Krimel said to dmb: As to your response below I was a touch disappointed that you needed to hide behind Taylor and Wozniak but that is chiefly because I am interested in what you think not so much what you have read.
dmb says: Can you seriously think that the purpose of quoting an academic paper on the topic is to "hide" behind it? Oh, excuse me for being relevant and for introducing professional voices into the debate. I must be crazy for wanting to use academic sources and for being on topic. Obviously, I should instead use unfair and ungenerous characterizations of what you say based on nothing at all. That's the only intellectually respectable way to go, eh? [Krimel] My disappointment stemmed largely from the length of the quotation but primarily from its irrelevance to the point at hand. You brought it up to address this statement: "No where is James saying that physical substance does not give rise to mental events." It simply does not. You say: "As I see it, you're looking at 'mind' and 'objective reality' in this sentence and supposing that their use is an endorsement of SOM. But I'm looking at what he's saying ABOUT them. He says they are the names of experiences. According to SOM minds and objective reality are the requirements of experience, the prerequisites for or conditions of experience. The representational theory of knowledge assumes this metaphysical starting point and construes knowledge as the correct mirroring of the objective world in a subjective mind. James is saying it ain't so." James is not saying that there is some kind of unitary form of pure experience. Nor is he advocating a monism of the sort you seem partial toward. He is saying that experience is plural. No single experience occurs twice for James. Your experiences are yours mine are mine and Memorial Hall's are Memorial Hall's". Any set of experiential streams can be thought of as a line, as in a geometric line and they can be considered that same at their point of intersection. dmb says: Yea, actually that's pretty close to true. Last semester I did a term paper for a class with the chair of the department in which I tied James and others to the perennial philosophy. I used the same paper as a writing sample for my application into the program. It worked too. (Got an A on the paper and was admitted into the program.) I mean, its not entirely unreasonable for me to believe that I'm reading James well enough. Perfect understanding is not something I ever expect of anyone, least of all myself, but there is a real basis for a certain level of confidence on these topics. [Krimel] Ok, Dave, you are a certified Jamesian expert. Krimel said: You believe that there exists in the grand scheme a higher consciousness or an implicit order in the universe out of which the world of appearances emanates. dmb says: That's pretty much the opposite of what I believe. As I understand radical empiricism (or Dewey's Immediate Empiricism), the difference between appearance and reality only makes sense on a practical, experiential level. In that sense, it is perfectly reasonable to say that plastic fruit only looks like the real thing. In that sense, a real rolex really is worth more than a fake one. But plastic and cheap knock-offs are still real. They real fakes. But when this distinction is expanded to cosmic proportions, it just creates a bunch of nonsense. [Krimel] Clear as mud but a definite miscasting of your views on my part. Krimel said: You believe, like so many others here, that the world ultimately has order meaning and purpose. dmb says: Radical empiricism is set up to, among other things, defy the positivist notion that the world is a completely purposeless and meaningless place. However, this is not done by merely asserting the opposite. Instead, it says that if an event is experienced as meaningful, then its unempirical to reject the meaningful quality of that experience. Radical empiricism refuses to dismiss such things as "merely" subjective. Even if later developments supercede the original experience, both are considered equally real so long as they are both actually experienced. In other words, it is not that the world is ultimately meaningful or meaningless. Purpose and meaning are not pre-existing realities that we discover at some point. They are qualities of experience. [Krimel] If you are saying, as I suspect you are not, they bring purpose into the world we might be on the same page. I pretty sure though that there must be some arcane reason that would make this not possible. Krimel said: You believe that thorough certain practices or mystical experiences you can be shed of the transitory nature of appearance and understand directly the ultimate nature of reality and commune with or become one with it. dmb says: Again, in radical empiricism the difference between undivided experience and the conventional experience or cognitive knowing is experiential and not ontological. Neither one is more real than the other. Krimel said You believe that Dynamic Quality is Pirsig's name for the purposive order found in the perennial philosophy. dmb says: As I understand it, the perennial philosophy only asserts that people from all times and places have reported a certain type or category of experience and that these are expresses in the various cultural manifestations, including the world's great religions. As I see it, this assertion is about as radical as saying that people in all times and places have ten fingers or love their mothers. These are just natural facts. [Krimel] And this significance of this is what? I would say that like having ten finger and toes and loving our mothers it is a purely biological feature of our existence. Krimel said: Just one gloss on what you have been presenting though. Of it one might repeat Poincare's question, 'Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?' dmb says: I'm not sure what you're getting at. Radical empiricism says reality and experience are the same thing. According to this idea, the child knows reality just as well as the quantum mechanic even if quantum mechanic understands physics better than the kid. In other words, having an intellectual understanding of the physical universe is not equated with knowing reality per se. [Krimel] Radical empiricism at least as James expresses it most assuredly does not say that reality and experience are the same thing. I might be construed to say that an individual's experience and an individual's reality are the same thing. But James spells our so often and so explicating that there is a "real" world out there on which our experience's converge that I can only interpret your failure to see this as willful failure to encode. I have offered up so many quotes to this effect that you have failed to address that I am loathe to offer more. But rest assured there are more to be offered. Krimel said: It is though you want to substitute the knotty but precise language of math and science for the merely knotty language of philosophy. dmb says: I have no problem with the language of math or science but rather their use in inappropriate contexts. That sort of language tends to be imperialistic, reaching out into foreign domains and forcing them into quantitative and technical clothes they were never meant to wear. Reductionism is the problem, not math or science. I mean, does it make any sense to try to quantify quality of all things? [Krimel] I obviously thing your misunderstandings about science are profound and mistaken. Reductionism as such is one of the most lasting and profoundly productive tools of science and math. It consists of breaking big problems into smaller ones. What's the problem? [dmb] Does brain chemistry really teach us anything about the meaning of experience? [Krimel] Why yes it does. Philosophical obfuscation aside all of our experiences arise in and are filtered through our nervous systems. James in no sense denies this and is a pains to emphasize and reemphasis it. [dmb] As I see it, talking about mystical experience in terms of chemical and organs is simply a matter of dismissing one topic in favor of another. Its not just a different way to talk about the meaning of experience. Its just a matter of changing the subject to something "physical" and or explaining it away as such. It is a way to AVOID talking about the experience and its meaning. [Krimel] It is a way of talking about how we construct meaning. It is a way of seeing how human being reaction to their environment, what they respond to and what they think about their responses and how they construct reality or of their interactions with the environment. [dmb] Radical empiricism is aimed at solving philosophical problems and in that sense it is not something that little kids are going to appreciate, but radical empiricism is not reality and kids don't need it in order to be in touch with reality. But it does explain how small children already understand what reality is and in what sense we all do. [Krimel] Willow trees need neither quantum mechanics nor philosophy to understand reality either. If being in touch was all that counted we would still be knocking rocks together. Rather our progress both scientific and philosophical progresses from improving our descriptions of realty; through construction of consensus; through inter-subjectivity. 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/
