[MD] Is this the inadequacy of the MOQ?

[John Carl]

Tim,

I haven't read it in a long time.  In fact, I got introduced to the Tao of
Physics at the same time and by the same guy who introduced me to ZAMM, and
Deep Ecology, as well.  George Sessions, at Sierra College.  What I
remembered most about it, was the supporting congruence it offered for my
reading of Pirsig.  RMP put a lot of the same realization into his novel,
that Capra did in his book.  But of course, through a more narrative
perspective.
 But notice the congruences?  Tao-Physics; Zen-Motorcycle Maintenance?
Gotta mean something.

I like narrative perspectives.  Maybe its my indian blood, but if it doesn't
fit into some kind of story, I can't understand it.  And I like happy
endings, which is why I'm attracted to metaphysical Idealism.  I want to
fully believe in the quality of it all.  Call it "psychological dependence",
I suppose.



On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 11:45 PM, <rapsncows at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> John,
>
> I was following up on the tao of physics and found this amit goswami
> guy: my curiosity is peaked
>
> AG: I'm glad that you asked that question. This should be clarified and
> I will try to explicate it as clearly as I can. The early work, like The
> Tao of Physics, has been very important for the history of science.
> However, these early works, in spite of supporting the spiritual aspect
> of human beings, all basically held on to the material view of the world
> nevertheless. In other words, they did not challenge the material
> realists' view that everything is made up of matter. That view was never
> put to any challenge by any of these early books.


I disagree.  If all matter is made of energy, then I don't see how this
insight is anything *but* a challenge to the materialistic view.


In fact, my book was
> the first one which challenged it squarely and which was still based on
> a rigorous explication in scientific terms.


Oh, I see.  Shilling a book, then.  Well, tomato, tomahto -- polar
co-ordinates, mercator.  My realization from the Tao of Physics and the Zen
of moto maintenance, was that by laying two differing maps over the top of
each other and comparing, a new realization is born.  This realization
transcends any images (Koncepts)  given by either of the old maps.



> In other words, the idea
> that consciousness is the ground of being, of course, has existed in
> psychology, as transpersonal psychology, but outside of transpersonal
> psychology no tradition of science and no scientist has seen it so
> clearly.
>
>
He's never read Royce, obviously.  But that's not surprising, few have.  I
believe that what occurs when we overlay our maps, is that a bigger picture
is realized.  And the process of ongoing realization, points to an Absolute
goal, which becomes realizable without being conceptually encapsulated.
It's like 1.99999999 becoming 2 in practice, even though technically we know
we'll never get there.  There's a real good
essay<http://www.borges.pitt.edu/documents/2501.pdf>on the subject, by
JD Peters, on Borges and Maps.

The following, somewhat along the same lines, is from a very interesting
guy, Fredrick Dolans <http://homepage.mac.com/fmdolan/Sites/Home/>, from an
address he gave at the Grass Valley Library in 2006, before I'd heard of
Royce or man I would have been there:

Dolans:

Royce’s demonstration that the mapping must be infinite follows from the
nature of
measurement or mapping. Since any measure is ideal, all measurements or
mappings idealize,
and can therefore always be made more precise. Progress towards greater
precision, however,
engenders ever-greater and finally overwhelming complexity. That is why
Hegel, in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, compares Absolute Knowing to a Bacchic revel “in
which no one is not
drunk.”

For Borges, unlike Hegel, this is not because we are driven to correct error
and achieve
completeness (a fool’s paradise and mug’s game), but because a new narrative
suggests how
different things matter differently, and one is moved to relate how things
seemed before to how
they seem now....

Royce understood, namely that one cannot take up permanent residence in the
Absolute, which is nothing more than the tautology that reality is what it
is. Occupying
the Absolute would be like having no map, or, to put it differently, the
concept of the
Absolute, at least if it is taken too seriously, is like a map that is
equivalent to its territory
– that is, useless, as the generations following Borges’s cartographers
understood. Even
the idea of “order” is just another abstraction, one that makes sense only
as a choice
among other possible abstractions and whose significance depends on our
ability to
discriminate finely among them. Having arrived at the general idea of order,
as Stevens
does in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” the only thing to do is to begin
making a
concrete, living, relevant image of order – to initiate the process of
relating events so as
to arrange them into a coherent whole by deciding anew what matters, what
doesn’t, and
why.

John:

"Deciding anew what matters, what doesn't, and why" is sorta the MoQ in a
nutshell, imo.  Trusting in the pursuit of betterness, as a realization of
betterness.  I'm convinced Royce was thinking along the same lines:


Dolans:

Royce’s concept of the Absolute as an infinitely self-duplicating object is
also, it
turns out, an anticipation of what we might think of as California’s
affinity with the
Absolute. If the essence of the Absolute is that it is the infinite (or from
our finite point
of view, endless) production of parts of itself that represent (or map) the
whole, then
Hollywood would seem to have shared what I take to be Royce’s premonition
that
German Idealism expresses the basic premises of the Golden State. Thus,
Paramount
Studios designed a map of the state that shows how various parts of it
represent the most
remote locations, from the Red Sea to the South Sea Islands – that, indeed,
shows how
California itself can be imagined as, or even more to the point – perhaps it
comes to the
same thing – can be desired as a text that aspires to embrace the narratives
of the world.


Take care, Tim,

California John