Monthly Archives: September 2025

The System

September 16, 2025 – 9:15 am

After sitting behind his father on a motorcycle for a day, and riding through a thunderstorm, Chris Pirsig wants to tell and hear ghost stories. He asks whether his father believes in ghosts.

Clear blue sky above; below, a sand beach, with a strip of sea visible; on the left, a brick road parallel to the shore passes in the distance through trees

Altınova, September 10, 2025

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Maugham, Pirsig | Tagged , , , | Comments (5)

Gödel and AI

September 9, 2025 – 4:59 pm

To prove that no recursive theory of addition and multiplication of the counting numbers can be complete, Gödel relies on the distinction between the subjective and the objective. I suggested this in “Subjective and Objective,” while noting also that, for a computer, all is subjective.

At the inner corner of a street, interlocking bricks break out of their pattern

Incomplete pavement
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 9, 2025

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By David Pierce | Posted in Harper’s, Pirsig | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

Artificial Language

September 6, 2025 – 8:29 am

TL;DR: AI writing is like human writing. Of course it is, since its model is human writing. But then what AI produces is like bad human writing.

My sources include Plato, Wendell Berry, George Orwell, E. B. White, William Deresiewicz, Hadley Freeman, Andrew Kay, Kenneth G. Crawford, Hollis Robbins, Yuval Noah Harari, William Egginton, Megan Fritts, and Vi Hart.

About preparing certain seeds for human consumption in an infusion:

For sensory attributes, I’m admittedly Platonic and believe that since coffee is a fruit, it should taste something like a fruit. (And it’s not just any fruit – it’s a cherry!) My roasting philosophy comes from the same conviction. Generally, I’m after bright, juicy, fruity, syrupy goodness.

Thus Caleb Bilgen, founder of Ánimo Coffee Roasters in Asheville, North Carolina.

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From a terrace beneath an awning, a low wall obscured by ivy, oleander, and quince; on the other side, a lawn with a jungle gym; beyond this, a weeping willow and a small white house beneath umbrella pines

What I see as the sun rises
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 5, 2025

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By David Pierce | Posted in Language, Pirsig, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (6)

Prairie Life

September 3, 2025 – 6:16 pm

I’m going to make some comparisons here, even some likenings, mainly between

  • Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), especially chapter 2, and
  • Wendell Berry, “Conservation is Good Work” (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1993; reprinted in Essays 1993–2017, Library of America, 2019).

Pirsig recounts a motorcycle trip west from Minnesota across the prairie. The riders pass through Yellowstone National Park, but Pirsig does not like it. At least his former self did not like it. This is in chapter 12 of ZAMM:

The guided-tour attitude of the rangers angered him. The Bronx Zoo attitudes of the tourists disgusted him even more … It seemed an enormous museum with exhibits carefully manicured to give the illusion of reality, but nicely chained off so that children would not injure them.

For Berry, such parks set the wrong standard for what should be conserved:

Right at the heart of American conservation, from the beginning, has been the preservation of spectacular places. The typical American park is in a place that is “breathtakingly” beautiful or wonderful and of little apparent economic value. Mountains, canyons, deserts, spectacular landforms, geysers, waterfalls – these are the stuff of parks. There is, significantly, no prairie national park.

I do see that Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve was created in Kansas in 1996.

A number of roses in three groups on canes sharing a root, against ground covered with pine needles; the shadow of a tree trunk divides the scene diagonally

Roses in the garden
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 2, 2025

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By David Pierce | Posted in Collingwood, Pirsig | Tagged , , , | Comments (7)

Omniscience

September 2, 2025 – 6:10 pm

I have been working on a post that could have been the result of the following prompt:

Write on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and AI, using such thinkers as

  • Yuval Noah Harari (b. 1976),
  • William Deresiewicz (b. 1964),
  • Annie Dillard (b. 1945),
  • Roger Penrose (b. 1931),
  • Robert Pirsig (1928–2017),
  • George Orwell (1903–50),
  • E.B. White (1899–1985),
  • Michael Attaleiates (c. 1022–80), and
  • Plato (fl. 4th cent. b.c.e.).

Not until I had finished a first draft did I actually know that all of those people would feature. My real prompt had been more like,

In the style of David Pierce, write on Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and AI, as discussed by Roger Penrose in his “Précis of The Emperor’s New Mind.”

So instructed, could an LLM have come up with the connections that I did? Well, sure. Anything that has happened, could have happened, even in some other way. The real question is whether I would want AI to write my next post.

The present post consists of things I wanted to say at the beginning of that other post, after I had a first draft.

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Note added September 27, 2025. The next post after this one was

  • “Prairie Life,” comparing Robert Pirsig and Wendell Berry, because I was reading them both.

After that came the two posts that the draft mentioned above turned into:

After those came

  • “The System,” on what was bothering Pirsig; this led me to the resurgence of fascism today.

I was trying to work all of this out in the place in the photo below.

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Two tall bushes, lit up by the sun, rise in front of a low wall, next to a pine trunk; crowns of pines behind

Laurels in the garden
Altınova, Ayvalik, Balıkesir
September 2, 2025

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By David Pierce | Posted in Harper’s, Pirsig | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)