Thanks for all the Ghosts

I thoroughly enjoyed Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I read it through in about a week. Unfortunately that was almost a month ago now, and so it might not be terrifically fresh in my memory.

Picking out some interesting (to me) instances of the belief/doubt theme:
- I thought Dirk's rejection of his own clairvoyance and any supernatural explanation of his coming up with all the exam questions was interesting. When someone knows for certain that something (e.g. seeing the future) does not exist, no amount of evidence to the contrary can convince them.

- The revelation of how the vase trick was perpetrated, particularly the reliance on a child's naivete, illustrates how Adams simultaneously wants us to think we're too constrained by the rigid ideologies of "acceptable" reality and that we shouldn't go off believing absurd things, like (in his opinion, I suppose) religion. Time travel, if it explains the evidence, is great; I doubt he would exhibit such sangfroid over a religious explanation.

- Gordon Way's surprise at discovering himself to be dead and yet still in existence was interesting. I think Way is set up as a fairly normal, non-introspective member of society. He assimilates the new knowledge rather quickly, all things considered, and dramatically alters his world view to accept the new evidence. Compare that to Robin William's character in What Dreams May Come where he takes some time to accept the fact that 1) he's dead but 2) he still exists. I think that, in general, Adams' writings lead me to believe he approves of rapidly evolving world views in light of new evidence, but again this seems at odds with his antithesis not only to religion but to religionists.

- The music of the spheres that Richard and the others find so enamoring indicates to me Adams' deep-felt desire to believe in an overarching, harmonizing force from which all that is good derives. This is echoed in the whole Anthem (?) development, and Richard's evidence-less conviction that the arc of a bird's wing in flight would produce beautiful music.

- The hypnotism and possession sequences, in which characters behave in ways they believe are rational and reasonable and arrived at by their own agency, but are in fact decided by an agent completely external to the individual.

So, I guess I've belabored the point a bit, but I think it's interesting in its contradictions. We should free ourselves to believe whatever best reconciles the evidence, except when it disagrees with my prejudice which is infallible despite its evidence-free basis, and oh, By the Way, you can't be sure that your logic is really your own because what if you're possessed. From a technical standpoint, my own research touches on some of these topics tangentially, and the more I know about how we know what we know the more I believe ideological devotion to deductive logic in its purest form is utterly insane. There's such a host of evidence-less assumptions that must be made before the first deductive step that anyone who claims such a process is bias-free ought to blush.

I hadn't intended to rant on the failings of deductive logic. Really, I just thought the book was a fun exploration of some of these ideas with a pretty good story that had me guessing for about 200 out of 300 pages and entertained for the full 300. Cami, who says she enjoyed it almost as much as I did, claims to have known exactly what was happening from the very first chapter. I guess some people are just like that.