Category: Pirsig

ZMM for Teaching Lawyers and Pilots. Interesting page from J R Elkins’ West Virginia Univ “Moral Philosophy for Lawyers” course material, with a very positive view of Pirsig’s ZMM.

And memes are self-reinforcing. Talk about blindingly obvious. It’s my Catch-22. How do you argue rationally against scientific fundamentalism / logical positivism ?

I’ve read Dawkins, though I’ve still never read “The Meme Machine”, but now I’ve just read Susan Blackmore’s “Waking from the Meme Dream“. Stong Zen thread here – clearing the mind of those certainties of memes from the history of humanity – to allow a little doubt in. Waking from the collective dream that scientific rationale is the answer to everything.

I’d only previously seen memes as matter of fact metaphor for how ideas spread – I’d never seen it before as the reason why bad, but easy to understand, ideas become the norm. Again blindingly obvious. A natural selection process tending to conformance and common denominators in the space where ideas compete for airtime – the brain and the web of comms media. Where ideas are concerned good (fitness) equals easy to communicate / understand / fit the web of communication – fit with available schemata – it does not relate to any intrinsic value relationship between the content of the idea and it’s application in the world beyond communication itself, without some postive feedback. If we all hold logical / scientific schemata, and our feedback allways post-rationalises event outcomes against ideas as inputs, then all ideas will tend to be scientific.

BTW the “TAO” site (Hungarian ?!) where I found Susan’s paper has some magic content – lots of links to full texts of many interesting works including Pirsig’s ZMM naturally, only some of them in Hungarian.

Where to start – I have 12 pages of notes from David Gurteen’s 3rd Knowledge Management Conference in London yesterday 3rd March 2004. (Matt Mower has blogged notes too.) The main speakers were David Snowden (IBM / Cynefin) and various advocates and users of the Cynefin framework – Martyn Laycock, Bruce Cronin, Les Johnson, Anabelle Mark. Personal impressions …

Overwhelming sense of re-inforcement, of those ill-expressed ideas of my own in this blog and my underlying thesis, by the Dave Snowden / Cynefin consulting framework analysis of modelling organisational complexity. This wave is a “Kondratiev Tsunami”, and Cynefin has given us some surfboards on which to survive when it thunders up the beach of general business management in 3 or 5 years time. Hype ? Actually I hope not, ‘cos we (all) really need this to happen on so many levels.

Not much is actually new. Boston Consulting 2×2 grids, as I’ve opined before, but with a new twist of axes that focus on what really defines the manageability of an organisation – order<>unorder and complexity<>simplicity. The way human behaviour contributes to that order and complexity (as complex-adaptive, post-rationalising agents in complex-adaptive systems”), and the socially and culturally conditioned “schemata” we humans hold to guide our decision making, are thrown into immediate spotlight as the issues to be “managed”. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and story-telling are as old as human life, and surprisingly for some, many philosophical writers and management commentators have been pointing out their relevance to what makes the world go round for aeons too. Cynefin get’s this stuff into management powerpoint-land not a day too soon for those of us in businesses riding the Information & Communications Technologies wave. Aren’t we all ?

How many of those presenters and participants yesterday had languages and philosophy as their first degrees ? How many had learned their wisdom in cybernetics and the like ? Most.

The questions are ancient – when you act or plan to act, how do you know what’s true and how do you know what’s right ? Newton / Einstein, Socrates / Pirsig, Rudyard Kipling / Douglas Adams / James Willis – all human life is here.

More coherent report to follow.

Rational Ignorance [Jo Ito] [via McGee]. Interesting. On the balance between academic and detailed “rationale” in the language a 12 year old could understand (O-level theory as I call it) on the one hand, and inspired (and interesting, and involving, and rhetorical, and aesthetic) brevity on the other.

The former is of course Pirsig’s death grip of scientific rationalism, whereas the latter is pure Quality. As Einstein may have said, approximately, in science, the hard bit is the inspiration to “find” a hypothesis (from who knows where), whereas disproving it using the logic of scientific method is the easy mechanical chore. Advancing the boundaries of science relies on this chore. Advancing human knowledge is another matter.

Just started reading James Joyce’s Ulysses yesterday (it had to happen one day, Jorn). I’m about six chapters in (two chapters into the second part) and surprised to find it not too hard going. Plenty of unintelligible neologisms, but they don’t interrupt the already strange prose-poetry flow. Plenty of intriguing throwaways that presumably hint at things we do not yet know about Mulligan and Daedalus. For a book accalimed as the novel of the 20th century, not surprising to find one or two wonderful turns of phrase.

Most intriguing are the Nietzschean Superman and Zarathustra references. Set in 1904, written between 1906 and publication in 1922, there are no references to Nietzsche in the copious introductory bibliographical and biographical notes (I’m reading the Paris / Shakespeare 1922 text published by OUP). I didn’t think Nietzsche had been translated into English at that time ? Did Joyce read the original German, whilst living in Austria ?

Another intriguing point is that the chapter naming plan (implicit only in the 1922 text, but explicit in earlier drafts) includes a chapter “Scylla and Charybdis” – the title used by James Willis in his essay on the pitfalls (whirlpool) of rationalism prompted by his reading of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Rather naively I guess, I was also rather surprised at all the references to the politics and war of Irish independence.

Reading it in the Pickerell, as usual, a couple of English students were interested to know if it was my first read of it and how I was finding it, given that it was on their reading list and they hadn’t started it yet. More difficult to understand was why was I reading it given that I didn’t have to.

In Search of the Real University of Chicago. Andrew Chrucky runs this site dedicated to “preserving the Hutchins tradition of liberal education at Chicago Uni”, starting with glowing citations from Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell.

I blogged Chrucky [and earlier] “Concepts of Persons and Morality” (a paper about the definition of life – from the perspective of the catholic debate on abortion) and found his thinking interesting – a tacit agreement, social contract, dare I say pragmatic view. I’ll need to reconcile his positive view of the Hutchins mob with Northrop, James, Rorty and Pirsig.

Chrucky also runs his meta-encyclopaedia of philosophy, linked in my side bar for the last two years.

MoQ as Pragmatic Tool. Corresponding with Matt Kundert on the MoQ Discussion Board concerning Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, as a (the best I know) pragmatic framework for value-judgements / decision-making, despite not necessarily being worth thinking of as a “Metaphysics”, and despite not being entirely new or original – nothing new under the sun I may have said.

My last MoQ-Discuss response to Matt was a little rushed as usual, and I’ve subsequently noticed several of my themes at play here.

Firstly MoQ is a “useful framework” – nuff said surely ? When using it, it remains important to remember it’s still just a model (an approximation, a metaphor) not a fundamentally “ahistorically” real thing – if there were such a thing (See my Manifesto, point C.4). It’s something that must be allowed to evolve with circumstances. The main danger with such useful models is that familiarity and use leads to reification (the metaphor dies) and it becomes some absolute or end in itself. Is it not pragmatically preferable to have a world view reify around a generally good framework (MoQ) than a poor one (Logical Positivism / mis-placed Scientific Rationality). In an ideal world we should all caveat metaphor, but in the real world perhaps the better metaphor is at least preferable, dead or alive. (I hope my business information blogging readers are seeing the similarity with the fixed organisation / ontology vs self-organising networked community model.)

Secondly nothing new under the sun. I’ve said this many times before (Google my blog). MoQ is mirrored in Maslow’s Hierarchy (don’t just take my word for it, see Heylighen) and the general pattern is clear since Dewey et al picked up on Darwin. The basic idea was there since Socrates / Plato / Aristotle if not before. Plato and Kant have a lot to answer for – the pseudo-scientific philosophical blind-turn. Lack of originality doesn’t make it wrong though. I expressed this view in earlier MoQ threads [here], [here] and [here, point(3)]

Perhaps Pirsig shoud have stopped at ZMM and avoided Lila ? Matt expresses quite strongly the view that Pirsig misfires when he picks up the metaphysical baggage that goes with his MoQ. Matt also says [Quote] in Pirsig’s attempt to be systematic in Lila, I think he got trapped by some of the disease he was trying to cure. [Unquote] This is my Cath22 again – I’ve also expressed a view on this [here, in RANT], [here] and [Northorp version here].

Just read Barfield’s Poetic Diction, originally published in 1928, when he was 30. This Weslyan University Press edition has a 1973 Foreword by Howard Nemerov, as well as an original 1928 Preface, and 1952 Preface and a 1972 Afterword all by Barfield.

I can see why people recommended I look at Barfield after Pirsig, Northrop and Lakoff. One particular angle of my own thesis is strongly re-inforced. Knowledge is about evolutionary psychology (spooky to pick up the Pinker link below at this precise moment). This is evident in etymology and in figures of speech of all kinds. Metaphor one way or another is the main component of this development of knowledge and meaning. Some extracts that resonated …

Evoking Maitland, he says [Quote p29] If law is the point where life and logic meet, perception is the point where life and imagination meet. [Uquote]

Paralleling the Maslow / Pirsig ideas of layers of value, he refers to the idea that vestigial layers have “hygiene” value in supporting higher layers once their own function is fulfilled. [Quote p30] … the historical function of logical method has not been to add to the sum of knowledge. It has been to engender subjectivity – self-consciousness. Once this has been achieved …. there is no more that logic can do …. its surviving function is to prevent relapse. [Unquote]

Evoking Pirsig and Northrop, [Quote p61] The cause of [the disproportionately small historical interest in the connection between language and thought] is to be found in the fact that western philosophy from Aristotle onwards is itself a kind of offspring of logic.[Uquote]

Accepting for a moment that the subject is poetry (or poesis), where good = “pleasing” = aesthetic quality, it is interesting to note the recurring references to dynamism being the key. He uses the electrical dynamo analogy from the outset – no motion no potential output – to back-up the idea that poesis relies on novelty, juxtaposition, creativity, synthesis of new meaning, often by metaphorical means. Interesting to note that even “archaism” – going backwards etymologically, invoking lost words or lost meanings of current words, is equally creative. Right in the final concluding paragraphs, Movement. is the single word sentence that jumps off the page. Poetry, said Coleridge, is the best words in the best order, in other words, best language – ie Highest Quality.

On the active / passive, transitive / intransitive theme. [Quote p55/57] This ability to recognise significant resemblances and analogies, considered as in action, I shall call knowledge; considered as a state … I shall call it wisdom. …. With this expansion (knowledge) may remain something of a peramanent possession (wisdom), my aesthetic pleasure will still …. only accompany the actual moment of expansion [of consciousness] [Unquote]

[Quote p63] One of the first things even an amateur student discovers is that every modern language is apparently nothing but a tissue of petrified metaphors. [Unquote]

[Quote p132] Process is the making of meaning …. There is really no end to the secrets hidden behind single words …. Meaning itself can never be conveyed from one person to another – words are not bottles [See Lakoff’s rant on the conduit metaphor] [A book on the subject of meaning which discounts metaphor as non-scientific] is somehow horribly tragic … indeed the book is a ghastly tissue of empty abstractions. [Unquote]

Updated Dusenberry Link – The link to Dusdenberry on my Pirsig Pages, Bozeman College Page has been changed. (This is the new link I need to incorporate into the page.)

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.)