[OT] Re: [NCLUG] Linux can do THIS too??!!!

[M Butcher]

On Sun, 2002-10-27 at 05:39, Marcio Luis Teixeira wrote:
> On Sunday 27 October 2002 11:29 am, Evelyn Mitchell wrote:
> 
> > One of the things I learned studying Academic philsophy is that any
> > Platonic Ideal we believe we're (moving | progressing | evolving ) towards
> > is just a projection of our beliefs.
> 
> I believe that one of Pirsig's point was that Quality has absolutely nothing 
> to do with a Platonic ideal. I don't think he would have been sympathetic to 
> Plato, in so far as Plato defines the ideal (for instance, Plato would have 
> said that "the set of all points equidistant from a central point" is a 
> Platonic ideal for a circle).

I'm not sure that Plato _would_ have argued that. Descartes certainly
would have, though. Plato would have argued that we all have an inherent
idea as to what the perfect circle would be.

It's kinda like OO programming -- everything is an (imperfect)
instantiation of the ideal. Quality, then, is the degree to which the
instantiation resembles the class. This would be treating quality as a
metaphysical topic.efm pointed out that quality can be treated as a
value statement (in a moral/virtue context), and that removes the
problem of trying to ascribe any universality to quality. I'm curious to
read Pirsig's book (already read "Zen"), as I'm curious to see how he
would make something like quality dynamic, while still ascribing it to
metaphysics.

> The way I see it (and this is my own interpretation, not Pirsig's) quality is 
> some sort of gradient over some unknown "fitness" function. We cannot see the 
> global maximum of this function, so instead we follow the gradient. Those of 
> you who know AI would call this the "hill-climbing" algorithm. There's no 
> guarantee we will reach the global maximum, and we might as well get stuck in 
> a local maximum. Anyhow, I think that Plato tends to talk only of *the* 
> global maximum (the global maximum) while Pirsig seems to be talking about 
> the gradient. I think this is why he calls it "dynamic Quality" -- the 
> gradient changes as you move around on the plane of the function. I don't 
> think it's much of a leap of faith to believe that "hill-climbing" is 
> employed by evolution.
> 
> > I wonder. There was a thread on Dave Farber's IP list this week about the
> > lack of historical perspective of most contemporary academic Computer
> > Scientists. They'd much rather reinvent a solution (often badly), than to
> > do research into published solutions from the past. In general, I've found
> > computer scientists to be quite intellectually lazy when it comes to
> > knowing the past of their own field.
> 
> Yes. As a computer scientist, I admit that I hate reading philosophy or past 
> works from late computer scientists. The reason is that most of the material 
> was written long ago and has an incredible amount historical context that 
> gets in the way of the reading. Descartes, for example, has some really good 
> ideas but I can't stand reading it because he lapses off into religion, 
> probably because 1) everyone was religious back then 2) he didn't want to 
> have the church to come after him. 

That's too bad you didn't read that. Descartes' appeal to God was not to
appease the church, but because it was the only way he could defend the
proposition that sense perception is an accurate way of determining
information about the external world. In other words, Descartes based
ALL OF SCIENCE on the existence of God... and no one has ever really
come up with a better way of doing it. The cogito -- "I think therefore
I am" -- on which almost all of western scientific thought is based, was
derived directly from the belief in God. 

That is what Husserl argued against in the _Crisis of European
Sciences_, that the cogito is invalid. He and others argued
(successfully, in my opinion) that science itself is incapable of
producing truth, as it makes assumptions that are logically invalid. If
you are interested, a shorter but similar book on the same topic is
_What Is Philosophy_ by Jose Ortega y Gasset.


<snip>
> Marcio Luis Teixeira
> 
> 
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Matt Butcher