Ron: Perhaps viewing it as an increase in predictabilty to create a relative base in certainty might come closer to the meaning that is commonly held in the term "belief', I think what is argued is how that certainty is arrived at. I think people tend to define the term as it relates to faith in our culture as certain kinds of socially derrived assumptions verses a personal approach to the inquirey of experience. How we make the arguement from the particular expereince to the universal understanding is every bit as important as the expereince being described. because it is likewise as important to reduce that universal back to the related expereince in ones own life. The most successful methods are those which correlate with expereince more accurately. Ayn Rand made some observations about the most common assumptions being to place faith in the words of an authority figure over individual thought. That as a result of a complex culture the tendancy is stronger because of the requirements it demands to function.
[Krimel] William James draws an interesting distinction between percepts and concepts. Percepts are the ongoing ever changing dynamic flux of immediate experience. Precepts are synthesized from sense data. For James percepts are both dynamic and continuous. Concepts on the other hand are static and discrete. They are the categories into which we shelve our percepts. Concepts he claims are wholly derived from perception. James thinks the Greeks were seduced by the beauty and perfection of concepts. The rational world of concepts was without flaw while the messy world of percepts is always changing and dirty. The Greeks saw the world of percepts as shadows derived from concepts. James argues that this is backassward. For one thing, once you have carved the world into discrete conceptual categories, it is darn near impossible to reconstruct the dynamic continuum experience. He speaks directly of Pirsig's "ghosts" when he says: "What is it to be real? The best definition I know is that which the pragmatist rule gives: 'anything is real of which we find ourselves obliged to take account in any way,' Concepts are thus as real as percepts for we cannot live a moment without taking account of them. But the 'eternal' kind of being which they enjoy is inferior to the temporal kind because it is so static and schematic and lacks so many characters which temporal reality possesses." Nevertheless his biggest point is that our understanding of experience neither precepts nor concepts alone is sufficient. He claims: "No one can tell, of the things he now holds in his hands and reads, how much comes through his eyes and fingers, and how much, from his apperceiving intellect, unites with that and makes of it this particular 'book'? The universal and the particular parts of the experience are literally immersed in each other and both are indispensible. Conception is not like a painted hook, on which no real chain can be hung, for we hang concepts upon percepts and percepts on concepts interchangeably and indefinitely; and the relation of the two is much more like what we find in the cylindrical 'panoramas' in which a painted background continues a real foreground so cunningly that one fails to detect the joint." I think this all points to reality as illusion in the sense you and I have discussed before. Illusion not as a mirage but as a particular way of organizing our percepts and concepts. In the light of our percepts and concepts what we see is not True in any absolute sense but not False either; rather they give us belief about reality. 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/
