Magnus: The problem with your SOLAQI is the same problem I've been talking to Ron about.
It assumes our reality consists of thoughts alone. Thoughts of eating, thoughts of conspiring and then the grand thoughts of intellectual abstraction. But if you, like Pirsig did in Lila, look at the world around you, write what you see on small pieces of paper, there are not many of those pieces of paper that will end up the "thoughts" box, right? A stone is not a thought, the computer I type on now is not a thought, me thinking about what to write *is* a thought on the other hand, and of course there's a thought involved when I'm about to write on each piece of paper. But the vast majority of paper slips will not be thoughts. Ron: This is the central disagreement between us, I was of the same opinion Until a few months ago when with the help of David Buchanan and Dan Glover To name only a few, brought me around to the notion that Rocks and computers Actually ARE thoughts. Thoughts of a differing nature perhaps, but thoughts None the less. Basic assumptions on which to build abstract thinking on. These basic assumptions are formed by social interpretation and taken as reality. What I mean by Objective Assumption" is the assumption that thoughts or what we are thinking about is Totally objective, that your perception of a rock is what any human being at any point in history would perceive as a rock. The term "a rock" has many meanings and forms just in one cultural definition. In our own culture "a rock" is interpreted given many subjective factors of the One perceiving it. Geography is just one consideration. What stored mental images you associate with the term is also associated with past experiences. A Rock to a desert dweller is different from a rock to a pacific islander. That's just inter-culturally some cultures may perceive rocks as living entities Or manifestations of ancestors. Some may have no word for it at all. What we perceive as everyday common items, objectively absolute, are culturally conditioned overlays. Static patterns are perceived symbolically and associated with cultural meanings that intellect manipulates abstractly. Rueben Able "Man is the Measure": "Visual perception is discontinuous, seeing consists physically of separate glances, each lasting about a quarter of a second. (the world may disappear in the intervals and we would never know it) The brain pieces together these distinct stimuli to construct an image of a stable and continuous world." " What enters the eye is not really seen until it is organized by the brain. To see what is the case requires context, inference, concepts, experience, interpretation." he goes on to say: " The selective nature of perception is also a consequence of the fact that the number of sensory stimuli, or possible messages from outside, is greater than we can receive and process. The channels of communication to us are crowded and noisy; we must filter stimuli. What we receive is usually what we expect, or want, or believe, or are used to. Our eyes and brains coordinate how objects look at different distances, from different directions, and under different light, and show us an object to which we attribute a constant size, shape, and color. To perceive is to solve a problem. Our capacity "to find strands of permanence in the tumult of changing appearances" (Polanyi) has survival value. Gestalt psychologists' stress how we tend to perceive well defined patterns and wholes which are not really there, by integrating heterogeneous cues and filling in contours." >From DMB: "For Rorty, "nothing pre-linguistic is conceivable" (Hildebrand 2003, 186). He shares the view with many that the world as we know it is "text all the way down". Interpretation is bottomless, so to speak. But that is exactly what Dewey and the radical empiricists are willing to defy. It hardly matters whether we call it "pure experience" as James did, the "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" as Northrop did, the "whole situation" as Dewey did or the "primary empirical reality" as Pirsig does. A rose is a rose. The idea is simply that everything follows from that first and most basic experience. All the conceptual distinctions are secondary to that, are derived from that. We are not talking about some other realm or any kind of thing. And this is not meant to suggest that the world as we know it suddenly pops into existence the moment a subject conceptualizes it. We are simply talking about experience before one has a chance to think about it, before it has been interpreted by our conceptual schemes. This pre-linguistic moment of experience has gone unnoticed as James says, because only "only new born babes" and people in extraordinary circumstances have access to pure experience (James 1912, 93). The infant also appears as an example in Pirsig's explanations (Pirsig 1991, 118-9). The "unverbalized sensations" of experience are "identified and fixed and abstracted" into the shapes we recognize as the world of things (James 1912, 94). For adults, arguably like myself, these abstractions have been fixed for so long and are used so automatically and habitually that they are invisible. This habits of mind have developed and evolved over long periods and are inherited by us from the culture in the normal maturation processes, in the process of acquiring language in childhood. I think this explains why SOM has assumed such a powerful role in Western conceptions of reality. The radical empiricists are saying they are not reality, that SOM is a theory that doesn't look like a theory. Its a metaphysical abstraction so old and pervasive that it has become common sense." 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/
