From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Wed Jan 05 2005 - 15:14:45 GMT
Hi Ham, (Ian mentioned)
> Please accept my apologies.
>
> I have a very literal mentality that some call naive. When I asked if the
> question you last posted was rhetorical, I did not mean to impugn your
> sincereity. Believe it or not, I have taken the time to answer questions
> in the past that turned out to be rhetorical! Only Ian knows what might
> have prompted that strangely disparaging remark.
No apology needed, Ham. Ian has this negative attitude towards me
no doubt due to my conservative political philosophy and my open-
mindedness to explanations beyond the rigidly scientific, or beyond his
notion of what constitutes pragmatic "real life."
> Hoffman's quotation is such a marvelous declaration that I rushed to add
>it
> to my website. Do you have the entire quotation? I couldn't locate the
> passage at the various 'explore this book' sites. If you have "Visual
> Intelligence" (presumably a recent release) by this young author, I'd
> appreciate the words that appear within your elipses. (I'll add Hoffman's
> book to my reference section once I have the complete quotation.)
You can find Hoffman's complete quote at aldaily.com, the Arts and Letters
website that I check out every morning because of it's ever-changing and
challenging intellectual content. The passage is contained under "Articles
of Note" in the one introduced "What do you believe to be true even though
you can't prove it? John Brockman asked over a hundred scientists and
intellectuals . . . more . . .Edge"
> It's always exciting to see one's own concept eloquently expressed from
> another perspective, especially that of a scientist. (Incidentally, you
> should know, this is the second time I've stolen from your research. I
> wonder what a 'moral universalist' would say about that?!!)
Well, I think the universal moral code would say that theft is immoral.
However, "stealing" from someone else's published research is what builds
the world's knowledge base and is therefore is not only morally
sanctioned, but applauded. (Of course, if you call it your own research or
original material when it isn't, then that would violate the universal
moral code of intellectual honesty.)
I'm still mulling over your latest post addressed to me and hope to have a
response shortly. In the meantime, I'm glad we're on the same page when it
comes to entertaining the reasonable thesis that there's more to the
universe than physics or an engineer's "common sense" would have us
believe. As Pirsig says, "What, after all, is the likelihood that an atom
possesses within its own structure enough information to build the city of
New York?" (Lila, 12)
Best regards,
Platt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 05 2005 - 18:42:28 GMT