Krimel, Peter, Ron. DMB, Platt. et al --
[Krimel]:
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.
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.
If science and medicine are the philosopher's information source, then all
philosophy can offer is an SOM-based ontology. I happen to think
metaphysics is capable of something more, but of course by not following
science as my authority, I'm seen by some as "making things up."
Actually, you have described the Cartesian concept of mind/matter quite
well, and have drawn proper attention to the MoQ's inadequate epistemology
for experience (the "subjective half of the equation). While your essay is
comprehensive and illuminating, for what it's worth as a "droner", I should
like to comment briefly on some of the points you raise.
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 have multiple experiences through multiple
pathways and we synthesize those into the singularity of experience
and of self.
Neither experience nor the cognizance that comes from it is "singular". All
sensory impressions are related to previous experience (in memory) and
intellectually intgrated into a cogent "whole" that represents our current
reality.
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.
"Arrival" and "departure" are transitional terms that imply cause and
effect. When you say "sensory input arrives through the pathways", the
implication is that sensory information is the substantive source or cause
of experience. That's the neurophysical model to which you and Pirsig are
beholden. At the risk of contradicting science, my epistemology reverses
this model. I maintain that value-sensibility (what Pirsig calls
"pre-intellectual experience") is primary to objective experience, which
means that the "stuff" of reality is not matter but value. In other words,
the intellect constructs (delineates, differentiates) its experiential
objects from value.
[snip]
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.
Cerebro-neural development occurs throughout life, and cognitive activities,
such as creating art or music, conceptualizing, problem solving, prayer and
meditation, affect the nerve network and formation of the brain itself.
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.
I agree with all of the above, which is why we cannot escape the self/other
dichotomy as long as we are active participants in this world. Neither the
MoQ nor Essentialism can change experiential reality. What changes it is
our choice of values, how we respond to them, and what we make of them. I
submit that a philosophy which offers a metaphysical foundation can help us
in that choice by broadening our reality perspective and giving a sense of
meaning and purpose to the life experience.
Thanks for this thorough analysis of human perception and experience from
the MoQ viewpoint.
Regards,
Ham
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