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title:: Books/Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance icon:: 📖 - Progressive Summarizations - Human imagination is ghosts from the past trying to find their place among the living #ghostfromthepast id:: 62de7158-40c9-45c4-b680-37ed58bd9ad5 collapsed:: true - Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn’t a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. - It’s all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It’s run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. id:: 62dff8ee-b0e6-4d5a-b1b5-4323ae749e51 - Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living. - On scientific method collapsed:: true - Solution of problems too complicated for common sense to solve is achieved by long strings of mixed inductive and deductive inferences - The correct program for this inter-weaving is formalized as scientific method. - The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. - The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. - In Part One of formal scientific method, which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know. #firstprinciple collapsed:: true - It is much better to enter a statement “Solve Problem: Why doesn’t cycle work?” which sounds dumb but is correct, than it is to enter a statement “Solve Problem: What is wrong with the electrical system?” when you don’t absolutely know the trouble is in the electrical system. - What you should state is “Solve Problem: What is wrong with cycle?” and then state as the first entry of Part Two: “Hypothesis Number One: The trouble is in the electrical system.” - You think of as many hypotheses as you can, then you design experiments to test them to see which are true and which are false. #binarysearch - Scientific questions often have a surface appearance of dumbness for this reason. They are asked in order to prevent dumb mistakes later on. - A man conducting a gee-whiz science show with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Frankenstein equipment is not doing anything scientific if he knows beforehand what the results of his efforts are going to be. - A motorcycle mechanic, on the other hand, who honks the horn to see if the battery works is informally conducting a true scientific experiment. id:: 63206613-09c3-4747-86b0-48a6058a434d - An experiment is never a failure solely because it fails to achieve predicted results. An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don’t prove anything one way or another. - Skill at this point consists of using experiments that test only the hypothesis in question, nothing less, nothing more. - To design an experiment properly he has to think very rigidly in terms of what directly causes what. This you know from the #hierarchy. - In the final category, conclusions, skill comes in stating no more than the experiment has proved. - That is why mechanics sometimes seem so taciturn and withdrawn when performing tests. They don’t like it when you talk to them because they are concentrating on mental images, hierarchies, and not really looking at you or the physical motorcycle at all. They are using the experiment as part of a program to expand their hierarchy of knowledge of the faulty motorcycle and compare it to the correct hierarchy in their mind. They are looking at underlying form. #engineering - The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. - The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and suddenly—flash!—he understands something he didn’t understand before. Until it’s tested the hypothesis isn’t truth. For the tests aren’t its source. Its source is somewhere else. - He had noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses, was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along. - “The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.” The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method! - Knife - High Country collapsed:: true - I want to talk about another kind of high country now in the world of thought, which in some ways, for me at least, seems to parallel or produce feelings similar to this, and call it the high country of the mind. - Real University collapsed:: true - The real University is a state of mind. - The real University, he said, has no specific location. It owns no property, pays no salaries and receives no material dues. - It is that great heritage of rational thought that has been brought down to us through - But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist. - They see professors as employees of the second university who should abandon reason when told to and take orders with no backtalk, the same way employees do in other corporations. - Analytic Craftsmanship collapsed:: true - I remember reading this for the first time and remarking about the analytic craftsmanship displayed. He avoided splitting the University into fields or departments and dealing with the results of that analysis. He also avoided the traditional split into students, faculty and administration. When you split it either of those ways you get a lot of dull stuff that doesn’t really tell you much you can’t get out of the official school bulletin. But Phaedrus split it between “the church” and “the location,” and once this cleavage is made the same rather dull and imponderable institution seen in the bulletin suddenly is seen with a degree of clarity that wasn’t previously available. On the basis of this cleavage he provided explanations for a number of puzzling but normal aspects of University life. - Random Highlights - A copy of Thoreau’s Walden… which Chris has never heard and which can be read a hundred times without exhaustion. I try always to pick a book far over his head and read it as a basis for questions and answers, rather than without interruption. I read a sentence or two, wait for him to come up with his usual barrage of questions, answer them, then read another sentence or two. Classics read well this way. They must be written this way. Sometimes we have spent a whole evening reading and talking and discovered we have only covered two or three pages. It’s a form of reading done a century ago…when Chautauquas were popular. Unless you’ve tried it you can’t imagine how pleasant it is to do it this way. - He was insane. And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. - In the temple of science are many mansions…and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be some men of both present and past times left inside…. If the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of nothing but creepers…those who have found favor with the angel…are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple…no single answer will cover…escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named Albert Einstein. - He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. #curseofdimentionality id:: 6329b338-b3b4-41c3-8de2-3675ce8f32c2 - The asphalt of the road is much wider and safer than it occurred in memory. On a cycle you have all sorts of extra room. John and Sylvia take the hairpin turns up ahead and then come back above us, facing us, and have smiles. Soon we take the turn and see their backs again. Then another turn for them and we meet them again, laughing. It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it. #thecentipede - People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists. id:: 6329b840-4b26-460c-a8ec-98c876ceff1d - The range of human knowledge today is so great that we’re all specialists - The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn’t the way it ever is. People should see that it’s never anything other than ==just one person talking from one place in time and space and circumstance.== It’s never been anything else, ever, but you can’t get that across in an essay. #Letters -