Krimel said to dmb: ...When I present a serious challenge to your position, for example, your claim that pre-intellectual experience is a unity, when clearly it is not, you run away like a little bitch.
dmb says: Okay, I'll take another lap even though we've been through this once or twice before. Maybe three times. I'm not running away so much as refusing to run in circles. If memory serves this is where I mention book titles like "Zen and the Brain" and you respond with some kind of reductionistic interpretation, dismissing what perfectly legitimate scientific opinion says about pre-intellectual unity. Or remember when you asked me to look at a scientific paper about the brains of meditators and the argument again ended with my complaints of reductionism in your interpretation of it? I'd said that what we need to prevent that kind of reading is scientists who can study meditation from the inside, not just from the outside, not just the measurement of brain activity but a view of the experience from the meditator's point of view. Jill Bolte Taylor fits the bill. Does that name ring a bell? Marsha posted a link many moons ago and I think we discussed that already too. But I'll take another lap and I'll even run like a bitch if you like. (See my tail wagging?) Wikipedia's entry on her has a link to "TED ideas worth spreading", where you can watch her tell the story about her "stroke of insight". The punch line is simple. She had a stoke, her left hemisphere stopped working and she experienced nirvana. She's a neuroanatomist who did some work at Harvard's psychology lab mapping the microcircuitry of the brain and is now the spokesperson for Harvard's brain tissue resource center. Last May she was on Time Magazines list of the 100 most influential people in the world. I haven't read her book, "My Stroke of Insight", but as she explains in the TED talk, the right hemisphere of the brain is like a parallel processor and the left side is like a series processor. That probably means more to you than it does to me, you big geek, but I think the difference is more than just a little relevant to our dispute here. I mean, it explains what it means to claim that pre-intellectual experience is a unity, is undifferentiated experience. And it does so in terms you like, in terms of brain function rather than philosophy. The right side of the brain is where we find the unity and the left is where we process the parts so the punch line here is that your assertion, that pre-intellectual experience is not unified and instead gets unified into perception only after the brain puts the sense data into a coherent picture, is true enough. I mean that process does occur but it's only half the picture, it isn't quite at the front edge of the experience and the occurrence of that process doesn't contradict the other kind of processing. They both happen but the unity comes first, as Taylor explains it. She says that our experience begins on the right side of the brain, which perceives the world as a unified whole and in the moment, in the now. The left side then selects things to notice, makes choices, categorizes the selected fragments of experience according to how we think in language and that this is the side that gives her a sense of "I think" and "I am", a sense of her body as a distinct individual, a separate being, etc.. This serial processor side stopped working because of her stroke and most of the TED talk is her description of what it's like to experience reality as a unity. It's a brain scientist's description of nirvana, of the mystical reality, of the pre-intellectual primary empirical reality. This is going to be of interest to any MOQer because the different ways of processing experience in the two hemispheres is a neurological way of getting at the difference between DQ and sq. I mean, Bo started this thread to discuss the difference between the MOQ and the DQ it talks about, the difference between static intellectual descriptions and the kind of dynamic experience it describes. Taylor says that when she lost her ability to select from and categorize her experience (that handful of sand from an endless landscape, to use Pirsig's image) she was "at one with all that is". That, of course, it the classic description of mystical experience. And she didn't speak in tongues. She couldn't speak at all. She lost the sense of self that is produced in the left side of the brain and felt peaceful, connected to every person in the world and connected to the whole universe. It was a version of "Thou Art That" as a medical problem. It was pure experience, prior to the distinction between subject and object. How does Pirsig put it? Everything you think you know and everything you think you are is undivided. To fully realize that lack of division is to become enlightened. Or something like that. Now before you stuff all this in your giant reductionism machine, won't you at least admit that brain science doesn't kill the MOQ? Don't you see how stuff like this means that Pirsig's claims about empiricism are entirely scientifically plausible? It's clear that even the MOQ's claims about mysticism are scientifically plausible, don't you think? And doesn't this paint the picture in such a way that the empiricism and the mysticism are very nearly the same thing? It sure looks that way to me. And before you crank up the grinder of reductionism watch Taylor tell that story, watch as describes nirvana with tears flowing. Listen to her pleas for world peace, for peace of mind and then tell me its just a bunch of neurons. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®:…more than just e-mail. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t2_hm_justgotbetter_explore_012009 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/
