Marie Foster <mfos@ieway.com> wrote:
> I suppose I was affected early in my life by a book called
> "The Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance".
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Very good book. It's even on
the virion recommended reading list! To a certain extent, I too was
affected by that book. I did read it three times. I *still* think that
it makes more sense to say that Quality is an emergent property of
matter/energy than vice versa... but then I'm an engineer.
Of course, I still find myself agreeing with things like the quotation
below:
The idea that Art should only ever be a mirror to reality has always
seemed ass-backwards to me, given that Art is always and everwhere
well-groomed and impecably turned out, whereas Reality wears a pair of
two-year-old Adidas trainers and a Toy Story T-shirt. As far as I'm
concernied, it's rather the job of reality to try and reflect Art.
***The purpose of Art is not to mirror reality, but to shape it by the
imprints and aspirations that it leaves in the human mind.***
-- Alan Moore
(as a last word, don't bother to read Pirsig's next book, where he further
develops the Quality metaphysics -- total waste of time)
> We remain stuck with a Newtonian view of the world yet.
Yes, we do. And that's becuase a Newtonian view *works*. Newtons laws
still get aircraft and spacecraft off the ground, and I suspect that they
will continue to do so -- regardless of the world-view of the people in
charge!
> What amuses me is that each age of man has
> felt himself at 'some kind of pinacle' of knowledge.
> And it is exactly that arrogance that has mostly led
> to our downfall.
I certainly don't think we are at a pinacle now -- although in some
subjects, we clearly have a fairly through understanding, there are others
where we are still mostly ignorant. Consider biology. I read somewhere a
while back that our knowledge of biology is still *doubling* every five
years! And things like psychology, or artifical intelligence, even digital
computing -- these are all fields where we have much to learn.
ERiC