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. [Krimel] Nice job of dismissing the other quotes which blatantly refuted your interpretation of James. This one was a bit more subtle though helps to demonstrate the depth of your misunderstanding of what he says. He is sometimes difficult to decipher and perhaps you could be forgiven if you weren't such a smug ass about it. In speaking of a world of pure experience James takes pains to note that he is talking about human experience. There is a line of human experience and a line of the physical experiences in the objective world. They become one at the point of their intersection, but more on that later. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] With regards to conjunctive relations, it means something more like the conjunction, which is a part of speech, you know and, or, but, nor. James adds, "with, near, next, like, from, towards, against, because, for, through, my." that sort of thing. He says, "A priori, we can imagine a universe of withness but no nextness; or one of nextness but no likeness, or of likeness with no activity, or of activity with no purpose, or of purpose with no ego. These would be universes, each with its own grade of unity. The universe of human experience is, by one or another of its parts, of each and all these grades. Whether or not it possibly enjoys some still more absolute grade of union does not appear upon the surface." He is arguing against a position held by some at the time which he calls the synthetic method. "Starting with 'simple ideas of sensation,' and regarding these as so many atoms, they proceed to build up the higher states of mind out of their 'association,' 'integration,' or 'fusion,' as houses are built by the agglutination of bricks." (Stream of Consciousness, 1892) Rather he claims that there are no such atoms of the mind and that no experience can be had twice. "Does not the same grass give us the same feeling of green, the same sky the same feeling of blue, and do we not get the same olfactory sensation no matter how many times we put our nose to the same flask of cologne? It seems a piece of metaphysical sophistry to suggest that we do not; and yet a close attention to the matter shows that there is no proof that an incoming current ever gives us just the same bodily sensation twice What is got twice is the same OBJECT. We hear the same note over and over again; we see the same quality of green, or smell the same objective perfume, or experience the same species of pain. The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas' of them are the same ideas.." (Stream of Consciousness, 1892) He firmly embraces empiricism but wants to correct what he sees as an error; namely that as traditionally framed it ignores the mental states that contribute to our perception of reality. "The Empiricists have always dwelt on its influence in making us suppose that where we have a separate name, a separate thing must needs be there to correspond with it; and they have rightly denied the existence of the mob of abstract entities, principles, and forces, in whose favor no other evidence than this could be brought up. But they have said nothing of that obverse error. of supposing that where there is no name no entity can exist. All dumb or anonymous psychic states have, owing to this error, been coolly suppressed; or, if recognized at all, have been named after the substantive perception they led to, as thoughts 'about' this object or 'about' that, the stolid word about engulfing all their delicate idiosyncrasies in its monotonous sound. Thus the greater and greater accentuation and isolation of the substantive parts have continually gone on." (The Principles of Psychology Vol. I, 1890) [dmb] 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. [Krimel] He is saying that experience is not a set of disconnected units it is as a continuous flow, a movie not sequence of frames. [dmb] (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.) [Krimel] The error here is that I mistook the name of a section in "World of Pure Experience" as the title of a separate article. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I thought the key to this was indicated in the quote I originally offered but he does make the point much more clearly in "Does Consciousness Exist": "'Representative' theories of perception avoid the logical paradox, but on the other hand they violate the reader's sense of life, which knows no intervening mental image but seems to see the room and the book immediately just as they physically exist. The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the 'pure experience' of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates respectively, it could be counted twice over, as belonging to either group, and spoken of loosely as existing in two places, although it would remain all the time a numerically single thing." [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Actually what he is saying is that experience is continuous. It is a Herclitian stream not a set of disconnected point that require metaphysical spackle to be smoothed together. At best one could say that James thinks our human experience is our reality. But it totally misses the point to assert that our experience is "Reality" He maintains that your reality is yours and mine is mine and where they intersect they are alike. But the arbitrator of this likeness is to be form in the world of objects. He says this so often it is hard to see how you could miss it but you are pretty good at hearing only what you want to hear. It's like your superpower or something. BTW, I know technology is not your thing but please find a geek to help you compose your email. It comes in as one continuous paragraph and looks as scrambled as what it says. Do you do it on purpose; a garbled look to draw attention from the garbled thoughts? 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/
