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Acronyms and symbols used in The Quantum Connections:

 OGC  - One Global Context
 OGT  - One Global Truth
 SOM  - Subject-Object Metaphysics
 ZMM  - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A Pirsig Connection:

A gift, useful for dealing with SOM practitioners like Hughes and Buridan, was bestowed on humanity in our 20th century's second half. It was bestowed on us by a man named Robert M. Pirsig.

Pirsig showed us that how any classical mind thinks (either/or) is flawed! He showed us sophisms are cautionary compasses warning us of foundational weaknesses in any classical manner of reason. He did not tell us this directly in his works. Instead, he told us there are mu questions which have mu answers and classical thinking tells us to sweep these mu questions and answers under a rug. But he warns us we should not do it, because mu questions and answers are closer to reality than SOM's either/or, true/false, exclusive, bivalent questions and answers.

Recognition of Pirsig's gift brings logical epiphany! Recognition of his gift is an epiphany we want to share with you, our reader. Accepting his gift epiphany is akin, but perhaps even more fundamental and important than, Stein's quantum-nonpreference epiphany of Buridan's ass starving to death standing undecided equidistant twixt two identical bales of hay. It is Pirsig's epiphany of many truths. It is a new meme!

Pirsig's meme of many truths is an epiphany of the ludicrousness of SOM's one truth. We mention this because nearly all authors in Western culture since Aristotle, including Buridan, Hughes, Stein, et al., assume (or appear to assume) SOM's One Global Truth, OGT, in their philosophy. Implied is SOM's One Global Context, OGC.

When you listen to or read their words, they evoke implicit one-truth/one-context assumptions, adhered or not. Those words, ensconced in Western culture today, inform any SOM language.

Pirsig's many truths concept has profound significance for a new paradigm, a new way of thinking. It has profound philosophical ramifications, only a few we mention here. It treats mind not as uniconventionally SOM-locked, but as a quantum stage—a stage of Value creation by interrelationships of all possible combinations of concepts, not just a tiny SOM-correct subset of 'reasonable' (non-absurd) concepts. I think Buridan might agree. But he would also lend this caveat: you gain much power and freedom in your new role as actor/actress on a quantum stage, but you have greater responsibility too—to assiduously manage many local and group conventions/contexts to avoid a Babel of relative truth in an unlimited, singular SOM context. Why aren't we doing this already? Your reviewer thinks SOM's attempted parenticide put quantum sophism on hiatus until now. Too, mankind's finite intellect is not yet wholly prepared for managing many interrelating contexts.

(Conjecture: One killer app in our third millennium will be some kind of virtual context/convention management assistant. We already have primitive language context management assistants on WWW's internet, but here we speak of Galois-logic/many truths/quantum context management assistants! One way we believe our successors, Neo sapiens, will differentiate themselves is by inhering this capability.)

Many Truths -

See chapter 29 of ZMM, p. 337 of his Bantam paperback, where Pirsig tells us:

"They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things." These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece...Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.

"Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth."

See chapter 10 of ZMM, p. 100 of his Bantam paperback, where Pirsig tells us:

"About this Einstein had said, 'Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,' and let it go at that. But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase 'at any given moment' really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!"

See chapter 10 of ZMM, p. 101 of his Bantam paperback, where Pirsig tells us:

"The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones."

Doug just wants to add one comment here. It appears now, CeodE 2008, that quantum~reality is holographic. A fine description of a hologram is "...that entity whose individual quanta all have full omniscriptions of all said hologram's other quanta, while each quantum is an enthymeme." Compare our quantum~stage brains and notice that a human's body is made of cells. Each cell contains a full, emerging, DNA omniscription of a whole human body. One must seek quantumly~cowithin oneself to find "many truthings." Thæy aræ ihn uhs amd wæ aræ ihn thæm! Doug - 26Nov2008.

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