[MD] Intellectual Level

[david buchanan]

Marsah said to dmb:
I have never said any old thing is right.


dmb says:
You weren't quite that pithy, but that does seem to be what you're saying. You said, for example, "Reality is whatever you think it is, there's no way you can lie about it, and if you change your understanding of reality, then reality changes too."

Do you think there is any real difference between saying "any old thing is right" and saying "reality is whatever you think it is"? I don't. Do you think there's a big difference between "there's no way to lie about it" and "there's no way to be wrong"? I don't. They sound more like infantile wishes than philosophical assertions. And this mindless whateverism is so obviously NOT what Pirsig is saying. It is as if you've taken the ideas about the personal and aesthetic factors in our rationality, about multiple truths and the provisionality of those truths and put them all in a blender with two cups of marshamallows and set the thing on high. 

Now who's gonna clean that up?


 > > Andre quoted Pirsig: 
> >> 'Poincare then hyposthesized that this selection is made by what he called the 'subliminal self',
> >> an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phaedrus called pre-intellectual awareness.
> >> The subliminal self, Poincarre said,looks at a large number  of solutions to a problem, but only the
> >> INTERESTING ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the
> >> subliminal self on the basis of 'mathematical beauty', of the harmony of numbers and forms, of
> >> geometric elegance. 'This is a true esthetic feeling which all mathematicians know',Poincare said...
> >> It is this harmony, this beauty that is at the center of it all'.
> >> 
> >> Poincare made it clear that he was not speaking of romantic beauty, the beauty of appearances which
> >> strike the senses. He meant classic beauty, which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, AND
> >> WHICH A PURE INTELLIGENCE CAN GRASP, which gives structure to romantic beauty and without which life
> >> would be only vague and fleeting...'. My emphasis.(ZMM, p261)
>
"Mathematics, the cornerstone of scientific certainty, was suddenly uncertain. We now had TWO contradictory visions of unshakable scientific truth, true for all men of all ages, regardless of the individual preferences.  This was the basis of the profound crisis that shattered the scientific complacency of the Gilded Age. HOW DO WE KNOW WHICH ONE OF THESE GEOMETRIES IS RIGHT? ...And of course once that door was opened one could hardly expect the number of contradictory systems of unshakable scientific truth to be limited to two. A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid's postulate, but also the first axiom..."