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

[Platt Holden]

> [Arlo]
> I take it we did go the route of dismissing ZMM entirely once again.

No more than you dismiss Lila.

> 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 people describe inanimate objects acting like people,  I suspect 
animism.

> 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.

I see good old relativism, the bogus idea that other cultures are just as 
knowledgeable as our own. 

> 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?

Depends on who or what is doing the valuing. Yes? Do you consider 
electrons "sentient observers?"

> 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.

Like I wrote to Ham, I didn't make the universe; I wasn't even there at 
the time. Neither were you, SA or anyone. 

> 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."

This is Pirsig in his hippie days which he later apologized for because  
the hippie movement ended up at the moral level of biological patterns.  
 
I think it's important to emphasize Pirsig's atheism rather than hint he 
might be receptive to the idea of the Great Spirit. But, I could be wrong.