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March 29, 2006
Stuck
The stack of books in progress is growing deeper. I'm now interrupting Kafka's short stories, which interrupted Schlesinger's work on Andrew Jackson's presidency, which interrupted a collection of George Steiner's essays, to read Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig. I'm stuck at p. 122:
There's a principle in physics that if a thing can't be distinguished from anything else it doesn't exist.
Up to that point I was reading along with minor to major disagreements here and there, suspecting that Pirsig's going to get around logic by sleight of mind. Not that he's going to do it intentionally. He'll be just as amazed by the magic as the rest of us.
Yet here he seemed to be laying out axioms from which he's going to mount his attack on the empiricist position. You sort of want him to win, because you feel, too, that the empiricists have missed the point.
Then you realize that if you take the first sentence of his argument at face value, you have to agree that the universe doesn't exist. Hmm.
Posted by Mark at March 29, 2006 12:47 PM
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