Ron: I have been accused of stirring up trouble for troubles sake and propping up s/o for lack of anything better to talk about. But I sincerely have a defense. Alfred North Whitehead said "The worst homage we can pay to genius is to accept uncritically, formulations of truths which we owe to it."
I tend to agree, with this in mind let us look at what DMB had to say in a recent Post about "pure undifferentiated experience" to Bo. Bo asked: I guess James' "aesthetic continuum" is another name for this pre-intellectual awareness that's neither subjective nor objective. But what does the dividing? dmb says: The answer is pretty well contained in the question. If pre-intellectual awareness is undivided experience and intellectual awareness is divided then, obviously, intellect is what does the dividing. And here intellect can't be equated with the subjective self anymore than an axe can be equated with the wood it splits. The subjective self is one of the divisions, not the divider. Ron: I think maybe you are missing the point Bo is trying to make, Rueben Able in "Man is the measure" describes pre-intellectual awareness, Abel confirms my suspicion that cutting edge experience is just as much a product of prior recognition of associated patterns: "Visual perception is discontinuous, seeing consists physically of separate glances, each lasting about a quarter of a second. (the world may disappear in the intervals and we would never know it) The brain pieces together these distinct stimuli to construct an image of a stable and continuous world." " What enters the eye is not really seen until it is organized by the brain. To see what is the case requires context, inference, concepts, experience, interpretation." he goes on to say: " The selective nature of perception is also a consequence of the fact that the number of sensory stimuli, or possible messages from outside, is greater than we can receive and process. The channels of communication to us are crowded and noisy; we must filter stimuli. What we receive is usually what we expect, or want, or believe, or are used to. Our eyes and brains coordinate how objects look at different distances, from different directions, and under different light, and show us an object to which we attribute a constant size, shape, and color. To perceive is to solve a problem. Our capacity "to find strands of permanence in the tumult of changing appearances" (Polanyi) has survival value. Gestalt psychologists stress how we tend to perceive well defined patterns and wholes which are not really there, by integrating heterogeneous cues and filling in contours." Ron: Where does symbol recognition end and manipulation begin. Does manipulation into relative meaning influence recognition? Is perceiving Solving the problem of relative recognition? If so then "pure experience" is relegated as James submits, to the realm of infants and those of special mental exception.. The error is seeing pure experience as separate from intellect. Which is plainly not the case. DMB goes on: If Dewey, James and Pirsig are all rejecting SOM but still manage to provide an intellectual alternative then it should also be obvious for that reason also that subjectivity and intellect can't rightly be equated. In that case, intellect still divides. Its just that one particular division is being rejected in favor of something else and they provide many explanations for that rejection. Ron: Dewey, James and Pirsig do not reject SOM and really do not provide an alternative, what they provide is an adaptation of existing concepts. James explains in "Pragmatism": "The most observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly Singled out for generalization is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but He meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody Contradicts them, or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other: Or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible or desires arise in him which they cease To satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then has been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with A minimum of modification. "The reasons why we call things true is the reason why they are true, for "to be true" means only to perform this marriage function." DMB continues dismissively: In other words, the point is simply that intellect isn't necessarily the same thing as a subjective self. And so I think one would have to miss this point entirely in order to assert anything like your SOLAQI. (Subject-Object Logic As Quality Intellect) Ron: I think you miss the point entirely by not recognizing that the subjective self plays a role in perception and assuming pre-intellect and intellect Are separate functions. I fear you confuse the term logic for intellect. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
