections BTW.) And, having been inflicted by Pirsigian Metaphysics of Quality before noticing Dennett’s engineering view of evolution as nature’s problem solving ingenuity imagine my surprise when this turned up. [Hat tip to Anon for now, thanks by the way.]

Spookier still because I was just using Authur C Clarke / Stanley Kubrick’s 2010 fantasy to illustrate on MoQ-Discuss how the future of the cosmos really is in the hands of intelligent life – the intelligence behind the TMA replicates itself and turns Jupiter into a second star in our solar system.

And spookier still, because the first comment refers to Atlas Shrugged !?! Given recent threads on that subject.

The alternative to coincidence is paranoia, surely ?

Interesting also that Terry makes some interesting East v West comparisons of the engineering profession on Friends of Wisdom.

My god it’s full of engineers !

It’s about time I finished off my Randian piece from earlier.

I’ve finished reading “Atlas Shrugged” a few days ago. Actually I gave up about 300 pages from the end (of 1000), after Galt’s speech to his “troops” in their secret Utopian Atlantis, and could only bring myself to skim the rest including his speech to his “fellow Americans” across the public air-waves. 

I guess it’s a book of its times; hopelessly McArthyist and US-centric in its early 50’s outlook, and no surpise that Rand’s main message is about the good of the individual vs the bad of the collective. I really tried, but I could not discern any argument to support that, or any basis of what makes good other than progress in some sense. No Pirsigian would argue with that, but the whole basis just looked like alien straw-men to me. The whole first two thirds of the book, about the rise of self-made industrialists and then their demise under collective “bad government” is a great argument for the value of “freedom” and a case for needing “good” government, but absolutely no basis for defining either freedom or good, or concluding that any form of collective government is necessarily bad.

Those first two thirds are just so fictionally implausible, not to mention wretchedly written as Alice pointed out, that the final third set in that Utopia where entrepreneurs have withdrawn their services from society at large is just too naive to swallow. A germ of an interesting idea ruined by a dreadful book. I just could not suspend disbelief for 1000 pages.

OK, so why after that does Rand’s “objectivism” look just like evolutionary psychology too ? Let’s be honest here, even Pirsig was writing about society’s values going to the dogs in the 50’s – in our time. Chalk or cheese, it’s still the moon we’re looking at. The trouble is Rand ends where Pirsig started – and what is “good” Phaedrus.

Rand’s objectivism is summarised in her own words “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason his only absolute.” The only clue as to why she sees this as “objectivism” is in the metaphysical foundation of reason. The real clues are in man, his, his, his ….

In fact she further summarises her philosophy as follows :

1. Metaphysics – objective reality
“Nature to be commanded must be obeyed”

2. Epistemology – reason
“You can’t eat your cake and have it too”

3. Ethics – self-interest
“Man is an end in himself”

4. Politics – capitalism
“Given me liberty or give me death”

The confusion here is the implied “man” – the species. She doesn’t say individual, but she does say me, me, me …. (Elsewhere it is clear she abhors any collective concepts.) Clearly she sees man as part of nature and mind as man’s defining tool. Although she doesn’t say it in so many words – she shares the Pirsigian view that the biological and social must not limit the intellectual.

Though logically irrelevant I can excuse her anthropocentric presumption of “man” as the pinnacle of reason (so far). Despite her abhorrence also of determinism – god given or otherwise- she ultimately fails to see that her “absolute” view of the existence of reason and mind places them outside the nature of creativity and progress she holds so dear in other aspects of reality.

Trapped in a psychology that doesn’t recognise its own evolution.
Phew ! May I never have to suffer reading her words again.

[Post note : to follow-up – man’s aim, happiness. Mill, utilitarianism, Heylighen.]