[MF] reality: interactions or quality?

[Ant McWatt]

Ted Cole asked Kevin Perez: Are you saying that a good metaphysics should be 
more popular at
this point if it is really any good?

Kevin Perez replied February 16th:  I'm trying to get at the root of the 
Metaphysics of Quality.

Ant McWatt comments:

Kevin,

I don't know if this will help you but this evening I was just re-reading 
this e-mail I received from Henry Gurr (the emeritus physics professor who 
gives ZMM to his students to read) last March:


Pirsig (and Owen Barfield**) remind us that:

ALL of this Physics and Cosmology exist only in our minds. So we better 
remember that these "projections of physics and cosmology" have no 
reality... we don't know "reality" and will never know "reality". We just 
have these plausible gigantic stories we tell ourselves. The stories just 
happen to have utility when you sit down to fix a motorcycle!

As for reading, I would think that Brian Green's popular book on 
?"Cosmology"? or Steven Hawking’s book on "A Brief History of Time" would 
not steer you too wrong. I keep up with articles in "Physics Today" and 
"Science" Magazine and "The American Scientist"...

But do NOT look for any of these writers to help you with Pirsig's 
"Operation of Value" in the Quantum World. Unless they specifically mention 
Pirsig, they will be totally into the dualistic thinking and completely 
unaware of the limitations. In fact as they discuss their theories, they are 
both thinking and talking about these as Reality, even though they should 
know better.

Pirsig is telling us that Value is a name that we give for the unknown that 
makes it all go. And makes us go (inside of us). It is unknown. We shall 
never know it. We must work with, and make sense of what we see, assuming 
that something there is an earlier cause that "makes the world go". We can 
try to project backwards from what we know, to something earlier in an 
assumed causal chain. Our discoveries can take us earlier and earlier in an 
assumed causal chain. But earlier is ALL we may expect. We can't get back to 
the origin of value.

Like the zero moment of: 1) the Big Bang, 2) absolute zero Kelvin on the 
temperature scale, or 3) the infinitesimal of Calculus, we will never get to 
the "origin".

Reality and the source of reality will remain forever unknown. There is no 
God's Eye level of seeing for us.

** See "Saving the Appearances" by Owen Barfield. This book is very 
difficult to read. But is also very rewarding. It agrees with and covers 
territory that overlaps with Pirsig.

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