Krimel said to dmb:You maintain as essential, the idea that experience is
primarily a unity, undivided. ..How can someone, who claims to be an empiricist
of any stripe, make such a statement? If knowledge is acquired through sense
data, where's the unity? Sense data is fragmented. It is vision, sound, touch,
taste, smell. These are all different sets of information. We synthesize these
fragments into something like a unity and we do it really quickly but that is
"perception". Yes, perception is a form of experience but is not and can not
take place on "the cutting edge," prior to sensation.
dmb says:That description of perception makes sense in certain contexts but
radical empiricism is not the same thing as sensory empiricism. The idea that
sense data comes in through the various sense organs and is then synthesized is
actually a complicated set of concepts and those concepts have limits. As
Heidegger points out, we never actually experience sense data. Things like
sound waves, photons, the air borne molecules that we detect with taste buds
and the olfactory system appears in experience only in the context of
scientific perceptual studies. When you're walking down the street this stuff
doesn't come in discreet packages either. We hear and feel and see and taste
and smell all at the same time. We might want to separate these sensations when
we're dealing with some problem or uncertainty but normally all these things
happen simultaneously. We can distinguish them conceptually and in certain
contexts those concepts will get you where you want to go. The belief that
photons bounce around to enter the eye or strike the film in the camera makes
sense if when you're eye doctor is testing you or when you're out taking
pictures but in this philosophical context it doesn't work so well. Hume and
Locke and even Francis Crick would probably agree with you but as I was just
explaining to Marsha, sensory empiricism leads to all sorts of philosophical
problems that radical empiricism is meant to solve. It's also based on SOM and
tends to be materialist, reductionist and usually both (as if the case with
Crick). Maybe it would help to think of undivided experience in terms of a
continuous flow of sensations rather than a unity. I mean, this claim is not
meant to say that sight and sound are blurred until we think about it. But the
main thing, I suppose, is that your description involves all kind of concepts
that work in the context of conventional physics and physiology but it is
several steps removed from the phenomenological view, from what it's actually
like to experience sights and sounds. We don't hear sound waves. We just hear
the voice or the piano or the train whistle or whatever. We don't experience
sight in terms of light hitting the retina, we just see what we see from a
certain perspective while we're in a certain mood and with certain interests in
mind. Like Pirsig says, the problem with traditional empiricism is that it
isn't empirical enough. It limits what counts as experience so that
perspective, interests and moods are deemed pretty much irrelevant to how the
sense organs work or how the physical world acts upon them. That's fine when
you're in the lab conducting experiment or when the doctor just wants to know
if you can read the bottom line on that eye chart but, again, in the context of
discussing the MOQ and radical empiricism your materialistic reductionism just
doesn't cut the mustard.
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