dmb and Krimel,
Am I missing something here, but isn't experience
(as dmb puts it) for an organism that has a biological
brain that thinks (as Krimel puts it) - the same
'thing'?
SA
> 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 isnt actually an it that does the raining.
> The raining is it. Thats 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. Thats 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.
>
>
>
>
>
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