David Nyman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Yes, and I despair (almost) of remedying this, even if I knew how. My own attempts at linguistic 'clarity' seemed destined only to muddy the waters further, especially as I'm really trying to translate from personal modes that are often more visual/ kinaesthetic than verbal, gestalt than analytic.
I have these very same difficulties and I try my very hardest to use the minimal number of most-accessible words in their popular mode. Not always successfully...but you have to start somewhere. My origins are as an engineer immersed in the natural (electrical) world. Thousands of hours of waiting during commissioning, thinking for a couple of decades.... to surface and try to describe what you have seen after this...is a challenge. > > That said, I rather like your 'adverbial' mode, which I think has also cropped up in other contexts (didn't Whitehead attempt something of the sort with his process view?) Nominalisation/ reification creates conceptual confusions, embedded assumptions spawn others, as in all language to do with time, which is already loaded with the assumption of experiential dynamism, and hence can do nothing to help explain it. > ================================================ ASIDE, for the record, dual aspect science (from the previous post). I) APPEARANCE ASPECT. Depictions (statistics) of regularity (correlations of agreed 'objects' within) in appearances II) STRUCTURE ASPECT. Depictions (Statistics) of structure of an underlying natural world based on organisations of one or more posited structural primitives. Both have equal access to qualia as evidence. Qualia are evidence for both. Whatever the structure is, scientists are made of it and it must simultaneously a) deliver qualia and all the rest of the structure in the universe(II) and b) deliver the contents of qualia (appearances) that result in our correlations of appearances that we think of as empirical laws(I). This is a complete consistent set of natural laws, none of which literally 'are' the universe but are merely 'about' it. ================================================ back to David's words re language...'adverbial' descriptions: Nicholas Rescher has wrested process thought from the Whitehead sequestration of it. Rescher uses the adverbial mode quite convincingly in his latest works. Thank goodness...far too much religious/cultish detritus smattered throughout the Whitehead camp. They have no right to 'own' the process view. I hope those days are over now. The adverbial depiction is very apt as it stops us being deluded into the assumption of 'nouns' and 'things'. In day to day life nouns and things are very very useful, but the assumption that just because our language has them and we have agreed to their presence in the universe's appearance...does not mean that the language tokens are actually instantiated! Adverbial descriptions are far more general in that they easily unify all natural world behaviour as a single process that can deal with 'verby things' like rainstorms, that are inherently processual and apparent lumpy things (like lions) that behave 'nounly'. Qualia naturally fit into this idea. There is no thing 'red' in your head. The universe is behaving red-ly in your head. NOTE: An ideal object 'red' may be said to exist in 'platonia'. But so what! This is about _our_ universe, not some abstraction. > My own hastily contrived usages were an attempt to expose the implicit (and hence generally conceptually invisible) holding of the world 'at arm's length' by the objectifying effect of 3rd person language, which simultaneusly relegates 1st-person to a subsidiary role, to the extent that some even feel impelled to deny its existence, or resort to bizarre ontolgies in an attempt to 'reintroduce' it. Where McGinn and Chomsky hold that it is the analytic/ synthetic modes of language that puts 1st person beyond our ability to conceptualise, I feel that the unacknowledged consensual projection of an 'objective model' as > 'reality' has more to do with it. > > My belief has been that restoring 1st person to some sort of centrality would be part of the antidote, and I haven't yet (quite) lost hope on this score. I look forward to the fruits of your own efforts in this regard. > > David Your plea has not gone unheard. V.S. Ramachandran said "...the need to reconcile the first and third person accounts of the universe...is the single most important problem in science." (Phantoms in the Brain .229) and there's McGinn in 'the mysterious flame' where he makes a convincing case for us having a profoundly inadequate view of matter. I agree! I'd say there isn't any such 'thing'! :-) Note Ramachandran is not saying 'physics' or 'neuroscience' or 'consciousness studies' is affected but SCIENCE, all of it. He is absolutely right. Qualia are our entire source of scientific evidence. We have nothing else. They are an appearance (as a measurement supplied to us inside our heads by the action of brain material). To say that the universe is literally constructed of these appearances is a) illogical and b) does not align with the modern empirical evidence of brain material. To a) be completely dependent on 1st person data for scientific evidence (even though we linguistically extract an apparent objective agreed view out of it, without qualia we have no appearances to do that with!) and b) demand that this 1st person data be used as evidence on pain of being declared 'unscientific'. (If you can't experience it, you are not doing science). and then c) To believe that the abstractions we get by correlating the appearances are structural/causal and worse then d) to deny the existence qualia/declare the ficticious third person view as the only valid view in spite of d) glaring anomalous data presentation in brain material. is a recipe for a science that I'm not too sure has any other status than some sort of "cult of the objective view". Do we really want to have historians look back at us and cringe? The dual-aspect penny has to drop at some stage. Qualia(appearances) are only intractible because we keep insisting on & trying to use qualia (appearances, our scientific evidence) to explain them! Is it only me that sees that when the scientific evidence system (qualia) is applied to collect evidence in favour of a "science of qualia", a science of _our evidence system_!!, that the evidence system breaks down? If I had to categorise the situation I'd say that science is currently "single aspect, unsituated" as opposed to "dual-aspect, situated". FYI ['unsituated' means that the scientist is, despite the observer dependence characterised by quantum mechanics, surgically excised from the universe by the demand for an objective view that does not exist. 'Situated' science puts the scientist back inside the universe with the studied items. Note that science only needs OBJECTIVITY (a behaviour) not a real 'objective view' to construct correlations of type I (above). Dual aspect science disposes of the cultish need for a delusion of a 3rd person view ] I'd be very interested in the group's view on this. I feel like I'm the only one who can see something broken here (science). If anyone can say that a dual-aspect approach cannot be used for any other reason than dogmatic clinging to the way it is, a) I'd like to hear it.. (I challenge anyone/everyone to do this. I can't!) b) don't we have some breakthough thinking of some sort to be getting on with? Wouldn't it be nice to be part of a solution instead of endless circular ruminations that are the problem? Colin Hales p.s. some physicists already are already working in the structure (II) aspect... and they don't realise it. We are already doing it! We just don;t know when we are. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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