[MD] A universe fit for man

[Ham Priday]

Platt says:

> I take it then that your answer to the question, "Did anything
> exist before human beings arrived on earth?" is "No."
> If that is indeed your answer, I suggest that may be why your
> Essence philosophy has been hard to swallow by participants
> on this site. That's certainly the case for me.

Undoubtedly this "upside down" concept of reality defies common sense, and 
I've avoided emphasizing it in my writing for that reason.  I confess it was 
hard for me to swallow, until I began to take Pirsig's statements seriously. 
But there is nothing sacred or profound about common sense, and 2000 years 
of it hasn't illuminated us as to how the universe came to be.

Stanford physicist Andrei Linde, whom I quoted as saying "I cannot imagine a 
consistent theory of everything that ignores consciousness.  It's not enough 
for the information to be stored somewhere, completely inaccessible to 
anybody.  It's necessary for somebody to look at it.  In the absence of 
observers, our universe is dead,"  has more to say on this subject, which 
you can read at http://www.slate.com/id/2100715 .  This is a conversational 
little essay by Jim Holt, a friend of  Linde who, while he exactly doesn't 
reach my conclusion, at least opens the door to it.  For example ...

"Among the many curious implications of Linde's theory, one stands out for 
our present purposes: It doesn't take all that much to create a universe. 
Resources on a cosmic scale are not required.  It might even be possible for 
someone in a not terribly advanced civilization to cook up a new universe in 
a laboratory.  Which leads to an arresting thought: Could that be how our 
universe came into being?

"'When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you 
needed to get a universe like ours started is a hundred-thousandth of a gram 
of matter,' Linde told me in his Russian-accented English when I reached him 
by phone at Stanford.  'That's enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that 
blows up into the billions and billions of galaxies we see around us.  It 
looks like cheating, but that's how the inflation theory works - all the 
matter in the universe gets created from the negative energy of the 
gravitational field.  So, what's to stop us from creating a universe in a 
lab?  We would be like gods!'"

But why a "laboratory"?  In a comment on this essay, one of Holt's readers 
says, "In our search for knowledge, we are so desperately driven by our need 
to find meaning in our own existence and the universe that contains us that 
we sometimes forget that knowledge is not only the means to an end but holds 
value in its own right."  Is it coincidental that he uses the phrase 
"knowledge...holds value in its own right"?  If Pirsig is right that Quality 
(i.e., Value) is pre-intellectual, then all intellectual knowledge is 
derived from it -- including our knowledge of an external universe.

One more argument for my case:
Keith Ward, writing on "Scientific Understanding and the Point of the 
Universe", says: "It presents a view of experienced reality as causally 
dependent upon a realm of intellectual principles of supreme simplicity and 
beauty, of utter generality and universal scope, wholly determining all 
events in accordance with its own general laws."  Note his inference that 
intellectual principles are primary to physical reality.  Intellect reflects 
human rationality, of course, and the description "supreme beauty" is a 
valuistic expression -- also a distinctly human realization.

Has it occurred to you that maybe this convoluted ontology isn't as crazy as 
it seems?

Essentially yours,
Ham