Thuam is still going?  Well, shoot... I would have joined if I'd seen this
a few hours earlier. (I realize I'm sending this days later... but I
started writing it having just missed things.)

I'm onboard with the experience-monism... I just insist that that we don't
conflate psychology-monism with some sort of super-underlying-everything
metaphysical monism.

It is one thing to point out the almost-truism that our experiences are
composed of experiences. It is another thing to assert---in some gnostic
fashion---that there exists only experiences.

To phrase it differently:
We can convert much of Nick's work on psychology into experience-monism by
making the Jamesian move of pointing out that our psychological terms refer
to things we experience, and asking what, exactly, is experienced in those
contexts. When a parent tells a young child they are angry---in the
contexts in which the child is just learning such words---there is a thing
the parent sees, which they are labeling in said fashion. They aren't
labeling something that lays on the other side of a cartesian chasm, they
are experiencing something directly, to which they are applying a label...
and we can prioritize THAT aspect of the happening.

That is different than falling down some rabbit hole where we start to talk
about "universal mind" and claim that rocks are composed of
experience-stuff.

The former is a perfectly reasonable conversation to have (whether it is
right or wrong), and the latter is squarely in the Wittgenstinian
that-about-which-we-cannot-speak category.

Best,
(other) Eric


On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 1:02 PM Prof David West <[email protected]> wrote:

> Yes, please, what Eric asked.
>
> I would expect most people on this list to tend towards the "hyper," not
> the "apha."
>
> davew
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2025, at 10:38 AM, Santafe wrote:
> > That’s interesting, Nick (on limited time here, but just for a while)
> >
> >> On Nov 6, 2025, at 11:19, Nicholas Thompson <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Given the work that many of you do, many of you are candidates for
> "aphatasia"
> >
> > Can you say more about why you expect a correlation?  This is not an
> > association that would ever have occurred to me.
> >
> > Eric
> >
> >
> >
> >
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