[These are the exercizes as they appear in the book. Feel free to use more contemporary illustrations for Question 4. The mgt.]
1. Let the class discuss the Zen riddle, "Who is the one more wonderful than all the Buddhas and sages?"
2. According to a story in News of the Weird, op. cit., six men in the Philippines once got into an argument about "which came first, the chicken or the egg." Tempers flared, guns emerged, and four of the six got shot dead. See if the class can discuss the Wheeler theory, pro and con, without equally drastic results.
3. Apply, with your own ingenium, the Wheeler model to an ordinary quarrel between humans.
4. Take a top off the tank behind the toilet, pull the handle and watch how the water level returns to its previous height after flushing. This shows the simplest possible circular-causal mechanism in an ordinary home. Apply circular-causal analysis to:
A. Race relations in the U.S. and the Union of South Africa;
B. The cold war;
C. The average divorce;
D. Self-fulfilling prophecies in corporation/human relations.
4 comments:
1. "The one" might suggest the whole system, universe in Bucky's terminology and/or God in Ibn 'Arabi's.
2. I've begun reading How the Hippies Saved Physics. I hope I can answer this question better after I finish it and/or as the S. Cat class begins at MLA. In one universe Mitt Romney wins today. In another Barack wins and legalizes pot. In another the Green Party wins, freaking out our mass media, etc.
3. In one universe we don't have the quarrel, in another I win, in another a chipmuck unsuccessfully attacks us (ending the argument), in many others you win the argument, etc. Have any of you seen the movie "The Quarrel"? I loved it and watched it over and over again. It deals with two friends from Poland who survived the Holocaust. They meet accidentally in Canada after the war and renew a quarrel.
1. I had always thought this meant that if you think deeply about the teachings of the Buddha and the other sages, the end result is more "true" to you than anything you will get from an authority figure.
when I was reading Illuminatus! trilogy I got the sense that it was your own brain, nervous system or some configuration of both called your conscience, but it could also be the very process that brought these about.
I think the engagement with mullah nasrudin's "koans" (i forget what they are called) indicates this conclusion because it seems implicit in them all.
or maybe I am looking for it.
2. I don't know enough about physics, but I am inclined to go with the theory, especcialy how it is espoused by Deutzche, who actually goes on and applies to one of the oldest paradoxes in the world time and then attempts an explanation of free-will facsinating stuff.
3. Watzlavicks Pragmatics of human communication has an interesting take on people's models of the world and how they can go pathological, he mentions the play who's afraid of virginia wolf as a very good highlighting of communication paradoxes, it has an interesting synchronicity because the play is about 2 people who are stuck in a pathological style of communication which watzlaviv describes in his book has having to do with nested points of view, which are not easily reconcialable and later on I read an analasys of virginia wolf's book, which talked about how she was good at having nested points of view in her work it also has an act called "walpurgisnacht"
4. I haven't enough time, I would have to write an entire essay.
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