Peter Lennox
Mon, 27 Mar 2000 03:36:23 -0800
Thanks for two brilliant quotes! couple of things: This Behaviourism is not necessarily regarded as the best model of perception for a wide variety of tasks. It is indeed rooted in Cartesian Dualism, via Newton (and Gallileo before!), it does presuppose that the universe is 'machine', powered by cause and effect 'push causality', and that in that context you can think about perceiving organisms as 'signal processors' - an extension of the machine view. But experimental psychologists out of JJ Gibson (and the Gestalt psychologists before him) who, incidentally was a philosopher before he was a psychologist - don't really subscribe to this model at all. Admittedly they do refer to "perceiver - actors" as a way of distinguishing what they mean by perception from the older view of 'perception-as-sensation', and to the casual reader this could be actually taken as an endorsement of the viablity of the older view. Nevertheless, for many workers in fields related to perception, -cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, perceptual psychologists and developmental psychologists -, the simple model espoused by behaviorist theories is simply inadequate to describe what it is they're actually enquiring into. So perhaps Wright has polarised the arguments somewhat in order to make a point? (incidentally, this is a tactic employed at a physical neorological level to facilitate fast recognition of certain key features [described as "object-sharpening"] of the environment). I would certainly go along with the idea that certain fields may still employ descendants of that world-view (wrongly, in my personal view) but that has more to do with the principles surrounding the generalisability of particular findings in particular situations, which in turn depends on quite clear 'subjective / objective' definitions. I've had a gentle wrist-slapping before about employing these distinctions, but in fact am of the opinion that it is actually too simple to say that these are merely social constructs, and so if we choose to ignore them, they'll simply vanish. I think that, at our present stage of development, we have an inherent propensity toward this type of classification; this is not quite the same thing as saying that it is 'wholly innate', so we don't have to get into that sterile argument (the innate / acquired thing). I think we're all in agreeement that the subject / object definition-tool is too simple and too heavy handed for some of the tasks we wish to undertake, but that's not the same as saying that it's wholly wrong, either. I tend to bear in mind that Newton's 'force' of gravity was actually a last gasp of ancient animistic worldviews, but it worked well enough in order to get us on to the next level of description. So whilst I agree with Pirsig that the S/O viewer is often hiding much from us, I don't necessarily agree that we should simply throw it away, we just need to know when to put it down. And to do that, we need to know more about it, not less .Thus, simply ignoring subject / object distinctions is tantamount to turning our back on potentially valuable information. Apologies to those who find this particular area sterile! cheers, ppl (p.s. - in reply to a posting about two months ago, I personally find a hammer is still a brilliantly versatile tool, in a way that more modern, specialised nail-guns are not. I often wonder if this is pertinent to the general 'person-in-the-street' view of philosophy?) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Platt Holden" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: 26 March 2000 19:41 Subject: MD The Hot Stove Encounter Greetings Philosphers: Never have I come across a more startling and accurate comparison-in-a- nutshell between Pirisg and the current popular worldview than in the following quote from a new book by Robert Wright (author of "The Moral Annimal') entitled "NonZero." >From Robert Wright's, "NonZero" "According to the mainstream scientific view, consciousness -subjective experience, sentience-has zero behavioral manifestations; it doesn't do anything. Sure, you may feel as if your feelings do things. Isn't it the sensation of heat, after all, that causes you to withdraw your hand from the surprisingly hot stove? The answer presupposed by modern behavioral science is: no. Corresponding to the subjective sensation of heat is an objective, physical flow of biological information. Physical impulses signifying heat travel up your arm and are processed by your equally physical brain. The output is a physical signal that coerces your muscles into withdrawing your hand. Here, at the sheerly physical level, is where the real action is. Your sensation of pain bears roughly the relation to real action that your shadow bears to you. In technical terms: consciousness, subjective experience, is "epiphenomenal" -it is always an effect, never a cause." >From Robert Pirsig"s "Lila" "Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience: It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow. "The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths. "Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any "self' or any "object" to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed. "Once this primary relationship is cleared up an awful lot of mysteries get solved. The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can't do it. You get all mixed up because values don't belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own." Next time somebody asks me what's so great about the MoQ, I'm going to say, "Here, read this," and present them a copy of the above. If that doesn't capture their interest, nothing will. Platt MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html