From: Ant McWatt (antmcwatt@hotmail.co.uk)
Date: Sun Jun 12 2005 - 18:00:49 BST
Ian G stated June 12th 2005:
>Good to see Kosko getting into the act - must re-visit his stuff sometime.
>Not rocket
>science, but pragmatic exploitation of the fact that very little is simple
>binary all or nothing choices - the idealised dualities are rarely
>applicable to the real
>world. Also, has Hofstadter been subject to previous debate on here ?
>... His biography and his psyche on arriving at his world view is spookily
>similar to Pirsig's
>despite him apparently retaining a pretty materialist (serious professional
>scientist) outlook from what I can tell so far - but loops of emergent
>complexity across
>multiple levels, and clear Zen "sympathies" all bode for parallel ideas.
>Also a clear line of "No objective, logical formal model can ever relate to
>the real world
>without interpretation", and a strong linguistic / anthropological
>strand to that interpretation.
Ian,
I've not read Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 Pullitzer prize winner text “Godel,
Escher, Bach - An Eternal Golden Braid” but he sounds like one of those
original thinkers often overlooked by the academic mainstream. I don't
think he has been discussed here before (maybe Platt or Horse might remember
differently) so I look forward to any further Pirsigian similarities that
you might find.
Best wishes,
Anthony.
.
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