The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
There must be few on ET who don't know that I think that Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.
I just wish I were intellectually equipped to argue his corner!
I presented a paper at Lancaster University on the subject of Knowledge based Value and Intellectual Property which attempted a different - "Metaphysics of Value" - approach to Economics... "The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson
Somewhere either in the attic here or at my Fathers, there is a copy, reassembled with sticky tape after it had been disassembled with a handaxe. Thats how frustrating I find it. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was very important to my understanding, though I left it out of my miniature biography. His description of Poincare is exquisite.
He too ran up against the limitations of science. And flunked himself out of Chemistry, no less. One issue he raises that I did not go into but which is very relevant for metaphysics: Since you can come up with hypotheses faster than you can test them, which ones do you test? You have to choose, and the choice may well have a basis that is not "scientific." At best you are relying on scientific inspiration (which is not supposed to exist) at worst you are making a choice out of social or personal prejudice.
From there we get to the problem of what questions does science ask? Now partly, scientists ask questions to which they can almost already see the answers. But as for the rest, again: Inspiration, or prejudice?
In truth, science is a method for testing hypotheses. Everything else, including the hypotheses themselves, is not scientific. That is not the problem. The problem is not admitting it.
Can we admit there is such a thing as scientific inspiration?
So, in Zen he develops the notion of Quality, and shows how it resembles the concept of the Tao.
In Leila he starts to develop the ideas of his metaphysics. I found Leila fascinating, but I must admit he went in a different direction than I would go. For me, Taoism led to Buddhism led to other forms of spiritual practice to a sense of the essential importance of non-verbal experience. He went directly back into the world of words, and partly I distrust that, and partly I just found it harder to get what he was saying.
At this point, I am not yet understanding the Metaphysics of Value, but am wondering if it can provide a route out of debt-based money and global ecological collapse. The Fates are kind.
you are relying on scientific inspiration (which is not supposed to exist)
Without intuition you get nowhere.
But none of my colleagues would ever admit that in public.
Why do you think is that? The Fates are kind.
I had to explain to my students that the proofs in their textbooks made no sense because they were discovered inductively in the opposite direction than they were written, and then sharpened for "elegance" in order to impress other professors so they will select the textbook. Take, for example, a typical epsilon-delta exercise from calculus. The official answer will start with "let epsilon equal blah blah bla" and the student will stop right there and scratch their head "how did they come up with that?". Well, that was the last thing they came up with. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
Dirac admitted it in public. The way he put is is that what people call "physical intuition" is knowing what the solution looks like without solving the equation.
Seeing how some of my classmates who were better than I was at symbolic algebra and functional analysis and never got caught by a trivial counterexample, but were mystified by even slightly nontivial PDEs, I came to the conclusion that I did the right thing studying physics before mathematics. Physical intuition allow the mathematics to come alive. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
(It wasn't the abstraction he objected to, but the disconnect.) The Fates are kind.
Gaianne: ... Without intuition you get nowhere. But none of my colleagues would ever admit that in public. Why do you think is that?
Gaianne: ... Without intuition you get nowhere.
Why do you think is that?
Because they were prisoners of a false image of what real maths or science was like - from their own education and the way papers are written - tidily, after the messy process of creative thinking (cf Colman below).
Koestler's "The Act of Creation" was published back in 1964 and gave many examples from science (as well as the arts) of how the creative process worked; bascially:
felt need (arts) existing problem (sciences)
initial conscious work
unconscious activity (so important to leave time for this - a very important lesson that B. Russell learnt the hard way after years of struggling to do it all consciously)
Insight/inspiration
The latter often occurred in dreams or half-awake state and often involved imagery - including in sciences - Kekule snake with tail in mouth I seem to recall - yes:
"While researching benzene, the German chemist dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth. Kekulé interpreted the snake as a representation of the closed-carbon ring of benzene" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
"While researching benzene, the German chemist dreamed of a snake with its tail in its mouth. Kekulé interpreted the snake as a representation of the closed-carbon ring of benzene"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
Einstein even said his creative "thinking" involved muscular sensations.
As this review points out, unfortunately it got a very bad review from Medawar (and probably other scientists) so not too many young scientists may have read this - a pity:
"The Act of Creation" offers a theory to account for the "Ah Ha" reaction of scientific discovery, the "Ha Ha" reaction to jokes and the "Ah" reaction of mystical or religious insight. In each case the result is produced by a "bisociation of matrices" or the intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas and fuses them into a creative synthesis. When the lines of thought are scientic the result is a scientific discovery, when they are concerned with devotional matters the result is mystical insight and when they are on a more homely plane the result can be a joke. The model is fleshed out with a great deal of information ranging from the religions of the world to a theory about the nervous system to account for the build-up of tension and its discharge at the puchline of a joke. Peter Medawar's review was scathing in his comments on Koestler's science, which is a shame because the book can have the desirable effect of encouraging young scientists to read far beyond the usual range of their literature. http://www.amazon.ca/Act-Creation-Arthur-Koestler/dp/0140191917
"The Act of Creation" offers a theory to account for the "Ah Ha" reaction of scientific discovery, the "Ha Ha" reaction to jokes and the "Ah" reaction of mystical or religious insight. In each case the result is produced by a "bisociation of matrices" or the intersection of lines of thought which brings together hitherto unconnected ideas and fuses them into a creative synthesis. When the lines of thought are scientic the result is a scientific discovery, when they are concerned with devotional matters the result is mystical insight and when they are on a more homely plane the result can be a joke.
The model is fleshed out with a great deal of information ranging from the religions of the world to a theory about the nervous system to account for the build-up of tension and its discharge at the puchline of a joke. Peter Medawar's review was scathing in his comments on Koestler's science, which is a shame because the book can have the desirable effect of encouraging young scientists to read far beyond the usual range of their literature.
http://www.amazon.ca/Act-Creation-Arthur-Koestler/dp/0140191917
Then Poincaré illustrated how a fact is discovered. He had described generally how scientists arrive at facts and theories but now he penetrated narrowly into his own personal experience with the mathematical functions that established his early fame. For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn't be any such functions. Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place. He described how a second wave of crystallization, guided by analogies to established mathematics, produced what he later named the "Theta-Fuchsian Series." He left Caen, where he was living, to go on a geologic excursion. The changes of travel made him forget mathematics. He was about to enter a bus, and at the moment when he put his foot on the step, the idea came to him, without anything in his former thoughts having paved the way for it, that the transformations he had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry. He didn't verify the idea, he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty. Later he verified the result at his leisure. A later discovery occurred while he was walking by a seaside bluff. It came to him with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty. Another major discovery occurred while he was walking down a street. Others eulogized this process as the mysterious workings of genius, but Poincaré was not content with such a shallow explanation. He tried to fathom more deeply what had happened. Mathematics, he said, isn't merely a question of applying rules, any more than science. It doesn't merely make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would he exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely; they must be felt rather than formulated. Poincaré then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the "subliminal self," an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phadrus called preintellectual awareness. The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. "This is a true aesthetic feeling which all mathematicians know," Poincaré said, "but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile." But it is this harmony, this beauty, that is at the center of it all.
For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn't be any such functions. Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.
Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn't sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.
The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.
He described how a second wave of crystallization, guided by analogies to established mathematics, produced what he later named the "Theta-Fuchsian Series." He left Caen, where he was living, to go on a geologic excursion. The changes of travel made him forget mathematics. He was about to enter a bus, and at the moment when he put his foot on the step, the idea came to him, without anything in his former thoughts having paved the way for it, that the transformations he had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry. He didn't verify the idea, he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty. Later he verified the result at his leisure.
A later discovery occurred while he was walking by a seaside bluff. It came to him with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty. Another major discovery occurred while he was walking down a street. Others eulogized this process as the mysterious workings of genius, but Poincaré was not content with such a shallow explanation. He tried to fathom more deeply what had happened.
Mathematics, he said, isn't merely a question of applying rules, any more than science. It doesn't merely make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would he exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones, or rather, to avoid the trouble of making them, and the rules that must guide the choice are extremely fine and delicate. It's almost impossible to state them precisely; they must be felt rather than formulated.
Poincaré then hypothesized that this selection is made by what he called the "subliminal self," an entity that corresponds exactly with what Phadrus called preintellectual awareness. The subliminal self, Poincaré said, looks at a large number of solutions to a problem, but only the interesting ones break into the domain of consciousness. Mathematical solutions are selected by the subliminal self on the basis of "mathematical beauty," of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance.
"This is a true aesthetic feeling which all mathematicians know," Poincaré said, "but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile."
But it is this harmony, this beauty, that is at the center of it all.
Problem solving is what I have always enjoyed more than anything else. I think that "pattern recognition" is a good way of describing the process.
My motivation is to find the simple answer that everybody knows, but which doesn't yet exist: Naoto Fukasawa
On top of this you have a vast amount of celebrity reporting that compresses the space that's available for other reporting. The vast increase in the number of TV channels also allows people to avoid any exposure to science.
why is Science that important to the average person when Brittneys got no underwear on? Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 14 48 comments
by Oui - Jan 20 49 comments
by Oui - Jan 23 2 comments
by gmoke - Jan 22
by Oui - Jan 10 60 comments
by Oui - Jan 21 10 comments
by IdiotSavant - Jan 15 20 comments
by Oui - Jan 20 5 comments
by Oui - Jan 232 comments
by Oui - Jan 2110 comments
by Oui - Jan 2049 comments
by Oui - Jan 205 comments
by Oui - Jan 172 comments
by Oui - Jan 169 comments
by gmoke - Jan 16
by IdiotSavant - Jan 1520 comments
by Oui - Jan 1434 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 1448 comments
by Oui - Jan 1389 comments
by Oui - Jan 1177 comments
by Oui - Jan 1060 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 877 comments
by Oui - Jan 772 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 710 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 668 comments
by Frank Schnittger - Jan 611 comments
by Oui - Jan 659 comments