Krimel said: I have only passing acquaintance with Heidegger so I can only comment on the example you present, as you present it. I do plan to listen to two college courses on Heidegger later this year but unfortunately that can only happen when time allows.
dmb says: Yea, I listened to that, some of the lectures more than once. That's pretty good stuff. Hubert Dreyfus is a major dude when it comes to Heidegger. (Although he starts and stops in the middle of sentences and fails to repeat questions posed by students so that you'll only hear the answers, all of which can be frustrating.) Once of the shortest, sweetest expressions of this same point was uttered by Heidegger. He said, "Language is the house of Being". (Arlo attributed this to Wittgenstein the other day but I'm pretty sure that's a mistake.) In fact, it was the early Wittgenstein who formulated one of the purest and most pristine kinds of SOM, which was taken up by the Vienna Circle and basically constituted a resurgence of positivism. He'd said, basically, that any statement of values or ethics was merely subjective and therefore meaningless. He changed his tune later, but the young Wittgenstein would be classic SOM and its influence can hardly be overestimated. (Put that stra w man in your pipe and smoke it.) Anyway, you may recall my previous comments about Dreyfus. He began his career in the sciences (like Pirsig) and was a pretty big deal at MIT even before getting interested in Heidegger. (If memory serves, he's at UC Berkeley now.) He's the one whose taken on the task of trying to explain why artificial intelligence can never work, and he says it can never work because of what Heidegger saw. Like Pirsig, he rejects SOM, and tries to explain to these computer scientists why they should too. Like you, they are operating with all those physiological models of perception, complete with sense data and the synthesis of this data. You know, they use a camera or two to replace the eyes and use processors instead of brains but the basic model is the same. And that's why it'll never work. That model is flawed, limited. Yea, it works during rush hour and at the eye doctor's office but when we get so fancy as to try and duplicate cognition in a machine the limits of this model are sorely exposed. You'll see. Or rather, you'll hear. The door slamming example comes from those podcasts too, I think. It does eat up a lot of time but I listened when doing simple chores around the house or in the yard. Don't need ears for that and not but brain power either. For whatever its worth, I've found that neither the chores nor the learning suffers from this double duty. Krimel said: You seem to think that the example you give is outside of sensory experience. Where did the knowledge that a slamming door can be associated with anger or wind come from? dmb replies: Outside of sensory experience? I'm really not sure what that means. The point is simply that we don't experience that slamming door as an acoustic wave or as sense data. Those are ideas ABOUT experience that we never actually experience. I mention anger and the wind to illustrate the idea that experience is immediately full of meaning, not meaning in the cognitive or intellectual sense, but meaningful as an immediately felt quality. In the hot stove example, as Pirsig explains, we know that we are in a low quality situation immediately, before there are any thoughts about heat or stoves or the physiological senses that transduce this energy. And in my own experience, at least sometimes, when a door slams I know immediately that someone is angry. Dreyfus also uses doors, slamming or not, as an example of how most of what we know just fades into the background so that we use this practical knowledge without thinking about it. We just use them AS doors. Let me back up a little. Heidegger was once a student of Husserl, who was something like the inventor of phenomenology. Husserl tried to develop a kind of pure empiricism, a pre-suppositionless observational technique. In other words, he thought he could figure out a way to observe the raw sense data, unpolluted by any assumptions. The problem was that the whole idea was based on some assumptions, namely SOM. Husserl is considered to be one of the last of the Cartesians. Heidegger would reject that sort of phenomenology, not least of all because he rejected those assumptions. He rejected Sartre's existentialism for the same reason, because it was very SOM. Put those straw men in your pipe and smoke them too. (If you're no too stoned already from smoking Ludwig.) That's how he came around to the idea that we never actually experience sense data as such. And you might find it interesting that what he asserted instead looks very much like Taoism. Ask Mr. Google about a book called "Heidegger's Hidden Sources". Like Pirsig, he was importing these contrary ideas from the East. Although I don't think Dreyfus gets into that. He's still a bit drunk on science. dmb had said: And, as Gav pointed out, you're working with the assumptions of SOM when making such points. Krimel replied: Only in the strawman sense of SOM. As I mentioned to gav I don't see the duality. With regard to sensation I talked about the transduction of energy into electrochemical impulses. I would be happy to talk about how those impulses effect changes in our neural networks by affecting the patterns of neurons firing and the strength of the connections between and among those neural pathways. Or perhaps the role of genetically encoded memory... dmb says: Understanding how small things work is not unimportant, but you are pretty much literally reducing experience to electrochemical impulses in the brain. This reduces mind to matter. This is Husserl's view dressed up in scientific jargon. This is what the early Wittgenstein said, that physical facts are the only thing about which we can make meaningful statements and all else must be passed over in silence. The dualism exists here in the form of the source of the sense data and the physiological transduction of the data. In other words, the objective reality and the reception of it by the subject. Krimel said: Yes, I have outsource a lot of cognitive functioning, particularly memory, to Mr. Google. I did however read the article. I'll try using some college search engines next time if it will make you feel better. dmb replies: I use Google all the time. That's not a problem. I'm just saying that its kinda stupid to get all self-righteous about something you learned five minutes ago. That's a dangerous game. Maybe you can pull it off but I suppose most people would just go off half-cocked and shoot themselves in the foot. Or what's worse, you could go off half-footed and shoot yourself in the cock. Ouch. dmb had said: This is a point Pirsig makes when he says that SOM doesn't acknowledge that there is a social level between "mind" and "matter". Krimel replied: I think you miss the point that there is no distinction between "mind" and "matter". They are not different irreducible substances whether mediated or unmediated. Rather than rejecting the dualism of SOM you seem to embrace it. dmb says: There is no distinction from your point of view because mind is reduced to matter, or material processes. But this is where da Vinci's drawings and Heidegger's saying (language is the house of being) comes together with Pirsig's assertion that all our ideas are culturally derived. The other day Arlo was explaining how it is necessary to learn the language in order to really see the world as it is seen in other cultures. That gets at the same idea too. According to SOM, subjects perceive objects and truth is a matter of the first corresponding to the second. But Pirsig says there is no direct connection between the two, that they exists in an evolutionary relationship with a third thing between them. That's language, the social level, the third level of the MOQ. That why Leo drew what he knew rather than what he saw, which is a little like the Cleveland harbor effect. Or, think of it like this. The earth supports many worlds. There is the so-called physical reality, rocks and animals and walls. But the various languages cut experience up in different ways so that each one is like a world of its own. There are worlds within these worlds, in something like the sense of the "academic world" or the "world of art" or the "world of hippies". Even if they all speak English, say, the particular jargon and lingo and slang shows, in a smaller way, how there are different ways of seeing. Or think about the way Latin and Sanskrit are dead and arrested languages. This reflects the extremely conservative nature of the "religious worlds" that preserve them. This is what it means to say that language is the house of being or that all our ideas are culturally derived. Was it the later Wittgenstein who said that the limits of my language are the limits of my world? In any case, that's the same idea too. Guys like Rorty nearly equate language with reality. Its text all the way down, they say. That's seem to go too far, but its still another example of the same idea. As far as I know, every one of these guys has to reject SOM and the correspondence theory of truth on the way to this view of language. Even in the milder versions the "mediation" that language does is very, very powerful. The pair of glasses in Pirsig's analogy aren't just rose-colored or corrective. They tell you to see the world in terms of subjects and objects. Those are some heavy-duty concepts, not just a tint or shade on things. The names of all the gods and heroes are still haunting this house. Its full of ghosts more obscure than Galen and that our world too. We could say that language is IN the eye of the beholder but it would probably be even more betterer to say language IS the eye of the beholder. So make sure you talk good. Be the betterest of speeching you can and proudly two. _________________________________________________________________ Time for vacation? WIN what you need- enter now! http://www.gowindowslive.com/summergiveaway/?ocid=tag_jlyhm 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/
