Krimel said to dmb:
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.
dmb says:
You shouldn't delete quotes being debated unless your aim to is hide and
obscure. Besides, I can simply dig it up and re-post it.
[Krimel]
Let me assure you that I never delete anything. I have right here in my
inbox every single post made in this forum since I began posting here. It
would not occur to me to delete a post. Each new post is an entity unto
itself and if I do not chose to include lengthy quotations that do not add
to the current post it is not to hide them. I can not imagine why you would
not have access to them. To me erasing one of these email would be like
ripping out discarding memories a chunk at a time.
[dmb]
Here is a paragraph from the paper I quoted (by Taylor & Wozniak). The
phrase "physical substance" isn't used here but notice what James wishes to
get rid of ("this substantial dualism") and what he hopes to replace it with
(a "monism of pure experience"). He is denying that there is an entity
called consciousness (the subjective self) and he is denying that there
"material objects". He says the "primal stufff or material in the world" is
not matter but rather "pure experience".
[Krimel]
I notice that James does dismiss materialism out of hand. He does such a
thorough job of dismissing absolutism and idealism, theism and most forms of
monism that I continue to search for a more thorough going analysis of his
arguments against materialism. On the other hand the only materialism James
had to argue against was a classical materialism of Newton, which would
indeed be hard to defend. In James's time its true death knell was being
sounded not in the philosophical tradition but in the traditions of physics
and mathematics with Helmholt's early sketches of the first non-classical
theories of thermodynamic. (Note: the "dynamics" part, Dave. It's a real
clue!)
[dmb]
To deny the existence of "consciousness" is not, for James, to deny the
existence of thoughts, but "to deny that the word ['consciousness'] stands
for an entity," to deny that there is any "aboriginal stuff or quality of
being, contrasted with that of which our material objects are made, out of
which our thoughts of them are made."[19]
[Krimel]
So far so good but he does add "... there is a function in experience which
thoughts perform, and for the performance of which this quality of being is
invoked. That function is knowing."
[dmb]
In place of this substantial dualism, James proposes what might best be
called a radically pluralistic monism of pure experience. There is, he says,
"only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything
is composed, and...we call that stuff ' pure experience.'" For James, in
other words, all that which exists is pure experience and pure experience is
all that exists. In contrast to the dualism of consciousness and content, in
other words, James argues for a monism of pure experience.[20]
[Krimel]
In three paragraphs a little later in the essay which I will radically
shorten here but which you have free access to obviously, James is pretty
clear that mental experience its distinct from physical experience.
"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..."
"In one of these contexts it is your 'field of consciousness'; in another it
is 'the room in which you sit,' and it enters both contexts in its
wholeness..."
"In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire
play over it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a
month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length
of time rent-free. If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction,
taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all sorts of
things are true of it which are false, and false of it which are true if you
treat it as a real thing experienced, follow it in the physical direction,
and relate it to associates in the outer world."
Later he spells out how the network of associations among aspects of
experience begins to form as patterns of order arising from chaos:
"This world, just like the world of percepts, comes to us at first as a
chaos of experiences, but lines of order soon get traced. We find that any
bit of it which we may cut out as an example is connected with distinct
groups of associates, just as our perceptual experiences are, that these
associates link themselves with it by different relations, and that one
forms the inner history of a person, while the other acts as an impersonal
'objective' world, either spatial and temporal, or else merely logical or
mathematical, or otherwise 'ideal.'"
In short we build an inner house not made with hands out of patterns of
perceptual experience obtained through contact with an outer world. Human
experience is at the intersection of the inner and outer worlds. At this
intersection the two may count as one.
In APU he carries this future saying, "Taken as it does appear, our universe
is to a large extent chaotic. No one single type of connection runs through
all the experiences that compose it."
dmb,
Look I am sorry but I will have to end here for now. It probably sounds like
a cop out but I fear I will be out of range of the internet for a few days.
As you might imagine I find the prospect of being disconnected from our
collective consciousness, even for a few days, pretty disturbing.
On a personal note I would like to thank you for your indulgence. I truly
enjoy swapping jabs with you. I suspect that I genuinely piss you off but
you are a great pen pal none-the-less. I believe we genuinely disagree and
are not really just using different language and talking past each other. We
could no doubt be a bit more civil to each other but hell we both know this
is street chess not a tournament. As Pirsig has suggested, there are no
reputations at stake just our egos and our ideas. Fuck it, let's blackness
each other's eyes and bloody our noses; call it street philosophy.
I know the new school term is starting for you, Dave. I sincerely wish you
well, my friend.
Krimel
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