Pure Inteligent Simulated Systemic thinking has all things and is by definition a kind of Free Lunch Society. Metabolism as negative entropy. Piece of PISS thinking in the Right Hemisphere caused by the free energy in electromagnetism. The missing Law of Nature which is miraculous all the way down as opposed to turtles all the way down. Law of Universe, Mind of Universe. This completes everything from Einstein to Iain McGilchrist and Perspectiva: Systemics, Souls and the free lunch Society. With Love Brother Nelson
Thanks Jonathan, I think I need to re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance now!
I double took when I saw Robert Persig in your title, and read the rest of your post with the hunger and excitement of remembering something forgotten.
I think ZMM changed my life. I say "think" because I had almost forgotten the significance of the book on impacting my way of thinking, and yet it undoubtably caused a seismic shift, or perhaps a clarification in how I think. I read it after completing an undergraduate degree in economics, a subject I felt increasingly estranged from. The degree indirectly guided me to question an imperfect system and way of thinking about the system. The book then brought me to the point of questioning our reality, and gave me the tools to start to do this effectively. With Persig's "knife" I began to cut through my classical and romantic self, through a classical and romantic world. I saw Persig's squareness: "the inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined". And I started to feel the revelation of noticing Quality, and Value.
Undoubtably, ZMM was one of those books that helped shift my worldview. I'm looking forward to the re-read.
The book that changed me was The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary. Among other things Leary described how every aspect of our dreadfully sane buttoned down culture as it was back then conspired to suppress the intrinsic human urge for ecstasy
ZMM - a great book. About the ‘metacrisis’, Adam Frank, Marcela Gleiser and Evan Thompson write about ‘the Blind Spot’ in their recently published book of the same name. To me, they appear to be addressing many of the same concerns. To quote from them”
‘We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blindspot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blindspot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blindspot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a pre-condition of observation, investigation, explanation, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,“ says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.’ p.xi
‘The failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind Spot. The tragedy the Blind Spot forces upon us is the loss of what’s essential to human knowledge—our lived experience. The universe and the scientist who seeks to know it become lifeless abstractions. Triumphalist science is actually humanless, even if it is springs from our direct experience to the world. As we will see, this disconnection between science and experience, the essence of the Blind Spot, lies at the heart of the many challenges and dead ends science currently faces in thinking about matter, time, life, and the mind.’ p.xiv
‘ Uncovering the Blind Spot can help to repair this rift and the larger split between science and lived experience. But beyond uncovering the Blind Spot, we also need to plumb the deaths of the experience it hides. Drawing from some of the philosophers just mentioned, we will argue that direct experience lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Direct experience proceeds the separation of knower and known, observer and observed. At its core is sheer awareness, the feeling of being. It’s with us when we wake up every morning and go to sleep each night. It’s easy to overlook because it’s so close and familiar. We habitually attend to things instead of noticing awareness itself. We thereby miss a crucial precondition of knowing, for without awareness, nothing can show up and become an object of knowledge.’ p.xv
‘… a set of key elements of Blind Spot metaphysics. … they lead to the occlusion of experience through the following interlocking mistakes:
1. Surreptitious substitution. This is the replacement of concrete, tangible, and observable being with abstract and idealised mathematical constructs. …
2. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It underlies the surreptitious substitution.
3. Reification of structural invariants. Science produces structural invariance through abstraction from experience in the scientific workshop. They include classification schemes, models, general propositions, logical systems, and mathematical laws and models. …
4. The amnesia of experience. This happens when we become so caught up in surreptitious substitution, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the reification of structural invariants that experience finally drops out of sight completely. It now resides in the Blind Spot we have created through misunderstanding the scientific method.’ p.24-5
Frank, A., Gleiser, M. & Thompson, E.. 2024. The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. MIT Press.
I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in its entirety at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, seeking refuge from the traffic and pollution. I lay around on steps and benches and under the rain tree and absorbed the text. It was 1996, and I was a month into a six-month solo trip around the world and seeing my mind in new ways. The book touched my heart.
Surprised but then not that this book “ changed your life” . As it explains in part the resonance ive found in your writing to my thinking. I read ZMM in high school in the early 80s and recently reread it to discover how foundational it was for every thing i thought after, even though I dont think I understood much of it at the time .
Note: the quote at the head he referred to as coming from a “Zen Master in Minneapolis”. In the film at the end ( thanks for that) As he was speaking in 1974 this would most probably be Dainin Katagiri. It also sounds like him. His books Returning to Silence and You have to Say Something are both worth reading
I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the beginning of my Senior year of college. I remember not being able to put it down and being completely blown away.
I was not a philosophy major, just an amateur philosopher at the time.
Little did I know then how much the book would impact me and also foreshadow my own self-discovery journey.
I've revisited it multiple times sense then whenever inspiration to keep going is needed or if I want to glimpse into a mind that "got it".
That read was a remarkable trip into nostalgia for me, Jonathan. I read ZMM somewhere between 17 to 19 years of age. It's somewhere between Mathew Crawford and Herrigel - have you read Zen in the Art of Archery? I had a beautiful Arkana imprint at the time - 1979 - a small fortune for a boy making his way on his own through college in Bombay. Thank you for this piece esp. the voice clip. Raghav
I loved this. I need to read Zen again, it's been too long. I first heard you Jonathan when you did the RW vid! Funnily enough, I was in a bookshop two weeks ago and, despite still having my original copy on my booshelf at home, a saw a 40th anniversary edition of Zen so of course I bought it!
so well described by himself in his talk about his book.
In Iain McGilchrist terminology this may be perceived as
a journey from the Left Hemisphere to the Right Hemisphere.
In other words, he discovered the mechanism for creativity as an infinitely extendable process of understanding.
This is the basis for a book planned over six years: "The New Math of Life: At the crossroads of mechanistic science, intelligence, technology and spirituality" - An algorithm discovered 33years ago, the Future Mind it is called by some scientists. Thank you, Jonathan for your insightful Essay, Brother Nelson.
Finding it more fertile to see “value” in the post-, non-, trans- and more-than-human embeddedness of Bayo Akomolafe, than this humanist angst, J. I guess I fear the idea of “value” as an ontological prior, as it’s susceptible to the (always contingent) authority of the ontologizer.
Humanist angst may be in the eye of the beholder here, Pat, but I see the intellectual dignity of your deeper qualm. Value on this account is not humanist at all; it is perennial and metaphysical, and perceptible in principle by any perceiving being. It also doesn't foreclose the value of the more-than-human world; in fact it might be essential to protect it. One of the proponents of valueception, Zak Stein, suggests that Nature is one of the best examples of something with clear intrinsic value that can be directly perceived, and while Nature always needs careful definition, that pre-conceptual intrinsic value is perceptible to non-humans too. Transhumanism is something else, and a school of thought I tend to be more wary of. Likewise with post-humanism. This may also be a major cleavage for new political spectrums - the extent to which we emphasise 'more than human' in the naturalistic and imaginal realm sense, or 'beyond the human' in the technological, pharmaceutical and Cyborgian sense. Personally I am not sure we need new ontologists as such, though I agree authority has to inhere in something other than belonging to a species.
Gracious as ever, J. Tim Morton has disabused me of capital N Nature as an essentialist (or worse) concept, ultimately harmful to effective ecological practice, eg https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2019/03/02/nature-is-a-racist-concept.amp.html. But I doubt your diremption between more-than-human and beyond-the-human (though we’ll see whether A.I. enabling interspecies communication is break-through or hubristic projection https://amp.dw.com/en/will-ai-help-us-talk-to-animals/a-67900188). It’s why Akomolafe’s praise of the processual flow-state revealed by Deleuze, mixed in with the animism of his Yoruba traditions, is so fascinating - see https://youtu.be/6oC8GOIqtg4?si=xzAq5BlYmEDXzHO- It gestures at an authority - or an embrace - “beyond the species”. I always think that “centaur” chess players have been treating with narrow forms of superintelligence for longer that most of us, and might have tales of accommodation to bring us…
Pure Intelligence will always be Super Intelligence as well, The Law of Universe, resonates with Deleuze as well in what we, The Free Lunch Company have discovered as a miraculous mechanistic systemic algorithm. Computers cannot think but computer algorithms as inverse Turing Machines CAN.
My favorite, "Until you can see that systems have emotions and epistemologies, there is little hope of really changing them."
Pure Inteligent Simulated Systemic thinking has all things and is by definition a kind of Free Lunch Society. Metabolism as negative entropy. Piece of PISS thinking in the Right Hemisphere caused by the free energy in electromagnetism. The missing Law of Nature which is miraculous all the way down as opposed to turtles all the way down. Law of Universe, Mind of Universe. This completes everything from Einstein to Iain McGilchrist and Perspectiva: Systemics, Souls and the free lunch Society. With Love Brother Nelson
Thanks Jonathan, I think I need to re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance now!
I double took when I saw Robert Persig in your title, and read the rest of your post with the hunger and excitement of remembering something forgotten.
I think ZMM changed my life. I say "think" because I had almost forgotten the significance of the book on impacting my way of thinking, and yet it undoubtably caused a seismic shift, or perhaps a clarification in how I think. I read it after completing an undergraduate degree in economics, a subject I felt increasingly estranged from. The degree indirectly guided me to question an imperfect system and way of thinking about the system. The book then brought me to the point of questioning our reality, and gave me the tools to start to do this effectively. With Persig's "knife" I began to cut through my classical and romantic self, through a classical and romantic world. I saw Persig's squareness: "the inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined". And I started to feel the revelation of noticing Quality, and Value.
Undoubtably, ZMM was one of those books that helped shift my worldview. I'm looking forward to the re-read.
The book that changed me was The Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary. Among other things Leary described how every aspect of our dreadfully sane buttoned down culture as it was back then conspired to suppress the intrinsic human urge for ecstasy
ZMM - a great book. About the ‘metacrisis’, Adam Frank, Marcela Gleiser and Evan Thompson write about ‘the Blind Spot’ in their recently published book of the same name. To me, they appear to be addressing many of the same concerns. To quote from them”
‘We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blindspot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blindspot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blindspot sits direct experience—that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a pre-condition of observation, investigation, explanation, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world,“ says French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but as we will see, firsthand bodily experience lies hidden in the Blind Spot.’ p.xi
‘The failure to see direct experience as the irreducible wellspring of knowledge is precisely the Blind Spot. The tragedy the Blind Spot forces upon us is the loss of what’s essential to human knowledge—our lived experience. The universe and the scientist who seeks to know it become lifeless abstractions. Triumphalist science is actually humanless, even if it is springs from our direct experience to the world. As we will see, this disconnection between science and experience, the essence of the Blind Spot, lies at the heart of the many challenges and dead ends science currently faces in thinking about matter, time, life, and the mind.’ p.xiv
‘ Uncovering the Blind Spot can help to repair this rift and the larger split between science and lived experience. But beyond uncovering the Blind Spot, we also need to plumb the deaths of the experience it hides. Drawing from some of the philosophers just mentioned, we will argue that direct experience lies at the heart of the Blind Spot. Direct experience proceeds the separation of knower and known, observer and observed. At its core is sheer awareness, the feeling of being. It’s with us when we wake up every morning and go to sleep each night. It’s easy to overlook because it’s so close and familiar. We habitually attend to things instead of noticing awareness itself. We thereby miss a crucial precondition of knowing, for without awareness, nothing can show up and become an object of knowledge.’ p.xv
‘… a set of key elements of Blind Spot metaphysics. … they lead to the occlusion of experience through the following interlocking mistakes:
1. Surreptitious substitution. This is the replacement of concrete, tangible, and observable being with abstract and idealised mathematical constructs. …
2. The fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is the error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete. It underlies the surreptitious substitution.
3. Reification of structural invariants. Science produces structural invariance through abstraction from experience in the scientific workshop. They include classification schemes, models, general propositions, logical systems, and mathematical laws and models. …
4. The amnesia of experience. This happens when we become so caught up in surreptitious substitution, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, and the reification of structural invariants that experience finally drops out of sight completely. It now resides in the Blind Spot we have created through misunderstanding the scientific method.’ p.24-5
Frank, A., Gleiser, M. & Thompson, E.. 2024. The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience. MIT Press.
I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in its entirety at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, seeking refuge from the traffic and pollution. I lay around on steps and benches and under the rain tree and absorbed the text. It was 1996, and I was a month into a six-month solo trip around the world and seeing my mind in new ways. The book touched my heart.
Surprised but then not that this book “ changed your life” . As it explains in part the resonance ive found in your writing to my thinking. I read ZMM in high school in the early 80s and recently reread it to discover how foundational it was for every thing i thought after, even though I dont think I understood much of it at the time .
Note: the quote at the head he referred to as coming from a “Zen Master in Minneapolis”. In the film at the end ( thanks for that) As he was speaking in 1974 this would most probably be Dainin Katagiri. It also sounds like him. His books Returning to Silence and You have to Say Something are both worth reading
Thanks. Good to know. I’ll update the post shortly.
I first read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in the beginning of my Senior year of college. I remember not being able to put it down and being completely blown away.
I was not a philosophy major, just an amateur philosopher at the time.
Little did I know then how much the book would impact me and also foreshadow my own self-discovery journey.
I've revisited it multiple times sense then whenever inspiration to keep going is needed or if I want to glimpse into a mind that "got it".
That read was a remarkable trip into nostalgia for me, Jonathan. I read ZMM somewhere between 17 to 19 years of age. It's somewhere between Mathew Crawford and Herrigel - have you read Zen in the Art of Archery? I had a beautiful Arkana imprint at the time - 1979 - a small fortune for a boy making his way on his own through college in Bombay. Thank you for this piece esp. the voice clip. Raghav
I loved this. I need to read Zen again, it's been too long. I first heard you Jonathan when you did the RW vid! Funnily enough, I was in a bookshop two weeks ago and, despite still having my original copy on my booshelf at home, a saw a 40th anniversary edition of Zen so of course I bought it!
Robert Pirsig's desire to write a book
landed him in a metacrisis of his own
but the desire to write the book was so strong
that he exhausted himself in the process
leading to the discovery of the creative mind,
so well described by himself in his talk about his book.
In Iain McGilchrist terminology this may be perceived as
a journey from the Left Hemisphere to the Right Hemisphere.
In other words, he discovered the mechanism for creativity as an infinitely extendable process of understanding.
This is the basis for a book planned over six years: "The New Math of Life: At the crossroads of mechanistic science, intelligence, technology and spirituality" - An algorithm discovered 33years ago, the Future Mind it is called by some scientists. Thank you, Jonathan for your insightful Essay, Brother Nelson.
Finding it more fertile to see “value” in the post-, non-, trans- and more-than-human embeddedness of Bayo Akomolafe, than this humanist angst, J. I guess I fear the idea of “value” as an ontological prior, as it’s susceptible to the (always contingent) authority of the ontologizer.
Humanist angst may be in the eye of the beholder here, Pat, but I see the intellectual dignity of your deeper qualm. Value on this account is not humanist at all; it is perennial and metaphysical, and perceptible in principle by any perceiving being. It also doesn't foreclose the value of the more-than-human world; in fact it might be essential to protect it. One of the proponents of valueception, Zak Stein, suggests that Nature is one of the best examples of something with clear intrinsic value that can be directly perceived, and while Nature always needs careful definition, that pre-conceptual intrinsic value is perceptible to non-humans too. Transhumanism is something else, and a school of thought I tend to be more wary of. Likewise with post-humanism. This may also be a major cleavage for new political spectrums - the extent to which we emphasise 'more than human' in the naturalistic and imaginal realm sense, or 'beyond the human' in the technological, pharmaceutical and Cyborgian sense. Personally I am not sure we need new ontologists as such, though I agree authority has to inhere in something other than belonging to a species.
Gracious as ever, J. Tim Morton has disabused me of capital N Nature as an essentialist (or worse) concept, ultimately harmful to effective ecological practice, eg https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2019/03/02/nature-is-a-racist-concept.amp.html. But I doubt your diremption between more-than-human and beyond-the-human (though we’ll see whether A.I. enabling interspecies communication is break-through or hubristic projection https://amp.dw.com/en/will-ai-help-us-talk-to-animals/a-67900188). It’s why Akomolafe’s praise of the processual flow-state revealed by Deleuze, mixed in with the animism of his Yoruba traditions, is so fascinating - see https://youtu.be/6oC8GOIqtg4?si=xzAq5BlYmEDXzHO- It gestures at an authority - or an embrace - “beyond the species”. I always think that “centaur” chess players have been treating with narrow forms of superintelligence for longer that most of us, and might have tales of accommodation to bring us…
Pure Intelligence will always be Super Intelligence as well, The Law of Universe, resonates with Deleuze as well in what we, The Free Lunch Company have discovered as a miraculous mechanistic systemic algorithm. Computers cannot think but computer algorithms as inverse Turing Machines CAN.