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. [Krimel] Do tell? Name a few. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I thought Heidegger said something to the effect that stuff fades into the background. So that when we drive a car we do not have to think about driving; we just do it. We have no problem synthesizing incoming data. When incoming data recedes into the background like that, it is called habituation. I can go on and on about habit formation but in short it is a static pattern of behavior. What attracts our attention/consciousness is change in the pattern of static. What attracts our attention is change in probability. A child playing near the road, passing or being passed by another car, require more attention than two lanes of Kansas blacktop. We notice our senses when they detect a significant change in probability. Our ears are front and center when glass breaks or thunder claps. You are aware of vision when the lights go out or a camera flashes. [dmb] 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). [Krimel] So, Hume, Locke, Heidegger and Crick might see things my way, but I am on shaky grounds because it doesn't work out so well in a philosophical context? I responded to your post to Marsha earlier. I will be happy to forward to anyone who asks, a copy of an article Crick wrote for Scientific American Mind a few years ago. In it he talks about the search for what he calls neural correlates of consciousness. Neither Crick nor anyone else claims to have figured it all out. But the approaches being taken have yielded astonishing insights about how the brain works and how that is reflected phenomenologically. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] As I said above, it is good for things to fade into the background. When they do they are rendered static. As we make meaning of the world. A static thing has an established meaning. The more static it becomes, the less likely it is to matter. We are conscious of change. That is what we attend to. It is call an orienting response. It is why we have necks and fish don't. When a fish orients to a change in its environment it doesn't require much energy to turn its whole body. That is not true of land animals and they evolved necks so that the major sensory receptors can "orient" independently from the rest of the body. You seem tangled in imagined differences between the physiology of sensation and the phenomenology of perception. As you say energy from the environment interacts with our sensory cells to cause certain physiological changes. Our sensory receptors transduce physical energy into electrochemical energy. What this means is that physical energy; light, waves of sound, mass... is reformatted into neural impulses. We can see specific pathways and bundles of nerves that react in response to changes in stimulation. That neurally formatted data interacts with other incoming data and consolidated first as emotion. I have already given a few examples of how dynamic input results in a physiological orienting response. This includes an emotional component. The magnitude of the emotional response is in direct proportion to input's deviation from the static background. The louder the bang the higher we jump, the faster we run, the more urine strains through our drawers. >From the emotion centers pathways converge into different portions of the cortex. While the whole cortex is interrelated there are areas of specialization for sensory and motor functions, language perception, language production, etc etc. We know that all of this gets integrated in the frontal part of the brain. We can almost assess the importance of a particular function by the amount of real estate it consumes and the interconnections it makes. I won't bother to try to spell out just how complex the medium of the nervous system is. But I don't have any trouble seeing how that level of complexity is both theoretically and metaphysically capable of accounting for who I am phenomenological and what I am physiologically. I am neither. I am both. I am often unsure which is which. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] It sounds like you just said that it's fine any where that matters but not here at the MoQ. I have not heard much from people who think that there is no relationship between perspective, interests and moods and how the sense organs work or how the physical world acts upon them. You are among the few. I think, and I might be wrong here, that you confuse sensation and perception and this muddies your understand here but the data that you claim doesn't cut the mustard for unspecified reasons is demonstrably and phemononologically accessible to any one. We have known since the 1800's that a spike through the forehead will effect a change in personality. We have been able to alter mood by changing our brain chemistry since the discovery of mushrooms and the invention of beer. People in ancient times were aware that there is a direct correlation between the amount of substance ingested and the degree of behavioral change. We can now state with high levels of confidence how changes in specific brain function and chemistry will effect mood, attitude, emotional responsiveness, memory, sensation and consciousness. We can show that these changes are isomorphic with patient reports of subjective experience. And yet they don't cut the mustard for you. You give no reason and you feel no need to address the facts in evidence with an alternate account. On some vague metaphysically principle you feel justified in ignoring both empirical evidence and theory. That's really ballsy, Dave. 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