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anandjeyahar comments on Rationality Quotes October 2013 - Less Wrong
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Mu means "no thing." Like "quality" it points outside the process of dualistic discrimination. Mu simply says, "no class: not one, not zero, not yes, not no." It states that the context of the question is such that a yes and a no answer is in error and should not be given. "Unask the question" is what it says.
.... [Somewhere later]
That Mu exists in the natural world investigated by science is evident. […] The dualistic mind tends to think of Mu occurrences in nature as a kind of contextual cheating, or irrelevance, but Mu is found through all scientific investigation, and nature doesn't cheat, and nature's answers are never irrelevant. It's a great mistake, a kind of dishonesty to sweep nature's Mu answers under the carpet. […]
When your answer to a test is indeterminate it means one of two things: that your test procedures aren't doing what you think they are or that your understanding of the context of the question needs to be enlarged. Check your tests and restudy the question. Don't throw away those Mu answers! They're every bit as vital as the yes and no answers. They're more vital. They're the ones you grow on.
--- Robert M Pirsig (Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
That's a bad way of phrasing it. "Mu" is about maps, not territories. What is "evident" is that some models do not result in testable predictions (answerable questions). The rest of the quote is pretty good.
Agreed. I always skimmed over that claim and never wondered why. The map vs territory analogy makes a lot of sense. After all the 'Mu' is an answer to a question. And the question is based on some map of the territory. Thanks for triggering that series of clicks in my mind. :)
You only need one > character at the beginning of a paragraph (but you do need another one at the beginning of the next paragraph). If you'd like to have a quote as many lines, you need to make each its own paragraph by hitting return twice in between lines of text.