Robert Pirsig – fellow left-hander
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance https://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1952011,00.html
Are you curious about its author’s childhood? Here is an excerpt from an interview with Tim Adams for the Observer, Nov 2006 –
TA: When you look back on childhood now, does it seem like another life?
RP: It was a strange life. You saw my IQ? [170 aged 9] I didn’t learn about that until I was 32. I just thought I was kind of a bad kid; I didn’t relate to people at all. I was kind of a sissy at first, in a playground situation, and the kid who is scared is the one the bullies go after. I used to get beat up pretty badly. When I was five I was put up a couple of years and everyone was seven or eight and much bigger than I was. And the teacher made me write with my right hand, though I was left handed, to stop me smudging the page. I started to stammer. Fortunately the University of Minnesota, where my father taught, had one of the top psychology departments in the world. Someone there told him that the speech centres of the brain are all on one side, and if you are forced to use the wrong hand to do things it throws all that out. By then it had created a stammer so bad I could hardly get a word out. This professor went to the school and presented this to the teacher, and I was allowed to use my left hand and my stammer disappeared in a month.
I really like this quote by Robert Pirsig, Lila – ‘An inquiry into morals’ New York (Bantam Books) 1991. Love the way he describes the behavior of particles in quantum physics. For more quotes: https://www.ldb.org/pirsig.htm
The only difference between causation and the value is that the word “cause” implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of “value” is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that “cause” is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles “prefer” to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.
