Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, An Inquiry into Values

The Umbral Moonshine Conjecture has been established, making it now theoretically possible to measure infinity in the real world. Assuming 42 is as good as it gets, it means everything they measure should eventually prove to be infinite in some regard, including any mathematics they care to use. Without a sense of humor, Zen becomes the art of missing the big picture. He couldn't know it when he wrote this book, without being more of an expert than academic philosophers, who are stupid as hell, but the mathematics, physics, and linguistics had already been developed which suggested that 42 is as good as it gets.

 

I never got into the book.

I was a staunch proponent of "Dove" (about sailing), and "Brave New World" (about soma... , or something else. I think the main guy kills himself at the end - anticlimactic). I read the chronicles of Narnia a couple of times too. But I couldn't get past the term "Zen", at least not at the age of 14. What I mean is I always sort of felt like I was selling my faith if I accepted "Zen"; not that those who've read the book have, no - nothing of the sort... But when I was young I had been raised by a very devoutly Catholic family; more so on my mother's side, but both sides went to church. Always. Religiously...

And so, because I perceived "Zen" as a religious philosophy differing from my own, I felt like there was literally a conflicting paradigm - it would have been contradictory, and further my family would have me divest from it...



So, I never read it and though now I'm reasonable, back then I was less able to separate intellect from faith.

 

"Reality, what a concept!" Mork from Ork

According to modern science, reality is something we can measure, and infinity is something we can measure in reality, because the mind and brain are actually a self-organizing system, and your dualistic logic only superficially reflects reality.

 

A thousand years later, and academic philosophers are still making the same category errors. In fact, Information theory encountered a flat out contradiction in the categories they use and, so far, has succeeded in ignoring the issue. Since they get paid to insist their own contradictions make more sense than anyone else's, its best to just humor them. Even Wittgenstein made the same error, stressing knowledge as the measure of all things. Here he's begging the question as to what is knowledge, and refusing to address the issue of authenticity. Without authenticity, it really doesn't matter what you know or what is true.

 

Horrible, just horrible, arguments. Hume was correct, in that knowledge is both acquired and intrinsic, but it is intrinsic to time itself, which is self-organizing, displaying particle-wave duality in everything, as the result of a universal recursion in the principle of identity. You could say our emotions reflect more of the wave-like knowledge we acquire from the world around us, but logic or thought or knowledge without the passage of time is a complete oxymoron, and every cell in our bodies has its own clocks, or we'd be dead. Words and concepts, including that of time, only have demonstrable meaning in light of the self-evident truth, while its quite easy to document how our own sense of humor can make more sense out of any logic or metaphysics in the real world. In other words, both these egg heads were arguing how our senses work, without any reference to our emotions, because their logic denies the real world exists.

 

Human vision provides an example, with the neural networks involved in vision all organizing around searching for what's missing from this picture. Shadows, for example, are the fastest, easiest, most efficient and reliable way to tell is another animal is moving. Ordinarily, shadows don't convey much information, but its precisely because they convey so little information, that they can more rapidly and efficiently convey what they do. The knowledge or data they convey can be described as "intrinsic" to the context, that there is actually light to give them a shadow.

Our emotions convey contextual data and help us to organize our memories. Sometimes we might literally get angry and shoot ourselves in the foot, but that reflects the fact we are relying on more error prone Three Stooges logic to prioritize our memories. Without priorities, knowledge is meaningless, without art and moving poetry, there can be no logic.

 

No, I do not teach neurology, and don't keep links. The brain is a self-organizing system, not a billiard table with balls bouncing all over the place. Your neurons don't just absorb photons, they process the data, and search for what's missing from this picture. For example, if I write, "What's **** from this picture" you can get an idea of what I'm saying. Your neurons leverage the same trick, and don't just pay attention to what the ***** contains.

The issue is speed and efficiency, and merely looking for what missing the smallest detail can be a discerning clue. Without the context of what's missing, what it contains is misleading, because the greater context inevitably determines the identity of its own contents.

 

Qualities are more context dependent, such as the "air quality", which makes his argument merely begging the question. His complete lack of awareness of Contextualism and linguistic analysis makes his book painful to read. Its like the guy is attempting to use logic and metaphysics developed during the dark ages to explain Asian philosophy. You can see the same effect in translations of the Tao Te Ching, with western missionaries often being the first to translate the text a century or so ago, and having no clue what to make of it.

 

It is one of those books that everyone and his buddy recommend , so I read that but it was back in the nineties.

 

Humor is an obvious quality he lacks, because quality is context dependent, and the only requirement to observe quality changing into quantity, is to change the context. In quantum mechanics, which he certainly never studied, sometimes you can treat a group of particles as if they were one particle, because what is a quality and what is a quantity is merely context dependent, making it easy to document. By merely examining the Big Picture, and questioning the validity of his two thousand year old logic and metaphysics, he might have actually found the answers he was looking for.

 

meagain, your post of Oct 20 (excluding the quoted sections), was superbly well-written to describe scientific, logical thinking. A 'de-quotationed' version should be posted in many 'general-audience' type threads here on Hip.

One can, and many do, wander afield with verbiage, and split hairs ad infinitum, but it was a well-put statement. Kudos.