[MD] Quantum Physics, Amerindians, Zen, the woods, beyond SOM

[Heather Perella]

Hello Robert and All,

     I have lots of quotes, but find this book I bring
up here fitting into what Pirsig mentioned as and I
paraphrase, 'eventually it all comes back to the
Indian.'  If it comes down to having standards of
static quality, a measure of excellence, of quality,
then here's a stab, a shot in the dark.

     [Robert]
     What other folks does this group propose...??


     You mentioned Bergson.  I have another book that
even uses dynamic in the way of MoQ.  Here's a quote
from "The Way of the Human Being" by Calvin Martin as
follows:
     "...'creativity' and 'imagination' are themselves
lame words.  Nor will 'pantomime' work, either.  None
of them tells us the true nature of the dynamic here;
none of them - art, creativity, pantomime, mimicry -
realizes that there is a field of force already
contained within the thing observed."
     Here's some other quotes that have quality:

     "...one must 'see the life' in something,
implying, of course, that it has 'being' already. 
Implying as well that the craftsman is not entirely
responsible for the final outcome.  The final outcome
is a joint accomplishment, and is not even final, of
course.  The substrate, the object, has being - a
voice, a story, a personality, a face.  The driftwood
that John Kailukiak finds on the beach... carves into
his wondrous masks:  is it using him to assume a
different shape?>  Does the wood find him just as he
is finding it?  For the Yup'ik Eskimos know that there
is a Spirit of the Driftwood; they carve its face,
too.  What kind of mutual intercourse, mutual
perception is happening here?"

     "The issue is ontological (literally, belonging
to the 'study of being, of reality')... Not only do
kass'aqs (whitemen - actually generalized from the
Russians that first came to Alaska) not 'think' like
Yup'ik; we don't blend with the atomic structure of
the earth in the way they do."

     "How could an electron passing through a hole,"
wondered Einstein in the 1930's, puzzling over a
slightly different version of the experiment,
"possibly know that another hole has been made some
distance away?"  The answer, apparently - and it is a
most disturbing one - is that the experimenter know
it.  'In some strange sense, this is a participatory
universe, ' reminds Einstein's colleague John
Archibald Wheeler... Wheeler tells us, in the presence
of ' a mysterious new entrant on the stage of
physics,' something that ' may someday turn out to be
the fundamental building unit of all that is, more
basic even than particles or fields of force or space
and time themselves.'  Wheeler christens it the
'elementary quantum phenomenon'; most physicists now
refer to it as 'superposition.'  Here at the very
heart of what is real, the deepest question one can
pose to the universe, we are ushered into the presence
of a smiling, sublime paradox:  'No elementary quantum
phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered
phenomenon - that is to say, brought to a close by an
irreversible act of amplification such as the
triggering of a photodetector or the initiation of an
avalanche of electrons in a geiger counter... or the
word spoken or written, of a sentient observer.  'When
we change the observing equipment,' cautions Wheeler,
'we do not learn more about that phenomenon.  We have
instead a phenomenon that is new and different.  The
observer's choice of what he shall look for has an
inescapable consequence for what he will find.'

     "The beautiful thing about superposition and
nonlocality is their  uncompromising insistence that
humans are fundamental participants in creating the
event.  Nor will it do to hide behind our
consciousness, claiming for it the sovereign power of
detached observation, and so saving ourselves from
tumbling into the Event.  No, responds the spectral
voice of superposition, we are participants before
consciousness is even awakened - we have no choice in
the matter."

     These quotes speak of dynamic quality,
"...participants before consciousness is even
awakened...".  Dq before static patterns may
eventually emerge, thus, dq and the code of art
flashing in our experience and if need be, we may
apply static patterns to further latch our experience.
 Yet, it all begins with "superposition.  Does the
answer to all of reality lie within its ghostly,
cosmic ganglia that are somehow our own?  Wheeler,
following on Bohr and his group, clearly thought so. 
And are we to believe that this quantum reality is the
invisible glue of our everyday, common relationships
and experience, the deceptively straightforward realm
of tables and chairs, of trees and mountains?  Or of
bears, say - or beavers?"  Thus, the hardness of an
electron isn't known until the observer provides an
opinion, a belief about the hardness of the electron,
participating and constraining the outcome of the
hardness of the electron by the questions asked, thus,
in superposition it isn't right to say the detector is
"...pointing to 'hard,' and it isn't right to say that
Martha believes that the pointer is pointing to
'soft,' and it isn't right to say that she has both of
those beliefs (whatever that might mean), and it isn't
right to say that she has neither of those beliefs.' 
In fact, it isn't until the observer specifies in some
definitive, concrete fashion her belief in where the
pointer is pointing that the event is actually born as
an outcome."

     So, we have dynamic quality, unknown, thus,
pre-intellectual.  We have superposition in quantum
mechanics, thus, unknowings about particles, until
according to what we believe or have opinion about
what is to be measured - the outcome, the intellect
has answers based on the specifics we define by our
questions.  Also, "Nalungiaq, the Eskimo, offered an
explanation for all this metaphysic by saying that 'in
the very first times,' when 'both people and animals
lived on the earth,... a person could become an
animal, and an animal could become a human being....
Sometimes they were people and other times animals,
and there was no difference....   All spoke the same
tongue...."  This reality is still present when the
stories are understood by those that still listen to
the stories, "Here, in this strange, fantastic
universe of the subatomic particle, we approach the
reality spoken of in the myths, - that reality invoked
by an old Yup'ik man who somehow knew that moose
surely hear us, of the hunter quietly telling his wife
that he saw 'something dark' in the bush today, the
world of an old woman dancing an oyster into the shape
of a whale."

     It is not that we learn something new, it is a
shift in how we participate with the world.  The world
can be of kinship, we can live with the world, and we
create the world - it comes down to perception.  So,
once the world is participated and is not separated
from us, the outcome is a totally different story of
this universe.  In a separated universe, "Gone is the
Power of 'something'; in its place are rigidly
measured shapes:  poplar bark, beaver, beaver lodge,
with no room for being anything other.  A great cosmic
door has slammed shut; reality itself has moved over a
notch.  A beaver is now a beaver is but a beaver.  Our
hunter is now thinking as an empiricist; he has
doubted his role in the 'participatory universe'.  In
sum... that's exactly why the Micmac, the real people,
tell these didactic stories:  to maintain a grip on
true reality."

     It not only comes back to the Indians, as Pirsig
stated, but it comes back to our living here together
as stories weave something that Aristotle follied. 
The Paleolithic times in Europe and everywhere around
the world.  The traditions that still speak the
stories now when we take a walk in the woods, live
Zen, notice beyond SOM.

Thanks,
SA   

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