Krimel said: ..But James is very clear that concepts are derived from perception. He is also clear on a point I have tried to make to dmb, many times: perception is the synthesis or summation of different sensory experiences. Perception is a process of smoothing over the rough spots and imperfections in our sensory systems. But the real point is that concepts (the objective) derived from precepts (the subjective). I include S/O not as an endorsement, but as markers for the outmoded concepts. There is no duality in James. His aim is to show the superiority of percepts, (empiricism) over concepts (rationalism).
dmb said: Firstly, I'll remind you that the book recommended to you by the panelist (Some Problems of Philosophy) is the same one named by Pirsig in chapter 29 of Lila as the place where he finds that James was using exactly the same terms found in the MOQ. Pirsig quotes from it there. " 'There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing.' Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phaedrus had used for the basic subdivision of the MOQ." This would be a dualism in the simple sense that it subdivides the monism into two sides. Then, of course, the static side is subdivided even further into four categories. James calls his view a monism too, but that doesn't mean we are supposed to erase or ignore the distinctions made within that monism. [Krimel] This would all be wonderful if the terms that Pirsig and James use were more than phonetically equal. If in addition they were semantically and syntactically related we might be on to something. I have always maintained that they are. I think to call something static is to say it has properties that can be specified. A relationship or set of relationships that are predictable in some way. To say that something is dynamic is to say of a relationship or set of relationships that it is not predictable in any meaningful way. If, as James describes it, consciousness and perception are a flowing dynamic stream; static qualities are islands in the stream. SQ is the canyons where the river flows. Those patches of land where Tom and Huck hid from Aunt Polly. SQ is the flotsam and jetsam. It is driftwood and discarded baby dolls floating in the backwash of a marina. I suspect that Pirsig and James use the term static in much the same way. But dynamic? Not so much. Your version of Pirsig, as I hear it, equates DQ with Quality itself. You render it ineffable. While I agree that Quality is ineffable. I don't think James would agree that nothing can be said of the "dynamic". We see the dynamic flow of experience, of perception. But we know where the stream has been and we can see where it is heading. We have a pretty good idea of whether we are polling our way through a bayou or drifting towards white water. Lao Tsu talks about the Tao this way too. We experience the Tao as The Way; the continuous path of life. Static and Dynamic are ways of conceptualizing perceptual relationships. They are complementary ways of describing the journey whether you are rafting a Stream of Consciousness or trekking The Way. Conflating Quality and DQ just produces confusion. [dmb said:] Secondly, I really don't know where you get the impression that the difference between perception and conception is lost on me. This distinction is common sense, something everybody knows. The way you construe this, however, James would be doing nothing more than re-stating what Hume had already said. You seem to read this as if James was a traditional empiricist, a sensory empiricist. Radical empiricism doesn't deny the senses but rather it expands upon traditional empiricism. In that sense, James and Pirsig are more empirical than the empiricists. [Krimel] Maybe I was a bit unclear. What I meant was you seem to confuse sensation and perception. Experience begins as sensation. James is very clear that percepts are composed of disparate sensations. Perception arise from sensation in much the same way that concepts arise from percepts. Sensory empiricists claimed the experience was derived from the bodily sensations. James agrees but added that perception is: synthesizing sensation into a unity. This is a kind of sense in its own right. A while back Case described it like this: It's the Sense of Senses That defines it; Processes and Refines it. We see, we feel, we think, we know He was being pretty specific about the order of transition. [dmb said:] Thirdly, I think it's pretty weird to claim that concepts are "the objective". There are some other confused notions in there too, like "smoothing over the rough spots" but I'd rather fry bigger fish. [Krimel] Concepts are "objective" because they are discrete... fixed... you know, static. They are what independent observers with a shared language agree and disagree about. Krimel said earlier:...James does not suggest that it is at all a good idea to kill all of our conceptual patterns and kill them completely. I think he would find such a notion as nonsensical as I do. But he does advise us to regard them with a healthy degree of caution and suspicion. I whole heartedly agree. But his chief point is that real understanding must involve both, percepts and concepts. dmb says:I think that's about right. Neither Pirsig nor James were saying that concepts are worthless. It's a mistake, I think, to take the "kill them completely" idea literally. Radical empiricism says that concepts are derived from experience, that abstractions are always abstracted from experience and part of what this does is to undermine the various rationalist notions that turn these abstractions into something more real than the experience from which they were abstracted in the first place. [Krimel] Exactly, he is arguing for a form of empiricism that he thinks is a better approach than rationalism. But he says that percepts and concepts need each other. Static concepts intermingled in the dynamic flow Krimel said:...Concepts, ideas, are static representations of perception. Perception is the dynamic flow of the present. We need them both and we need them to be in balance and to complement each other. They are yin and yang. If the goal of mysticism is to be free of static concepts that is a bit like saying that we would all be better off to remove half of our brains. Dave has pretty much endorsed this with his lauding of Jill Bolte-Taylor's nirvana-like stroke experience. Enlightenment through pathology, if you will. dmb says: Are you saying yin is static and yang is dynamic? [Krimel] Yes! That is exactly what I am saying for about the 83rd time. [dmb] That's weird. I think yin and yang are the two sides of all dualistic pairs and that Pirsig never intended any such comparison. [Krimel] You think that is weird? Pirsig ends ZMM claiming that Quality is exactly like the Tao. He mentions his personal copy of the book which he transcribed by hand while studying oriental philosophy in the far east. In his second book he imagines his monism spliting into an active and passive duality. Why indeed, would anyone think there was any basis for comparison? [dmb] But more importantly, the case of Jill Bolte Taylor was not presented to suggest that we ought to use just one half of our brains. Quite the opposite. It reveals the ignored half, the half that experiences reality as an undifferentiated, undivided whole. The other half, the half that selects elements from that first half and categorizes them in terms of words and concepts, dominates so overwhelmingly that something extraordinary has to occur for us to notice it. Meditative techniques that quiet the analytic side will allow us to see that too, but Taylor's stroke did the trick too. She experienced reality as undivided as the analytic side of her brain began to fail her. This experience provided an insight that changed her life quite dramatically. In that sense, yes, it is "special". [Krimel] Right, very roughly speaking, the right side of the brain processes sensation into perception. Portions of the left side of the brain process perception into conception. I think we all can and should, strive to have many different kinds of experience. We should look at life from as many different points of as we can. One can focus attention on a problems at hand or on practicing an instrument or playing a game. We can lose ourselves in knitting or doing crossword puzzles. We go through the guided meditations of television and movies. We see things as wholes. We break them apart. Analytic side off... Feeling side on... Analytic side on... Feeling side off... I'm thinking of a dimmer switch... [dmb] On the other hand, under normal circumstances the side of the brain that experiences reality as undivided is always involved. It's a feature of direct everyday experience even though we Westerners very rarely notice this. It's a blind spot in our culture such that we go around with half our brains tied behind our backs. In that sense, the mystic is NOT saying we should remove the analytic side but rather add the other side to it. [Krimel] Blind spot in our culture? Freud introduced the notion of an unconscious almost a century ago. Nearly everyone has some sense of an unconscious; some idea of what it is. It is ubiquitous in literature, art and film. There are whole technologies devoted to influencing our unconscious motivations. Stoke victims and split brain patients teach us a lot about localization of function in the brain. The leading authority in the world on this speaks of a "non-conscious." What Freud saw as our animal nature, Gazzaniga sees as mostly just non-verbal with its own point of view. What I take from all this is that James split between dynamic percepts and static concepts is embedded directly into the structure and function of the brain. So yeah it might be worthwhile to check out how all that works and ties together. It's about like tuning a Honda when you get down to it. 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