HELLO, ALL PIRSIGIZERS:
Struan said quite a few things about Pirsig's paper that I believe are
mistaken. His view of complementarity is also flawed and causes his
understanding of what Pirsig said about it to suffer from many
misconceptions. I'll try sort some of them out.
In fact Struan's 1/24/99 post was titled "Many truths and Shroedinger's
cat", but was mostly concerned with Bohr's complimentarity and Pirsig's
paper, "SDOV". To say the posting started in a confused state would be
kind. The cat in the box problem seems pretty irrelevant, except perhaps
as an analogy. Even as a mere anaolgy, it failed to align itself with
the MOQ or complimentarity in any meaningful way. The inexplicably
inserted debate as to the existence or non-existence of the moon was
equally unhelpful. The moon doesn't become the Conceptually Unknown
simply because we turn away from it?
I don't even think its possible to determine what Struan thinks
Complimentarity is. One can't assemble any coherent idea about it based
on what he's (she's?) written. The only thing that's clear is that in
Struan's opinion everyone but Struan has it wrong. I looked hard for
Struan's uniquely correct definition of complimentarity, but I never
found it. I guess an agressive offense serves in place of a defense,
especially where there is nothing to defend.
The most obvious error is Struan's apparent assumption that
Complimentarity is strictly a problem of physics. To sustain this
assumption after reading SODV, one would have to ignore a large part of
what is written in the paper. Pirsig and Bohr's biographer repeatedly
talk about Complimentarity as a philosophy, as an epistomolgy and as new
conceptual framework designed to accomodate the pardoxical nature of
experience. To be fair, Bohr hoped his complimentarity would solve
problems like the wave/particle pardox, but it was not limited to
physics.
Niels Bohr was only 25 or 26 years old (1910) when his early belief that
human experience was highly ambiguous and he saw that, ironically, solid
scientific evidence supported this view. He saw that lots of concepts
from all fields of inquiry seemed to contradict one another even if each
of these ideas could be proven on firmly grounded facts. He also noticed
that our concepts seem to divide into mutually exclusive or
"complimentary" groups. The particle and wave concepts are our prime
examples of complimentary facts. Each is needed for a full description
of what we know about the atom, although one excludes the other in
observation. Bohr's complimentarity is an attempt to solve the paradoxes
created by complimentary concepts. (Through multiple experiments and
unambiguous communication.) Complimentarity is a noun and is the name of
Bohr's philosophy, whereas complementary is an adjective which means
roughly, "completing". Complimentarity is a philosophy that applies to
all human concepts and methods in the same way that it applies to the
observation of particles and waves.
Another huge error of omission was commited by Struan when he chose to
ignore the rather lenghty and crucial Heisenberg quotes concerning his
debates with Bohr.
Heisenberg was fully satisfied with the mathematical descriptions. Even
if it meant the abandonment of the classical concepts that we normally
use to describe physical reality. Who needs the philosophy if you've got
the math? The math worked perfectly. Words were the only problem. It
couldn't be described in ordinary language, yet it was verified by
experience and entirely describeable in mathematics. Pages 3,4, and 5 of
the paper are mostly Heisenberg quotes. Pirsig gives him nearly a
thousand words to explain his debates with Bohr. Heisenberg says
repeatedly that it was not a physics problem, it was a language problem.
Struan chooses to ignore this also.
BOHR WRITES "Since the uncertainties expressed by the wave function are
not resolved until the particle is observed, the particles can not be
said to have any definate state until it is observed. The observer...can
make a photon either a particle or a wave. "
Struan uses this quote with his own bracketed additions inserted in
mid-sentence, as if the explain the true meaning. But his additions
largely misconceptions of his own and only confuse the issue. He
confuses physics with philosophy and undiscovered objects with the
Conceptually Unknown. The uncertainty is in the wave function, not in
our minds, as Struan suggests. The wave function is in the mathematical
description itself. Those uncertainties are resolved in the observation,
but its not because "once we look it we can define it", as Struan says.
Finally, the observed photon can be a wave or a particle depending on
which experiment we do, depending on what we choose to measure. And it
is not just a matter of Gestalt perception as Struan suggested with his
reference to a 3D cube on 2D paper.
Struan then concludes that his cat is an example of theConceptually
Unknown, which apparently he equates his own personal ignorance of the
undiscovered cat. He's managed to turn Bohr's philosophy into some kind
of solipsism. In the paper Pirsig clearly equates the Conceptually
Unknown (his term) with Dynamic Quality itself and as the "unmeasured
phenomenal object" in Bohr's Complimentarity. Pirsig also equates all of
these with Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". Clearly,
this is not solipsism.
Pirsig is not trying to marry MOQ to Bohr's philosophy, as Struan
suggests. Instead he sees Bohr trying to rescue physics from absurdity.
Pirsig believes his MOQ has provided concepts and other intelledtual
tools that allow him to finish what Bohr could not. Bohr didn't refuse
to speculate about what was beyond the threshold of observability, as
Struan claims. He couldn't find the words and concepts to come to any
translatable conclusions, but Heisenberg testifies to Bohr's persistent
and passionate speculations.
Pirsig lists 6 pieces of evidence that the MOQ answers problems Bohr
could not. Struan makes no mention of them but still claims the two are
incompatable. Curiously, Struan Selected two Pirsig quotes for the post
and they appear directly before and after the six pieces of evidence
listed in the paper. Talk about willful ignorance!
Its getting late. I could go on forever listing Struan's lapses in
judgement, logic, and grammer, (not to mention civility and dignity) but
I'll make just two more notes.
STRUAN wrote: "Quantum theory works below the level of predicatability
and is not incompatible with the existence of the universe" Taken as a
whole, this sentence is utterly meaningless. The first part struck me as
odd. Quantum theory works below the level of predictability? Quantum
theory predicts the behavior of quanta perfectly.
As Heisenberg said, the math works every time. Words and meaning are the
problem, not the ability to predict physical behavior.
STRUAN WROTE "We can see that the claim made for Complimentarity is
that the measurement of a particle actually changes its nature, a
mistake made by Pirsig in his paper," Pirsig never made that mistake
because he never made that claim. Instead he said the measurement
CREATES subject and object, not changes it.
I realize no one asked, but I'd suggest bringing some healthy skepticism
to the examination of Struan's posts. They're wrong more than not.
David.
MOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mailing List Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Queries - mailto:moq@moq.org
Unsubscribe - mailto:majordomo@moq.org with
UNSUBSCRIBE MOQ_DISCUSS in the body of the email
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:02:50 BST