[MD] Distinguishing Levels (Platt's Individual level)

[MarshaV]

At 05:53 PM 5/30/2006, Platt wrote:
>Not that I can tell. To me intellect creates intellectual patterns and
>garners meaning from the intellectual patterns of others. Pure
>experience, however, is pre-intellectual. I agree with  with Pirsig
>that pure experience = reality = value = morality. And I agree that it
>is from the state of pure experience that DQ is most likely to be
>recognized. So, yes, if you accept Pirsig's premises and follow his
>logic, the statement you refer to makes sense. That's why I pursue
>Beauty. It's pure experience, independent of intellectual patterns and,
>at its best, is transparent to DQ.

Hi Platt,

Just something to think about.  Not to be a kill-joy, but I found 
this in the book ''The View from the Center of the Universe', by Joel 
Primack and Nancy Abrams.

"There is a romantic notion that the true scientific theory is always 
the most beautiful one.  John Keat's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ends: 
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all / ye know on earth, 
and all ye need to know."  However, truth may be beautiful, but 
beauty is not always truth.  A theory appears beautiful generally 
because it appeals to some deep preference like simplicity (meaning 
we can understand it) or symmetry, but the universe exists on size 
scales, such as the size of atoms, to which humans have no conscious 
connection.  What happens on these size scales is beyond human 
experience -- and maybe even beyond our imagination.  If quantum 
physics, relativity, and modern cosmology have taught us anything, it 
is that things are not always the way they seem.  The universe is 
under no obligation to be the way our aesthetic sensibilities might 
with or expect.  To assume that we earthlings can accurately judge 
cosmic truth by what seems beautiful to us here and now is really 
hubris, and using beauty this way as a criterion for truth can be a 
prejudice if it keeps a scientist from find a successful theory that 
looks very different from expectations." (p. 28)

Static patterns might come in beautiful packages that point away from 
dynamic quality.

Marsha