Part III: The Illustrated "Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" Chapters 16 thru 26.  

Saturday, July 20, 2024: … At The ZMM Narrator’s “Turnout” This Sign Gives A Bit Of Interesting History, And Where The Name Colgate Came From.

The ZMM Narrator says, concerning Traditional Science Practice =>
” We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for us, and then reason disinterestedly from the facts we observe.
…But when we stop and think about it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin to see that this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are those facts? What are we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable side cover plate? The color of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don’t just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we’re not going to just sit back and "observe" them. We’re going to have to be in there looking for them or we’re going to be here a long time. Forever. As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what facts we observe.
The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! This is an ability about which formal traditional scientific method has nothing to say. It’s long past time to take a closer look at this qualitative preselection of facts which has seemed so scrupulously ignored by those who make so much of these facts after they are "observed." I think that it will be found that a formal acknowledgment of the role of Quality in the scientific process doesn’t destroy the empirical vision at all. It expands it, strengthens it and brings it far closer to actual scientific practice.
…I think the basic fault that underlies the problem of stuckness is traditional rationality’s insistence upon "objectivity," a doctrine that there is a divided reality of subject and object. For true science to take place these must be rigidly separate from each other. "You are the mechanic. There is the motorcycle. You are forever apart from one another. You do this to it. You do that to it. These will be the results."
This eternally dualistic subject-object way of approaching the motorcycle sounds right to us because we’re used to it. But it’s not right. ”
[Bold by HSG.] (Cont. Next Photo)

Colgate Lick Turnoff Rest Area, Lochsa River Canyon, ID.

File = DSC 0658 rot Resize1000x1504 ~154KB


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