dmb disagreed with Krimel: The idea that mental events arise from physical substance is exactly what James and Pirsig are against. They assert that "mental" and "physical" are products of reflection, abstractions of the qualitative differences known in direct experience.
Krimel replied: No where is James saying that physical substance does not give rise to mental events. And Krimel quoted this, among other things, for support: "The Conterminousness Of Different Minds" "I can see no formal objection to this supposition's being literally true. On the principles which I am defending, a 'mind' or 'personal consciousness' is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit by different transitions. If one and the same experience can figure twice, once in a mental and once in a physical context (as I have tried, in my article on 'Consciousness,' to show that it can), one does not see why it might not figure thrice, or four times, or any number of times, by running into as many different mental contexts, just as the same point, lying at their intersection, can be continued into many different lines." dmb says: I'm stunned that you would quote this to dispute what I said, because it is exactly what I said. Here, James is saying that 'mind' and 'objective reality' are names for experience. He's saying that the 'mental' and the 'physical' both arise from one and the same experience. In "A World of Pure Experience" James insists that “the relations that connect experiences”, provided they are actually experienced, “must be accounted as real”. He thinks that “conjunctive relations” (which is just a fancy victorian way to say that things are connected in experience) have been overlooked by traditional empiricism and that this oversight is what creates the gaps between terms, especially terms such as subjects and objects. For this reason, he wants us to pay special attention to “the most intimate of all relations”, “the conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy”. To put it simply, he's saying that “the passing of one experience into another” is itself “a definite sort of experience”. “The is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self”. There a seamless ongoing “experiential tissue”, with no “external cement” required to assist in “our confident rush forward”, toward whatever purpose we hope to fulfill. James wants us to notice these connecting experiences because it is a way to offer an alternative explanation as to the nature of the subjective self and objective reality. Or rather, it explains how they came about in the first place. The failure to account for these relations generated the need for a subjective self as the agent that connects experience. The continuity of experience was explained by the existence of a thinker that has the thoughts or does the thinking, as something separate and distinct from the thinking itself. When we say, “it is raining”, to use a classic example, there isn’t actually an “it” that does the raining. The raining is “it”. That’s what James is saying about the Cartesian self and the objective reality that goes with it. That's what James is talking about when he says, “On the principles which I am defending, a ‘mind’ or ‘personal consciousness’ is the name for a series of experiences run together by certain definite transitions, and an objective reality is a series of similar experiences knit together by different transitions”. (Either James said exactly the same thing in two different essays or you've misattributed it, because I'm presently looking at the text and so am fairly certain he said it in A World of Pure Experience.) The re-conception of “objective” realities is similarly achieved by the connections between experiences. In his main example, the walk that terminates at Memorial Hall, the connection between idea and the building itself is known in experience through a continuously developing progress in actual experience and his point is that “objective” knowledge goes no deeper than this. “Whatever terminates that chain was, because it now proves itself to be, what the concept ‘had in mind’”. “The towering importance for human life of this kind of knowing lies in the fact that an experience that knows another can figure as its representative, not in any quasi-miraculous ‘epistemological’ sense, but in the definite practical sense of being its substitute in various operations”. That’s why James wants us to notice that most intimate of all relations, to notice the experienced connections between experiences. James says, “to be a radical empiricist means to hold fast to this conjunctive relation of all others, for this is the strategic point, the position through which, if a hole be made, all the corruptions of dialectics and all the metaphysical fictions pour into our philosophy”. James is saying that the subjective self and the objective reality, came in through that hole. _________________________________________________________________ i’m is proud to present Cause Effect, a series about real people making a difference. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/MTV/?source=text_Cause_Effect 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/
