Ham, gav and other poopooers... I include the text of my "droner" at the end if anyone needs to reference it.
gav: krimel says 'we do not have singular experiences'; but, phenomenologically speaking, (immediate) experience IS unitary (this is obvious to anyone that has done anything requiring their full participative awareness). this is very important. now is this an illusion? is this due to, as krimel thinks, the synthetic action of our brains, esemplastically integrating discrete strands of sense data into one polyphonic 3D experience?.... [Krimel] Experience is perceived as unitary because we are able to synthesis a sense of unity out of disparate sensations. For example we can feel something round and distinguish a ball from an orange purely through the sense of touch and we can translate that into a visual image. gav: okay krimel is making some good points here but they are all presuming something....(and what is that gav?)...they are all presuming the existence of an object 'sending' data to a subject. the perceiver receives sense data (reflected light waves in the case above) from the perceived object. can you see the subject and object here? and how they are discrete? THIS IS SOM. [Krimel] Oh no! Are you accusing me of SOM. Mercy, that has become the MoQ equivalent of the threat of eternal damnation. But if you will notice what I outlined is not dualistic. I outlined a process of energy changing form from light and sound and chemistry into electrochemical impulses. There is no mention of mental versus physical substance in anything I said. And no where was I talking about metaphysics. S and O maybe but no M. gav: more SOM. 'we' see the 'sense data'. this is subject and implied object (source of sense data). take the 'we' away and we are getting close to MOQ. the experience of seeing is ontologically prior to the abstraction of who is seeing and what is seen. in other words the dynamic event of seeing comes first, then we abstract 'me' the subject and 'that' the object. this point seems unassailable. why would sense data be esemplastically unified AFTER the unitary experience itself? ie the experience is already unified - to re-unify it doesn't make sense! [Krimel] Because experience is not unitary. I focused on vision and tried to show you that even a purely visual experience requires multiple exposures to piece together a coherent image. But we do not just experience anything in a single modality. While we are glancing about we accumulate other sense data through other channels that contribute to the experience. We hear noises, feel temperature, and we feel our hearts beating. In the process of creating a unified experience we add in emotional valance or the sense of value. None of this becomes a unified experience until we unify it through this process of perception. gav: and it is equally nonsensical to say that sense data is unified BEFORE the experience. immediate experience is immediate. there is no before. t=0. [Krimel] I mentioned the importance of time. Stay turned but in brief part of the process of perception is integrating the present with the past in anticipation of the future. gav: in closing, krimel disparages (implicitly) the value of calmness and compassion, but these are an example of pragmatic truth criteria. truth as having utility. if something, some idea or state of awareness, is conducive to compassion and calmness it is probably a damn good (ie true) thing. [Krimel] I was not disparaging the value of such experiences. I said that they clearly have demonstrable health benefits. So, by the way does belief in God and regular church attendance. These are psychological benefits but I do not think such experiences are particularly useful guides to cosmology, ontology or for that matter epistemology. gav: one more thing. the brain-wave activity of meditating monks is corellated to the state they 'subjectively' are in. the logic of what we know about the regions of the brain corresponds with the logic of the meditation experience. that is the parts of the brain that are involved in individuation and self-consciousness become less and less active as the meditation experience becomes more of oneness/no-thingness. [Krimel] The parts of the brain that you mention were shown to produce different kinds of electrical activity than brains in nonmeditative states. The only conclusion I draws from this or that, as I recall, the researchers drew from this was that learning and practice change the way the brain functions. gav: no causation though - from an MOQ perspective we can see that the brain wave activity and localisation is an analogue of the experience itself. the brain wave activity doesn't cause the subject to experience (sOm); neither does the subject's experience cause the brain wave activity (Som). there is first experience, then analogues that we use to help communicate to ourselves and others the nature and logic of the experience. [Krimel] Obviously, the point I am making is that brain activity IS experience. [Ham] 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." [Krimel] I agree that it is far more convenient to just pick and choose to attend to those things that support whatever fantasy we elect to indulge in from moment to moment. You love to quote science when it suits you and to pretend that your arguments are rational when it suits you. But when they don't you affect an aura of smug superiority and pretend to be above such trivial limitations. [Ham] "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. [Krimel] Yes your epistemology is at odds with science so much so that it is hard to take you seriously. Rather than take the trouble to look at the research that directly asks the questions you are asking and to understand both the techniques used and the results of such research, it is far easier to keep your fantasy life above the fray as it were. [Ham] 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. [Krimel] It is even more frustrating that you, at times, almost get it. Yes the brain does change throughout life as it assimilates new experience and accommodates to conform to new data. [Ham] 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. [Krimel] Yes, neither the MoQ nor Essentialism can change experiential reality. The difference is Essentialism seems to make of virtue of ignoring it. A "philosophy" that does this is not a philosophy at all it is just an example of a rich fantasy life. ---------------------------------------------------------- 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/
