Krimel said to dmb: But yeah, Dawkins and Wilson are heroes of mine. Yes, what they say makes me uncomfortable probably for the same reasons they make you uncomfortable. But I don't think discomfort is sufficient justification for dismissing them or their methods. I am unable to get Rosenthal's talk into a format that is convenient for me to listen to all the way through but I can see nothing whatever in the first half of her talk that supports your view of radical empiricism as the royal road to cosmic consciousness. But maybe she saves the best part for last. dmb says:Oh, so now the geeky square is having technical problems. Sure. ...Actually, I was thinking of an exchange in the responses to Rosenthal's talk. This is not just the second half of her talk, but a separate file. Anyway, someone in the audience asked what James would say about Dawkins and Wilson. Rosenthal said James would find them quite upsetting. She criticized them for being reductionists, how pragmatism is opposed to this and accused Dawkins in particular for being dogmatic and intolerate too. The audience member argued with her answers but the Hilary Putnam chimed in and said the very book in which Wilson denies reductionism, is reductionistic from page one. I don't know about any royal road to cosmic consciousness but the Harvard conference surely offers a path to clarity on these topics. Why not let the professionals explain it to you? And it's free!
Krimel said to dmb:...Pirsig resorts to teleology, claiming that some higher order future state of "betterness" is pulling evolution forward. That is not bottom-up processing. dmb says:Not at all. Betterness is just a general direction, not "some higher order future state". This movement toward betterness occurs from within. In the case of the hot stove, to expand on Pirsig's example, there is no top down processing that directs you to get off the stove. It's an immediate response within experience. This is the same betterness that pushes evolution. There is no master plan or final goal. That's what Pirsig is denying when he says Quality is not some Hegelian Absolute. That's why James disagreed with Royce. Pragmatism was born as an alternative to all that Hegelian, quasi-theological stuff. Have you seen Pirsig annotations on Bradley's Idealism? Like Royce, he was a kind of Hegelian Idealist too. Krimel said: Your hero Wilber makes on even bigger mess of this, claiming all kinds of new age mumbo jumbo exists at higher levels that we lesser beings have to tie ourselves into pretzel shapes mentally and physically to grasp. dmb says:There is a moment during the Harvard conference wherein Cornel West speaks about the intellectual project he was working on with his "brother" Ken Wilber. When it comes to discerning new age mumbo jumbo from legitimate professionals in philosophy, I think I'm gonna go with Cornel West and the Ivy League (which has granted a number of Ph.D.s based on Wilber's work) rather than your judgement. This is not out of respect for institutional authority so much as agreement with my own instincts. Krimel said to dmb: As I have said there are plenty of reason to throw out greedy reductionism. It is a bit frustrating to continuously be charged with advocating a position I do not hold. But from your point of view I can see how it is easier to address a caricature. dmb says:A caricature? Said the guy who just characterized Wilber as a new-ager and me as offer the royal road to cosmic consciousness! Project much? Besides, the charge of reductionism was a specific response to specific claims you made. Since those specific comments we're reproduced along with the charges of reductionism, it hardly seems possible to construe this as addressing a caricature. Wasn't I explaining how your own words expressed reductionism? We're your intellectual heroes charged with the same at the Harvard conference? This is a genuine philosophical issue, not mere name-calling, you soul-less nerd. Krimel said:One or two threads over dmb, called me a scientific dogmatist. That just sounds like an oxymoron to me. Science is anti-dogmatic. It is rooted in skepticism. It recognizes the tentative nature of truth and offers nothing more than a best guess. It insists that concepts are subordinate to perception. It states its assumptions and invites questioning of them. ...Does this give science a privileged claim to Truth or even truth. Not really. But I would say to anyone two-stepping to a different gong that if we have guess on these matter, why not make it our best guess? dmb says:Yes, ideally at least, scientific truths are provisional. But people can be dogmatic about anything and some people are dogmatic about science, like Dawkins for example. There is an article in the Atlantic Monthly online that pretty well explains why James would dislike Dawkins, as Rosenthal contends. The article is titled "The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher" and includes this little quote from James... No part of the unclassified residuum [of human experience] has usually been treated with a more contemptuous scientific disregard than the mass of phenomena generally called mystical. Physiology will have nothing to do with them. Orthodox psychology turns its back on them. Medicine sweeps them out; or, at most, when in an anecdotal vein, records a few of them as "effects of the imagination"--a phrase of mere dismissal, whose meaning, in this connection, it is impossible to make precise. All the while, however, the phenomena are there, lying broadcast over the surface of history. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_052009 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/
