[MD] Quantum computing

[Ham Priday]

Ian --


> It's easy to scoff at Ray Kurzweil's exaggerated hype,
> but it's also easy to miss the point. ...
> You asked:
> "Is Pirsig's philosophy built on cybernetic information?"
>
> Well yes it is, kind of.. Look at his life story. As well as
> motorcycles and barbecue sculptures, Pirsig documented
> manuals for early computing and control devices.
> Recognising the "value in the machine". (I also suspect
> you are using a narrow idea of cybernetics.)

I also documented computer manuals prior to my experience in advertising,
including a Maintenance & Repair procedure for the coding device designed to
launch missiles attached to the Alaskan Dewline system, which was an RCA
contract in the 1970s.  So I recognize not only "value in the machine" but
the tremendous potential of computers in industrial production, scientific
research, and creative applications.

My point, as always, is that there exists a psychic entitity that is
identified with every individual and by which everything in existence is
made aware.  The mind, whether you acknowledge it or not, is the subjective
half of experience which, according to Pirsig, is responsible for the world
as we know it.  It's as obvious to me as it is to Bo that proprietary human
consciousness and its intellectual function is either missing or
repositioned in the MoQ heirarchy, implying that  awareness itself is a
figment of Quality's imagination.  Pirsig's philosophy gives no credit to
human beings for inventing ideas, theories, moral systems, or works of art.
All of these faculties are treated as a part of some bio-social principle of
which man is only an evolved 'subset'.

I see this is a huge philosophical oversight.  Instead of explaining the
logic of the primary division, the MoQ refuses to recognize it.  This
doesn't "overcome" subject-object duality (if that's its intended goal); it
simply positions conscious awareness on the objective side, and we end up
with a reality that is totally other, leaving the individual hanging in
limbo.  As a consequence, any concept of individualism is rendered fictional
or "egotistical", as if the human ego is a low-quality vestige of the past,
along with religion and spirituality.

> That old object-observer interaction stuff seems to be
> a very misleading analogy to represent Heisenberg's
> apparent uncertainty. The Qubit (the quantum of undecided
> information) is becoming much more credible, and
> underlies any material reality. It is perilously close
> to the dynamic interactions of quality being more
> fundamental than subjects and objects. BUT ...

I couldn't distinguish a qubit from a quantum, not that I care.  One is as
"uncertain" as the other.  There will always be uncertainty in life -- it's
a built-in factor of man's freedom.  The goal of philosophy has always been
to achieve wisdom, not certainty.  But so long as philosophers hang on the
coat-tails of scientific materialists, they will never come up with an
epistemology that relates proprietary awareness to the experienced world.
And this, it seems to me, is where contemporary philosophy should be
heading.

-- Ham