LS Re: Conceptions of Dynamic Quality


Platt Holden (pholden@worldnet.att.net)
Tue, 24 Feb 1998 18:46:39 +0100


Ken Clark wrote:

> I am not sure that all of this talk about not being able to understand
> reality because we are a part of it is right. I would be interested to
> hear
> your explanation of why that is so. Just saying it doesn't make it so.

To explain, allow me to turn to Robert Burns, the 16th century Scottish
poet who you should like for he wrote:

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
 Has broken Nature's social union."

Here's the relevant quote:

"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
 To see ourselves as others see us."

Just as you cannot step outside yourself to see yourself as others see
you,
we cannot step outside our reality to see it as someone outside our
reality
would see it.

We tried. Lord knows we tried. Science took us all the way down to the
reality of the subatomic world, and there we lost it. We found we could
not
observe reality at that level without disturbing it. There we discovered
that the object could never be completely separated from the subject,
and
suddenly the whole world of subjects and objects, the world of me in
here
and you out there, came tumbling down. The assumption that reality (or
information) exists independently of us blew up in our faces, leaving
our
entire subject-object world view in shambles.

Few have come to terms with reality as discovered by quantum mechanics
except for physicists like Eddington:

"Something unknown is doing we don't know what--that is what our theory
amounts to."

Or Heisenberg:

"The common division of the world into subject and object, inner world
and
outer world, body and soul, is no longer adequate and leads us into
difficulties."

Or Schroedinger:

"Subject and object are only one."

Or the philosopher Pirsig:

"(Subjects and objects) can be used as long as it is remembered they're
terms for patterns (of values) and not some independent reality of their
own."

The assumption that there exists an objective reality independent of
subjects is no longer tenable. We have met Quality, the fundamental
ground-stuff of the world, and it is us.

Platt

Catch 42. No one can be certain of anything.

 



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:42:48 CEST