From: Patrick van den Berg (cirandar@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Sep 10 2003 - 21:48:37 BST
Hi YL,
I wrote a reply on your post two days ago, but wasn't able to subscribe
(again) to the list. Here it is anyhow:
Can anyone here answer this question:
It is my belief that the creation or recreation of a fractal
philosophy as
found at http://yalelands.com/frph.pdf is consistent with Persig's
MoQ. Am
I right or wrong about that? YL
Dear YL,
The pdf-file was interesting, although the ego-blown style of the author
irritated me. It does have similarities with Pirsig seeing Lila. In the
café he notices she notices that he is watching her, and she notices
that he notices that she notices he is watching her, etc. ad infinitum.
Like standing between two mirrors, you have a reflection of a reflection
of a reflection. The fellow of this pdf-file applies a similar strategy.
Two things I found particularly interesting:
The first is that he uses a mathematical metaphor of the seemingly ease
of going away from a spot: Any direction is adequate, north, west, south
or inbetween. Finding a good alternative narrows you options
considerably, however. The place you want to go is either north or south
or another particular direction. What Pirsig says about the
hippie-movement is that the hippies were good at walking away from the
center of the western culture of the sixties- they didn’t, however, know
where to turn to. That’s why the movement virtually bleeded to death.
The second thing I found interesting was the notion of aming at turning
towards turning towards something. It has a relation with the concept
of free will. What does it mean to turn your attention to something (to
will something)? In order to do that, you have to change your thinking
from this to that (to the topic you want to focus on). And how do you
initiate this change? By accelareting from some zero-point, so that you
can accomplish an amount of changing your attention. But how do you
start to accelerate? By starting to accelerate you acceleration. This
leads to an obvious paradox. How is it ever possible to turn your
attention towards something? How is free will possible? (This is a
version of psychology’s homunculi, by the way)
The notion of a fractal philosophy is quite big and interesting.
Relating such a big idea to the whole edifice of the MoQ seems to me
daunting. Nevertheless interesting. Maybe cartesian philosophy (SOM)
tries to zoom in on a fractal- hoping someday to see the ultimate
building blocks! Pirsig would say: Hey, you’re just going in one
possible direction. There are others, not only by ‘zooming in’ but by
staying at one level and walk around there, or better: zoom in a bit but
going to the ‘left’ simultanously. (Fits into another metaphor of
Pirsig: His idea of a chaqautua meaning to deepen the riverpaths of our
behaviors, instead of creating new ones only to end up in one shallow
homogenous river.)
Let’s see if I can post this, Patrick.
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