dmb, What a wiggling load a weasel wording you dumped in your last post! A stunning display of priggish romanticism. I really don't have time waste with such rubbish. You think I don't understand the metaphysical issues you chirp on about? You insult me. I too took a course from the chairman of my philosophy dept. The text book was John Lilly's Center of the Cyclone. I got 'A's on my papers and a tip to cover the chapstick. I used to camp out at bookstores the night before Castaneda's books were published, like they were Harry Potter. I reviewed ZMM in a magazine just a few months after it was published. I read Robert Monroe and Charles Tart. I have a letter signed by J.B. Rhine advising me on the best path to take into parapsychology. I was a staff volunteer for a conference where Fritjo Capra spoke.
I was a psychonaught, motherfucker. The "real world" was just an EVA (NASAese for Extra Vehicular Activity for the techo-tards in the audience). Don't tell me my conceptual continuity is locked in place. I've had three Gestalt shifts every morning before breakfast since Pink Floyd's Meddle tour. I have bona fide romantic esthetic street cred too, biatch. I am a bad poet, and a worse musician. I have been a painter and potter. I have won awards for photography and writing and I started using computer graphics as an art form when everything was monochrome. Your attacks are not aimed at me. You don't know shit about me. You are attacking a bunch of labels you have plastered on me while talking about how expansive and fluid your metaphysics are. You say, "If I were to make a case that such things have been marginalized by scientific materialism, you would be exhibit "A". You're a living stereotype, a classic example, a real live case of the strawman you deny." You decry rigid thinking and yet are bound and chained to your own. All I have asked you to do is apply your understanding of the MoQ and you can't do anything more that shout in romantic generalities. Let me see if I can state my position in slightly more romantic terms. We are as Bolte-Taylor says "energy beings" exchanging energy with our environment. This is not some ephemeral romantic jibber jabber. We have expanded human consciousness through machines that allow us to watch this energy flow and transform. Respiration, digestion, sensation and contemplation all reveal distinctive patterns. Those patterns in every instance can be understood in terms of their static and dynamic properties. Reductionists like the Maharishi and Dalai Lama seem to think that by studying these patterns we might find ways to more easily induce them. Or that looking at their effects on people's lives we might be able to show more readily why they are desirable. But let's take a look at dreams since you are so concerned with their neglect. Freud thought the dreams were the window to the unconscious. Through recording his own dream and the dreams of his patients he tried to unravel the static code of dream symbolism by assessing the intellectual and emotion patterns they produced. To the extent that a symbol like a flag pole evoked static patterns of association with male sexuality it was a phallic symbol. For Freud sex was the dynamic force that produced static patterns of cognition and behavior. Jung said that some of these static patterns of responses occurred across time and across culture. Jung was not as impressed with the primary importance of sex as a motivator. He thought that the universal commonality of these symbols he called archetypes was somehow inherited, or statically encoded in our biology. He correctly noted that people at every where and every when, dream of flying, being chased, being embarrassed, of the old man and of mother. He thought that culture and the environment interacted dynamically with these static propensities to help the individual understand their place in the world. A more modern approach to dreaming suggests that as the brain's dynamic electrical activity slows down in sleep. Neurons fire more or less randomly as fleeting thoughts and reflections of the day's activities. The brain naturally attempts to actively synthesize these dynamic images into a narrative. This follows from the brains natural propensity to seek static patterns from the dynamic environment. This was just a set of sketches of how the MoQ might be read into a series of approaches to dreaming. Earlier I was attempting to do something similar with sensation and perception. I think Gav is mistaken when he says, "...pre-intellectual awareness is already unified and it is the differentiations come later. The mistaken assumptions, in this case, has led you to get things exactly backwards right from the start." As I said the senses are dynamic and fragmented input that we unify into static patterns. We create static patterns of meaning out of dynamic input from the environment. We evolve static patterns of response (habit) in response to the dynamic events of our day to day lives. Again this is just a brief sketch of how the MoQ might be used to understand how the intellectual emerges from the pre-intellectual. It might be extend to show how our intellectual patterns coalesce into static patterns of thought and behavior. It has the advantage of fitting with both the MoQ and the results of neuroscientific studies. What Gav, like Ham offers is a dogmatic statement, bolstered only by intuition. The defense of this dogma is basically, "look inside yourself and you too will believe." It is faith in some kind of universal spiritual instinct. If, as you claim, the data are not in dispute then it behooves Gav to account for where these patterns of interaction originate from and how the notion of pre-intellectual unity make more sense of the data. Or perhaps why the neuroscience data is irrelevant. If you are saying only that Gav's view require no such justification; that the evidence for it is a primary perception not accessible by others and accountable to no one. Then I say that's not mysticism that's masturbation. The MoQ claims to be a flexible tool that can be applied to understand a host of perceptual construction. It transcends point of view. It is a tool that can be applied to any point of view. A point of view, a conceptual illusion can first of all be understood in terms of its static and dynamic qualities. But not for, Dave. The MoQ is a narrow mean thing. It is a defense against rigor. It is an excuse to cling to romantic notions of the supernatural. You have turned the MoQ into a resurrection of the romanticism criticized in ZMM. You aren't arguing about monism and dualism or mind and body or subjects and objects versus static and dynamic. You are arguing about the virtue of vagueness. You condemn science as stagnant while clutching wishing thinking close to your breast. At the same time science has showed us how to transform ideas into reality from the Euclidian geometries of our homes to the virtual World of Warcraft. Well, Dave. I've looked at life from both sides now. From win and lose and still somehow it's life's illusions I recall. I really don't know life at all. The truth is I really don't have time for this. I will be in Boston for the next couple of weeks. Among other things I will be marching straight into the belly of the beast at the annual APA meeting where Malcolm Gladwell will be delivering the keynote address. If anybody in the North East wants to hook up in the acme of academic snobbery somewhere near Harvard Square let me know. I will be the one wearing the "MoQ or Die" T-shirt. But I have a passel of impossible things to do over the Fall term and if I am writing in the virtual world, it's a bad omen for progress in the real one. I leave it to y'all to sort out which is which. 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/
