Category: Pirsig

Thanks to Matt Poot on MoQ-Discuss for picking up this Toronto Globe and Mail best seller list from Sunday 9th October.

Well, well, well. Robert Pirsig’s ZMM is a non-fiction best seller in October 2005, sharing the list with James Frey, Jared Diamond, Bill Bryson and Malcolm Gladwell. (Dan Brown is top of the fiction list fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it.)

(Interesting, searching for Pirsig / best-seller I find the Wikipedia page is well linked with current Pirsig material, including my own.)

(This June 2005 page from the American Association of Booksellers also has ZMM in their best seller list – perrenial they say – though it’s under travel books !)

(And an interesting current reading list from Zug, a “comedy” site (!) includes Douglas Adams, Aldous Huxley and Scott Peck as well as both ZMM and Lila – dense with ideas they says – Comedy ?)

Here at KMTheory.com published by Don Mezei is a Unified Theory of Knowledge which uses, and which Don claims was originally inspired by Pirsig‘s Lila and MoQ. As well as introductory quotes from E O Wilson and Erwin Schroedinger there is this apt one from Ernest Becker

“I have had the growing realization over the past few years that the problem of [humanity’s] knowledge is not to demolish opposing views, but to include them in a larger theoretical structure.”

Right from my “let’s synthesise” school of thought. Clearly a good fit with Psybertron’s aims and approach to the matter. There is a difference between an arbitrary view that says all views are relative and have equal value and one that says that two views that don’t agree are necessarily mutually exclusive. Apparent opposites are often just two aspects of the same thing – a kind of complementarity.

The “theory” paper is brief and succinct with some creative graphical models of the whole of ontology / epistemology. Worth some consideration.

Paper from April 2003 by Sam Norton, concerning an alternative interpretation of the “intellectual level” in Pirsig’s MoQ. I only skim-read it previously, and because I didn’t “get it” I’ve been unable to participate in some of Sam’s debates. So here goes … (this is a long one) …

The standard model – Sam describes the standard view of the MoQ in his own words. Only a couple of quibbles. Inorganic Level – Sam admits to being no physicist, so let’s not worry about errors of popular science detail – let’s just agree to call it the “Physical” level (the level where only physics prevails – in its widest sense). Similarly the Biological Level – a few quibbles on where physics and chemistry become biology and life. Let’s agree to think of this as the “Living” level, where life prevails over mere physics.

First actual disagreement. Sam says this is the layer where “natural selection” occurs. No, I say that exists in all the levels and is one of the major mechanisms of evolution throughout the MoQ.

Second actual disagreement. Sam says only humans participate in the “Social Level”. Not sure why we need to make such a constraint. Clearly a lot of social patterns in other animals may be purely biological evolved instinctual social behaviours, but I have no doubt other intelligent species can and do use inter-individual communication – language of sorts – in their own lifetimes to organise social patterns too. (But “inteligence” is part of the subject under discussion here, so let’s hang fire.)

In the Social Level Sam also talks, as does Pirsig, about the celebrity principle, setting and spreading cultural standards. My only quibble would be to update this with the concept of “memes”.

In the Intellectual Level, Sam re-iterates Pirsig’s idea that this is distinguished by “symbolic manipulation of information” and by the idea of “truth over opinion” and quickly goes on to point out what he sees as failings with the intelectual level, the subject of the essay.

OK – just to put my stake in the ground – I see the intellectual level as the advent of “formalised reason” – “scientific thought” – this is the lowest layer of the top level. The start of the whole problem. The idea of truth and right being derivable from concepts and axioms, as distinct from what social and below had just been “better” for those involved. So what I’m looking out for is the meta-problem. Is Sam saying the world model for “reason” is wrong or that the MoQ statement of it is not a good one ? If the former – I’m right with him, as is Pirsig’s MoQ of course, that’s its point.

A second stake in the ground – I’ve never actually seen the Intellectual as totally distinct from the Social. I see a socio-politico-intellecto-cultural continuum, with many different static latches, not just one clear social vs intellectual demarcation. The definition of “intellect” is a cultural issue. I prefer one Cultural level. There is a level at which the formal intellectual gets added to the social, but it never displaces it, just adds to it. I think we’re going to be debating which kinds of reason are higher quality – “intellect” is a crude approximation. The intellectual Quality level is going to need a definition that involves “Quality” as part of it, or else it is going to get hooked on the very defintions of “reason” it aims to supplant. This is Godel. This is the meta-problem. The “top” level in any MoQ may always have to have this cosmic bootstrap problem.

Reading on.

Sam expresses concerns 1 to 5. Clearly I share something like them. (Let’s just ignore further popular science quibbles about biological life, evolution and DNA, being irrelevant to the point.) Basically the Intellectual Level is badly defined – either absolutely or distinct from the social – intellectual is certainly not the best word for it

So Sam “Eudaimonia” is your alternative to “Intellect” as the fourth level ?

Sam suggests “The autonomous individual” as the esence of the fourth level. No, that’s not it. Though Sam re-defines autonomous. Not just free to act but free to rationlise / reason how to act. This is looking promising. Its the communicable formalisation of reason – beggining to look like memes to me.

Sam says “My society says that this is good, but is my society right to say so? – in other words, there is a questioning of social values.” Spot on. In the social level value are right because they are social, in the intellectual (or whatever) they are right because the reason can be formalised independent of the social acceptance. Super-social-reason.

The middle third of the essay is a pre-and post-Socratic history of the of judgement of individuals independent from their social roles. So what are those units of judging, units of choosing ? (Interestingly the Chalmers stuff I’m still reading, has a big play on “judgement” in terms of what can be known – but I digress.)

Aha, it’s happiness – Sam says Eudaimonia is human flourishing or happiness. I say, or Satori or Quality. This is beginning to crystallise – the top level of the MoQ is highet level of quality itself, where quality is defined by the MoQ, dynamic quality. MoQ is its own grandpa. This strange-loopy recursiveness is very attractive (to me). Maximising happiness is also very “pragmatic”.

Sam goes on to highlight artistic, aethetic quality that is not amenable to “logical” analysis. This is not new or contentious.

Sam says “I consider intellect (in the Western sense) to be something of an anti-DQ death-force, precisely because it seeks a ‘closed’ and formal understanding.” I say I wish I’d written that first. Spot on. This is Godel / Hofstadter again.

Sam concludes (before pre-loading ammunition for his critics)
[Quote] Again, I think this is something that Pirsig himself articulates in ZMM, not least when he discovers the Sophists properly, and their teaching that ‘man is the measure of all things’, and Pirsig writes, “Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! not ethical relativism. Not pristine ‘virtue’. But arete. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along.” Rhetoric – the development of the capacity to discern quality – is the pre-eminent technique for developing autonomous individuals. It seems fitting for this to be the most notable characteristic of the fourth level. [Unquote]

Sam, I think I agree. Not sure re-naming the fourth level Eudaimonia helps enlighten. We should just re-label it with any existing name for the highest quality – you list plenty. Quality or Dynamic Quality or MoQ itself, and damn the recursion.

Alternatively, let’s just maintain the “Intellectual” label for the fourth level, but make sure we have a clear definition that this is what MoQ means by intellectual. Least resistance line to the right conclusion, no ? MoQ is the highest intellectual pattern. (So much ongoing discussion misses this meta-problem of discussing the MoQ within the MoQ – this would expose that beautifully.)

Wot, still no god ? 😉

Completed Hofstadter and Dennett’s “The Mind’s I” on the way back to Perth, Oz. Although it peters out a bit, with Hofstadter’s “Conversation with Einstein’s Brain” there are still more gems in there.

After Lem’s excellent “Non Serviam” mentioned previously, we still have Ray Smullyan’s “Is God a Taoist”, John Searle’s “Minds, Brains and Programs”, and Thomas Nagel’s “… Bat”

Nagel’s Bat has been well aired here previously, and familiarity no doubt breeds contempt. There’s actually quite a lot wrong with it and the editors’ reflections, not so much wrong, as missed opportunity. Bats are not only not blind, they “see” with sound, but their vision must be incredibly vivid and textured compared to our world of one-dimensional electromagnetism, they have so many layers of modulation as well as wavelengths to play with and, what’s more, they are in control of it. Nagel’s Jimi Hendrix to Hofstadter’s J.S.Bach maybe. Of course there is something “it’s like to be” a bat, even if its self-conscious “I” is no doubt pretty limited by its neurone count. Again, it’s not all or nothing. There must be some kinda way outta here. Next.

Smullyan, on the other hand, was new to me. His brief dialogue with “god” on free-will and ethics, can’t help but lead you to a Taoist, non-teleological, pan-theist view of the “laws of nature”. Liked the conclusion ….

[Quote]
Mortal : You certainly seem partial to Eastern philosophy !
God : Oh, not at all ! Some of my finest thoughts have bloomed in your native American soil.
[Unquote]

East and West are merely points of view as Northrop and others have pointed out. In fact Smullyan is thinking of neither Northrop nor Pirsig, but Walt Whitman when he quotes … “I give nothing as duties. What others give as duties, I give as living impulses.” Native American is good too – the ambiguity in the native referring to the “mortal” in the dialogue works on three levels at least. Clever stuff.

Searle is ultimately disagreed with by Dennett and Hofstadter. This legendary discussion on AI covers the “Chinese Room” and McCarthy’s infamous “thermostat”. Like many a thought experiment the “ifs” are probably too incredible to begin with, but whilst the particular case doesn’t support AI, the reasoning does, even if it is more geared to the material of brains than the form and architecture of the software levels they can support. The disagreements seem subtle compared to the power of the arguments for Strong AI. (I see Roger Schank’s work gets yet more namechecks, alongside Block, Dreyfus, Haugeland, Wilensky and Winograd. Must read Schank and understand better why Jorn Barger fell out with him. My instinct is to stick with Barger. The criticisms of strong AI seem to be targetted at the falsity of early claims to haver created it, rather than the possibility in principle.) The thermostat story, just illustrates the problem with excluded-middle / binary arguments about what constitutes AI. Let’s move on.)

Hofstadter’s GEB has a thread – his eternal golden braid I guess – on strange loops from the outset, mathematical, visual and musical at the obvious level of his title, and clearly from the content, he’s leading to the idea of emergence of “intelligence” from multi-layered (recursive, cyclical) patterns of complexity.

I noted a clear strategic / tactical game-theory angle in the “evolutionary” cycles of development. Whether it’s the mathematical quest for a model to completely contain all others, or a record player to play all records designed to break it (GEB shows its age there), or a model that humans know more than any formal system can, or the game between advertisers “honesty” and their target audiences, or a bio-evolutionary battle for survival, they are all battles of (metaphorical, anthropomorphic) wits. The key point that at any given “level” of current strategy, it’s a matter of trading tit for tat tactics, until either side finds a different strategy, and moves the game on a level. The other side may intially cry “foul”, but must find a new tactic that acknowledges the new strategy. Strategy continuously leap-frogs tactic, until it finds itself to be just another outmoded tactic in the face of a new strategy. It’s an inevitable driver for evolution.

The aspect that creates the drive is the desire for a “response” that is the response to beat all responses. ie it accomodates all previous responses, but for good measure claims to include the defintion of (or response to) itself, so that no further response can trump it. It really is the Russelian set of all sets vs Godel’s incompleteness. You can’t win, but you can’t step out of the game either. (NB out of the “frame” … frame analysis here, and a Pirsigian connection too, and for me the original metaphysical “bootstrapping” problem.)

Two other corollaries …

(1) The problem is when you give the concept, “the idea of the mother of all responses” a name, a definition. because you are always then back in the linguistic game. Any conceptual high ground is lost. (Hence the attraction of Zen, at least as a concept, if not a solution ;-))

(2) Talking of mothers, it is also in fact a manifestation of a conundrum that I’ve called the parent / sibling problem in classification / ontologies. Supertype is called “a widget”; a popular subtype is also commonly known as “a widget”; a less common subtype (of the supertype) is also a widget by inheritance, but is usually know as a “special widget”. Special widget gets very confused about the identities of its mother and sister. (Also the “I am my own Grandpa” variation on that theme.)

The really attractive positive conclusion of all this … there can never be a complete formal model of everything or a metaphysics with solid foundations and defences … get used to it … forget that, but do we really have “mechanism” to explain the emergence of intelligence from physical patterns ? Wow.

[Post Note : Of course this links directly to the “learning organisation” and “theory in use” cycle stuff in the original business context in my dissertation – low-level adjustments within the current “model” as loops within higher loops of “strategic shift”. Bullshit baffles brains, but that doesn’t make it wrong.]

One important thread in the development of Pirsig’s ideas, starting with Northrop and the aboriginals of “Latin” America (and all points “East” of western thinking), continued in the North American Indian anthropological forays with Verne Dusenberry. A descendent of said anthropologist points out that Dusenberry’s book is back in print with Oklahoma University Press.

Some interesting Dusenberry biographical points just in the site blurb which might explain Pirsig’s remarks that Dusenberry had a better knack than he did, when it came to interacting with the indians on their own terms. He was an adopted son.

Is that snow on the top of my reading list ?

[Note also error in the Laverne Madigan details in the Pirsig timeline – to be corrected.]

Just started Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel, Escher, Bach – An Eternal Golden Braid” – A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll. So far, I’m reading his 1999 Preface to the 20th Anniversary Edition of his 1979 original Pullitzer prize winner.

It’s a book about life, mind, and the evolving psychology of “I” in self-referential loops, crossing multi-level patterns in systems of sufficient complexity. His preface is mainly frustration that despite his earlier prize-winning success, few people writing about his book seem to have got the message amongst all his artistic and musical metaphors.

His bio leading up to the book is intriguing and reminiscent of many others, Pirsig for one, and perhaps myself too in a small way at least, so I’m already sympathetic to the message.

After being struck by the self-referential beauty of Godel’s theorem in refuting Russell and Whitehead’s “Principia Mathematica” – he set out thinking mathematical / formal logic was the subject that excited him, but dropped out of Maths in Berkeley after just one year of “dead” logic.

Doing Physics from 1967 onwards at Eugene Oregon, he was just off Pirsig’s ZMM Oregon trail in July 1968. But, it was 1972 before Hofstadter set off on his own trek across Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alberta, pitching his tent in forests beside lakes and the like. In his case rolling not on a Honda, but cruisin’ in a ’56 Mercury – cue refrain “My baby crazy ’bout a Mercury …” (K C Douglas, 1949) Understanding the Godelian matters ever more clearly. After then going back south he continued East and he too ended up the Big Apple’s Manhattan, albeit 20 years after Kerouac, but beating Pirsig by two years, taking in Zen and “voguish” anti-scientific, hippie-irrationality (wot, no drugs Douglas?) with Molecular Biology, not to mention Escher and his Illusory Loops and Bach and his Fugues along the way. He eventually returned to Oregon to complete graduate studies, but by the time he settled on his PhD and was moving towards AI, he had already seen the subject matter shift from mathematics and logic, to philosophy and linguistics.

That same fine line between rejecting exclusively objective logic, without being branded anti-scientific. Will we find some link between the logical paradoxes of self referential loops and the blurring of objectivity with … something else. That self-referential problem and the bootstrapping of metaphysics must be the same issue at core.

ALso love the story of creating his own printed book for publication, using traditional techniques, only to have his efforts hit the buffers at the finishing line. Very reminiscent of T E Lawrence.

Time to stop speculating, and read on.

Nice to get a word of encouragement in response to the previous post – thanks Georganna. I’ve actually stepped out of both threads of debate, purely for a breather – I’ll be back. I don’t want to go the same way as Pirsig, exhaustion to the point of total breakdown, “in the effort to outflank the entire body of western thought”. It sure is hard work.

I genuinely don’t want to waste the breath – like Dennett, amongst others who “peremptorily dismiss” such issues of faith in any kind of purposeful causal god, my preferred tactic is just to ignore and if necessary reject out of hand any such suggestions. However there are good and bad theologians and some, after overcoming the initial offence, do seem prepared for open debate – open to everything except a change of premise it seems. What is the point ? Well none it turns out, if I explain to you my thought for today, really just another re-statement of my Catch-22 I guess.

I think I’ve stumbled on something. Clearly religious faith is in deep in all socio-political structures. Religious faithful were never my target – are still not a “target” at all – I really would ignore them if they went away to mind their own business. There is clearly another suggestion (equally offensive, no doubt) of an element of religious faith for the non-intellectual who just want something convenient to plug the mysterious gaps in the world – isn’t that Marx’s opiate of the people ? Anyway, as long as people who’d really rather not worry about difficult questions never get into positions of power and influence then we might be OK.

The dangerous ones are those who are either cynically exploitative (I might say evil) in their power, or worse still, the buggers who seem to want to argue using “dishonest intellect” – and this is the key point – that dishonesty is of course generally NOT pre-meditated NOR evil NOR a conspiracy (see exceptions above). Of course it looks to have a conspiracy behind it, in exactly the same way the creation looks to have an intelligent designer behind it. What it is, is the same widespread misplaced western faith in objective / logical positivism. Exactly the same. As in exactly. Using that misplaced style of argumentation, you can indeed convince / be convinced you are right in your faith. The intellectual argument is not so much “dishonest” as plain misguided.

The very problem I was trying to find a solution to for more parochial “business management” reasons. I always knew it spread across all “organisational decision making”, right to the highest national and international government and non-government organisations, but until this moment I had never spotted it was exactly the same problem “western” churches suffered from. How right Pirsig was with his “Church of Reason” – even if he was using “church” in the more figurative sense.

Oh my god, this is truly awful. The logical positivist memeplex reinforces the religious memeplex. Science has unwittingly been it’s own worst enema.

So back to plan A. The original plan was in fact correct. Ignore them as politely as possible and keep working to get “higher quality” argumentation and decision rationale in at a very simple level, far away from the battlefront. Evolution always needed segregation and nurture as well as comptetition for survival. We need a domain where the meme has space to replicate, re-inforce, meet complementary memes, breed a nice healthy memeplex and some suitably supportive environmental conditions, and then find opportunities for stealthy break-out into the wider world.

So, we’re looking for a godless place to breed. Don’t you just love the dirty jobs.

(And psst – as I said, it neeeds to be a conspiracy, kept secret from those other buggers. Talk about Catch-22. Mum’s the word.)

Following a search hit I find a source that links many of mine ….

Pirsig and VUB/Heilighen, (Einstein Meets Magritte) with Josephson (explaining the paranormal with open minded science) with Dennett, Searle and Chalmers (PoM / Consciousness) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

A paper in the 1995 JCS reviewing the 1995 Einstein Meets Magritte conference.

Both a bit pricey ? Let me think about this.

(Almost looks like the 1995 “Einstein Meets Magritte” conference intiative was a direct pre-cursor to the later multi-disciplined “Science of Consciousness” conferences. – I had just assumed some coincidence of content, but I think not. Interestingly the title of the 2004 JCS article here, about the Tucson conferences, was “Ten Years On”, and this JCS editorial talks about working on the Tucson agenda in 1993. Interesting read. – Oh well, so much for causality.)

Talking of Magritte, he seems to link several other threads of mine too. Foucault’s review of “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” (This is not a pipe) by Magritte, Oliver Sacks front cover “Ceci est ma femme” (The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat) in the style of Magritte. “Le Grand Guerre” on the cover of Searle’s “Mind – A Brief Introduction”

And talking of Searle, I’m now almost finished. After my impatient initial view, I have to say this is 100% common sense and pragmatic view of consciousness and mind.

Sorry to keep going on about it but there really is some great convergence here for the taking, if people are prepared to synthesise debate constructively, rather than analyse arguments destructively. Careful with that razor Occam, or that knife Aristotle, or that axe Eugene.

(PS also picked-up a search hit linking Donald Schon with Positivism. Come back to that later.)

Brad Cox and Greg Balzer.