gav said to Krimel: ...your thinking pressuposes SOM - senses responding to an external (system dependent) reality - that is *subject experiencing object*. this is as non-moq as it is possible to be.
Krimel replied: I have been through this a dozen times with your cult leader. I have no intention of rehashing this with someone who doesn't have the juice to keep up. dmb says: Hmmm. As I see it, Krimel, you have evaded this point a dozen times but have never once actually addressed it. You employ the presuppositions of SOM in your physiological descriptions of experience but have never examined them. Similarly, you've never really addressed the issue of reductionism either. These two mistakes are inter-related and are apparently so central in your thinking that questioning them, for you, is unthinkable. It seems that you don't understand the problem or even understand how it could be a problem. As a result, your responses are almost always completely irrelevant to the actual issues. And calling people names does not constitute an argument. Grown up people just roll their eyes at that sort of nonsense, which is only fitting. If you ever provided a relevant response to these criticisms, I must have missed it. Feel free to re-post your best shot at it, if you think there was a good one. [Krimel] Our recollections really do mesh at all as I recall it is have answered these point repeatedly but your responses has been to either change the subject avoid the issue or run and hide. Here are some examples. The most recent is from 6/10/09 just a few days ago. Then there is one from8/28/08 and another from 1/1/2008 Do you need more or will answering these at last give you plenty to do? 6/10/09 MoQer and All who might be interested, Dave accuses me of "reductionism" as though it was some evil spirit. He invents this Darth Vader version of systems theory, slashes it with light saber wit and has the nerve to summon Pirsig to his aid in the battle against the imagined demons of reduction. First of all just because you say systems theory is a form of reductionism doesn't make it so. The Wiki on reductionism lists it as an alternative to reduction. Secondly it is absurd to claim that even you are against "reductionism" as a blanket term. Conversation, the use of words, reduces experience into language. I mean I know you aren't terribly good at it but are you actually against it? This is just your usual use of labels instead of reason. I guess you either got tired of calling me SOM and this is your new blanket for condemning things you either don't understand, don't like or just can figure out anything meaningful to counter with. You are using your usual caricature of greedy reductionism despite being shown several times how lame that is. You summon Pirsig to help you presumably because in your confusion you somehow equate reductionism with SOM. But Pirsig only speaks of reductionism once and only in Lila. He is talking about various approaches to anthropological theory in the period before the 1970's. Here is what he says: ------------------------------------------------------------ "What many were trying to do, evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning all theory, by agreeing not to even talk about such theoretical reductionist things as what savages do in general. They restricted themselves to what their particular savage happened to do on Wednesday. That was scientifically safe all right - and scientifically useless. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. wrote, 'The very term "universal" has a negative connotation in this field because it suggests the search for broad generalization that has virtually been declared unscientific by twentieth-century academic, particularistic American anthropology.' Phaedrus guessed anthropologists thought they had kept the field 'scientifically pure' by this method, but the purity was so constrictive it had all but strangled the field. If you can't generalize from data there's nothing else you can do with it either. A science without generalization is no science at all. Imagine someone telling Einstein, You can't say "E=mc2." It's too general, too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory.' Cuckoo. Yet, that's what they were saying in anthropology. Data without generalization is just gossip." ------------------------------------------------------------------ He seems to be condemning exactly what you are doing. But stick with anthropology for a moment during the time Pirsig is writing about, the view was that all human behavior was learned. It was Lockean tabula rasa stuff. Meade claimed that culture was chalk scribbling on upon all of us, blank slates. What was written was somewhat arbitrary. What we become is largely a matter of custom. But custom is just something everyone around us agrees to agree about. What Pirsig is talking about with regards to field research in anthropology needs to be understood in terms of what they were actually trying to accomplish. In order for there to be meaningful theory in any field there has to be a common data set or an agreed upon way to look at the data. The field at the time is talks about was struggling to bring order and commonality to field investigation. What broke anthropology and the other social sciences out of this funk wasn't mysticism it was evolutionary and systems theory. Eckman resurrected Darwin with his demonstration that emotional communication is a universal language that utterly transcends culture. Rituals, marriage, dominance hierarchies, sexual roles, even mythological themes can be seen in a variety of forms in all cultures. It is one thing to note that all cultures produce these things but this leads to the question, why? The answer that Dawkins and Wilson give is that they result from an interaction between our genetic predispositions and our interactions with the world that we find ourselves in. In other words biology plays a role in the forms and structures of human culture. Generalizations can be made and how do we account for them? That is the business of the theoreticians in any field. The attempt to collect field data in a particular way was really just a way of trying to have a common language for theorizing. It boils down to this: field data is perception. Theory is conception. Understanding grows out of the interaction between perception and conception. In the case of theories about emotional communication it was shown that an evolutionary model works better than a cultural model. This is the point where you accuse me of explaining you objection to reduction away with a reductionist argument. But as always to would be missing the point. Conception is derived from and secondary to perception. Concepts are the intellectual level. Perception is mainly physiological. Leonardo's early top down driven drawings of the brain were concept driven just as his later drawing were drawn from the bottom up and more faithful to his perception. I don't think that it is possible or desirable to have either concepts without perception or perception without concepts. The first is just fantasy and the second a blooming buzzing confusion. I was going to pass on your road trip nonsense but it's like you almost get it when you say, "The mechanic and operator are just two perspectives, not necessarily two different people, and they are best when integrated." Which is exactly what I have been trying to tell you. You make this extraordinarily lame point that the narrator in ZMM is a literary devise. Perhaps but have you been reading Strauss or something. Like the book is code and sometimes it means what it says and sometimes it doesn't. Are we now to start looking for hidden messages and determining that for more than half of ZMM Pirsig is talking backward talk? If on the other hand your point is that Pirsig is a clever user of literary forms, perhaps that would account for why he is more revered in literature departments than in philosophy departments. But that really doesn't help your case much. My point has always been that it is harder for romantics to get with the program because their objections to classic thinking are aesthetic. You, gav Platt and Marsha are great examples of this. Not only are your objections to the classical view purely aesthetic, they make the use of reason futile. For example you say this, "Human perception is reduced to transduced energy. It's all about functioning parts." That is almost what I said and almost my actual position but what is missing is critical. If you have been paying attention you would notice that I have insisted all along that "sensation" is transduction or encoding of physical energy into neural impulses. Perception is the synthesis of the parallel process of sensation and memory. Awareness and perception are properties that emerge from the parallel processes that give rise to them. This is in fact what William James claims. Concepts depend on percepts but are not confined to them or necessarily limited by them. Perception depends on sensation but is like wise not necessarily confined or limited by them. Furthermore these processes interact in strange ways. Our concepts can override perception as in the case of Leonardo's early drawings. Our perception can override sensation so that we see the world right side up instead of up side down as it appears on our retinas or we see a whole visual field instead of a visual field with two big holes in it. Obviously, you are pandering to the Aw Gis. Their sycophantic founder seems to see your attempt to talk sensibly as an excuse for gushing romantic clown talk and pretending it's wisdom. But here is a genuine question for you. What exactly do you think "pre-intellectual" means? Is this a state you think would be desirable? Would it be desirable to be in this state all the time or is this a sort of conscious vacation spot where one drops in for the occasional quickie? Krimel ------------------------------------------------------- [Krimel] on 8/28/08 You addressed my assumptions, that is true, but as I responded what you addressed were not particularly relevant to my assumptions. I pointed out that I was using only terms that should be acceptable within the MoQ to describe the formation of the patterns that make up "levels." None of my assumptions addressed substance or truth whether correspondence or given. I do not use or make assumptions about the kind of "objectivity" that is damned as SOM. I do think there is an external world independent of any observer. But that says nothing whatever about its nature. It does now claim that I am a subject existing independently of that external world. As with all of my assumptions, it is provisional. I do infer the existence of such an external world as the overlap of shared experience with other observers who report commonality in our experience. Such a reality is objective in that sense. As Ham might point out not much can be said about such a reality in the absence of any observer. But I don't think that the MoQ demands that we discard inference as a tool for acquiring knowledge. It is after all vital to pattern recognition. I would say that claiming that "the external world comes in to us through our senses and that we organize that sensory data into a picture of the world," is exactly what James says radical empiricism is about; Pirsig as well. So yes I am saying this but I don't think this is at all what Pirsig is railing against as the evil SOM. There is no duality. There is no disconnection between me and my experience or me and the world external. There are no fixed rigid objects existing in and of themselves. There is only experience guiding my own particular understanding of the world around me. What you seem to be advocating is some extreme form of phenomenology that is indistinguishable from solipsism. ------------------------------------------------------ 1/1/2008 dmb says: The MOQ is "in essence wholly subjective"!? Okay, now I'm starting to think that you have not read Pirsig's books. In Lila you will find him referring to the subjective self as completely ridiculous, as a fictional entity. Likewise, William James (in his Essays on Radical Empiricism) humorously claims that the Kantian self built by philosophers is made of an essence called "breath". Using medical terms, he says this "breath" is the sort that comes out of one's nose. He's saying the subjective self is a bunch of hot air. See, by rejecting the assumptions of SOM as a starting point, both the subjective self and the objective TiTs are already taken out of the equation. Or rather, their primary metaphysical status is taken away and they are reconcieved as secondary, as assumptions rather that the "real" starting points of experience. But seriously, how can you have read Pirsig and still say the MOQ is wholly subjective? Is that some kind of joke? Are you drunk? [Case] While I may or may not understand Pirsig, you certainly do not understand James. Here is the passage you have miss read as being "humorous". 'My reply to this is my last word, and I greatly grieve that to many it will sound materialistic. I can not help that, however, for I, too, have my intuitions and I must obey them. Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as I am of anything that, in myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breath' which actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.' - William James "Does Consciousness Exist?" This is the conclusion of this essay. The ironic part you refer to starts after the "...but breath, which was ever..." In this essay James denies the existence of consciousness as a substance or thing metaphysical or otherwise. He questions its usefulness as a concept at all. But James is serious in his use of "I breath" as a substitute for "I think". As he notes above the matter is taken up at greater length in his "Principles of Psychology". There he says: "My glottis is like a sensitive valve, intercepting my breath instantaneously at every mental hesitation or felt aversion to the objects of my thought, and as quickly opening, to let the air pass through my throat and nose, the moment the repugnance is overcome. The feeling of the movement of this air is, in me, one strong ingredient of the feeling of assent. The movements of the muscles of the brow and eyelids also respond very sensitively to every fluctuation in the agreeableness or disagreeableness of what comes before my mind. In effort of any sort, contractions of the jaw-muscles and of those of respiration are added to those of the brow and glottis, and thus the feeling passes out of the head properly so called. It passes out of the head whenever the welcoming or rejecting of the object is strongly felt. Then a set of feelings pour in from many bodily parts, all 'expressive' of my emotion, and the head-feelings proper are swallowed up in this larger mass. In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat. I do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for I fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in this field. But I feel quite sure that these cephalic motions are the portions of my innermost activity of which I am most distinctly aware. If the dim portions which I cannot yet define should prove to be like unto these distinct portions in me, and I like other men, it would follow that our entire feeling of spiritual activity, or what commonly passes by that [p. 302] name, is really a feeling of bodily activities whose exact nature is by most men overlooked." - William James "The Principles of Psychology: Vol. 1" It is a mistake on your part to read James as a simply a philosopher. He does write philosophy but many would argue the James is primarily a psychologist, among the first of the breed. James is trying to understand the nature of experience as a psychological not a metaphysical matter. He does not deny TITs rather he is seeking to describe how we know them psychologically. "As a room, the experience has occupied that spot and had that environment for thirty years. As your field of consciousness it may never have existed until now. As a room, attention will go on to discover endless new details in it. As your mental state merely, few new ones will emerge under attention's eye. As a room, it will take an earthquake, or a gang of men, and in any case a certain amount of time, to destroy it. As your subjective state, the closing of your eyes, or any instantaneous play of your fancy will suffice. In the real world, fire will consume it. In your mind, you can let fire play over it without effect. As an outer object, you must pay so much a month to inhabit it. As an inner content, you may occupy it for any length of time rent-free. If, in short, you follow it in the mental direction, taking it along with events of personal biography solely, all sorts of things are true of it which are false, and false of it which are true if you treat it as a real thing experienced, follow it in the physical direction, and relate it to associates in the outer world." - William James "Does Consciousness Exist?" As matters of experience James says percepts and concepts are the same stuff. And when he says that many will grieve that his explanations of them will sound "materialistic" he is very serious. James is working to show that psychological processes are rooted in physiology. He is explicitly saying that consciousness is not some supernatural or mystical "stuff." He is arguing against this Neo-Kantian idea of consciousness as Transcendental. It is hard to pinpoint just what brand of Philosophical mysticism you espouse, Dave, but it I do not know of many forms of mysticism that do not refer to some form of transcendent consciousness. I don't think you are going to find James a friend in this regard. As for Radical Empiricism you similarly fail to get even the gist of James. In the nice essay you sent you simply quote Pirsig's account of what Radical Empiricism is alleged to be: "The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and objects were not the starting point of experience." -Pirsig "Lila" While Pragmatism may be regarded as philosophy, Radical Empiricism, on the other hand is philosophy rooted in James' psychology. But in it I think one will find scant support for mysticism. "Empiricism is known as the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts in the order of logic as well as in that of being. Empiricism, on the contrary, lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element, the individual, and treats the whole as a collection and the universal as an abstraction. My description of things, accordingly, starts with the parts and makes of the whole 42 a being of the second order. It is essentially a mosaic philosophy, a philosophy of plural facts, like that of Hume and his descendants, who refer these facts neither to Substances in which they inhere nor to an Absolute Mind that creates them as its objects." -William James "A World of Pure Experience" So if it makes you happy I will gladly modify my statement: The MOQ is "in essence wholly subjective" in favor of: The MoQ is "In essence wholly psychological". As for misunderstanding Pirsig I may be guilty of looking more at what he points too than to what he says he is pointing at. Here are a couple of examples: In possibly the first reference to DQ in Lila, Pirsig talks about random access and his slips of paper. He explicitly notes the connection between random access and Quality: "Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all based on it. In the same passage he shows how his metaphysics was dynamically organizing itself through the process of random access. He is describing here how this abstract set of concepts in fact has a fractal structure much like a river bed or a lightning bolt or a tree. Patterns emerge and organize themselves spontaneously conceptually in much the same way: "Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the index card together with its related topic slips." - Pirsig "Lila" Pirsig hints at the same kind of thing in ZMM with regards to hypotheses in science: "As he was testing hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did not decrease. It actually increased as he went along." -Pirsig "ZMM" In his justification for writing his MoQ Pirsig says this: "Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a 'Metaphysics of Quality' is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity. It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes." Here he is clearly pointing in the right direction: the MoQ IS like a mathematical definition of randomness. What he glosses over is that, yes this is possible. What he does not seem to be aware of is that static patterns indeed emerge from and are a consequence of a mathematical definition of randomness. I would like to point out that most of what I have said about James above applies to what Pirsig is doing as well, at least to the extent that Pirsig is talking about the psychological processes by which subjects and object are derived from experience. It is a mistake to think that any of this has to do with TITs. They are simply excluded not ruled out. My comments on Pirsig do not relate directly to this point. I raise them because they begin to show why I think Pirsig rightfully has a place in the science section of your local bookstore. ------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
