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

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt]
Remember that people were burned at the stake to release their "spirits" 
from their bodies.  Quality inheres in high-priced sausages.  Spirit does not.

[Arlo]
I take it we did go the route of dismissing ZMM entirely once again. No 
matter, I don't disagree with the Pirsig quotes you've provided, I just 
don't see the "animism" in SA's post.

When he asks, "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?", I see little 
contradiction in how Quality gives rise to, and precedes both subjects and 
objects.

When he talks of other cultures "we don't blend with the atomic structure 
of the earth in the way they do", I see directly the cultural origins of 
sand we sort.

When he quotes, "'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.", I see "nothing is 
real that is not valued". If something is not valued, it does not exist. No?

Perhaps your response was mainly to SA's inclusion of Indians and Zen, two 
things you'd like the MOQ to forget? Because oddly I find, "The beautiful 
thing about superposition and nonlocality is their  uncompromising 
insistence that humans are fundamental participants in creating the event" 
to be a wonderful restatement of how Quality brings subjects and object 
into existence.

Or perhaps it is the quote, "Our hunter is now thinking as an empiricist; 
he has doubted his role in the 'participatory universe'." that harkens to 
Pirsig's great observation that "And now he began to see for the first time 
the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand 
and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built 
empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into 
enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for 
this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an 
understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of 
it."