Peter, dmb and everyone else who's chimed in here, This recent set of exchanges has been very helpful to me in understanding what this SOM brouhaha is all about. I have long been a subscriber to the strawman school, thinking that it was Pirsig's way of bitching about a whole cluster of things but that no one really subscribes to SOM as he framed it. I do agree with Peter that this is the way we all see things. There is a set of private experiences that each of us has that can only be known to and by us individually and there is a public set of experiences that we communicate about through mutual consensus. "Reality" is rather like William Gibson's description of cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination."
But SOM is also Pirsig's version of the long standing mind/body dualism debate wherein mental substance and physical substance are two irreducible forms of "stuff" which mysteriously interact but are not dependant on each other. Pirsig is ultimately always talking about how each of us has and makes sense of our individual experience. Even from a purely SOM perspective half of the equation is subjective private experience. I have always been puzzled that hardly anyone here spends much time pondering how it is that each of us has any kind of experience at all. Sure Ham drones on about it but he is mostly just making things up and ignores or misrepresents what medicine and science have to say on the subject. I would like to raise a few points here that relate not only to the mind/body problem but also to the notion of a self and to mysticism. There seems to be an underlying idea in much of what goes on in these discussions that experience is a unitary phenomena. Not just the idea of mystical oneness but that we can have "an" experience. From my point of view this is definitely and demonstrably an illusion in the "Kulpian" sense, as Ron has outlined. We do not have singular experiences. We can not have singular experiences. We have multiple experiences through multiple pathways and we synthesize those into the singularity of experience and of self. Experience begins as sensory input. Sensory input arrives through the various pathways of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature, balance, pressure, proprioception and perhaps a few more. But vision is our primary sense so let me start with that. Pretty much everything we see and the way we see it is a Kulpian illusion. The way that the receptor cells are arranged on the retinas of our eyes guarantees that only a tiny fraction of what we are looking at in any instant is actually in focus. Our lenses focus light onto a very small spot in the center of the retina. This area is packed with nerve cells which are able to pass along this focused information to the vision centers of the brain. Every thing we see "appears" to be in focus because we glance around a lot and construct from our multiple glancings a picture of a world in focus. As Pirsig notes the world that is in fact focused onto our retinas is also upside down so the illusion that we create is not only in focus but right side up. In addition there is a hole in our retinas were the optic nerve enters the eye and this blind spot is also covered over and masked as part of the illusion. If what we "see" were just the raw sense data not only would it be out of focus, upside down and have a hole in it, it would be entirely two dimensional. While we can abstract three dimensional models from monocular input through our experience with visual textures, relative size of near and distant objects and so forth, binocular vision facilitates the process. My point here is that even with the single sense of vision it requires multiple exposures to abstract our visual experience into a whole. Add to this the fact that at the same time we are constructing our visual worlds we are hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling it at the same time. The feeling of oneness or the unitary nature of experiences is a massive illusion. Each of the various senses arrives in the brain through isolated neural pathways which are eventually unified in the frontal cortex. I should add that usually these pathways wind their way through the midbrain were emotional valance is added. This most recently evolved frontal cortex performs the active synthesis of our fragmented experience. This function is sometimes referred to as "executive function". I like to think of it as the "sense of senses". In a set of studies done in cooperation with the Dali Lama it was found that monks who meditated on a regular basis have measurably different kinds of activity going on in their frontal lobe and that the longer they had engaged in meditative practices the more different this activity was. Pirsig is right to say that that the sense of self or the sense of values can not be located in any one place. It emerges from a host of isolated inputs and pathways that are integrated into a whole. It can also be shown that disruption of these inputs and pathways has profound affects on individual's ability to perceive the world, on their sense of self and on their ability to make sense of the world and to relate to others. I would suggest that this "illusion" of the self and the illusion of an external world is exactly what we have been designed to create. We can watch the phases that children go through in their cognitive development to see how these processes change and mature over time. Mystics may claim that a sense of oneness has some metaphysical significance or tells us something about the true nature of things. But I would say that this is just a furtherance and deepening of the Kulpian illusion of unity that we create every minute of every day. Practitioners can rightly argue that this is a very healthy thing to do. It produces a sense of calmness and compassion. As Pirsig notes it helps with the analysis and synthesis of new information. But extrapolating that into a blueprint of how the world works in a cosmic metaphysical sense as many in the new age schools of eastern philosophy are want to do; strikes me as creating illusions in the pedestrian sense of mirage, fantasy and hallucination. There is a temporal dimension to all of this that I would love to explore. There is also a whole set of ideas that arise from dmb's mention of how ideas, concepts and experience connect together but since this is pretty long already I think I'll stop. This is all likely to be either ignored or poopooed anyway so have a nice day y'all. Krimel 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/
