[dmb] Ian linked us to this interesting piece from Stanley Fish > http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/14/fathers-sons-and-motorcycles/
[Krimel] OK, let's review. I accuse you of mindlessly labeling ideas with what you consider to be dirty words so that you can avoid actually engaging the issues raised. Focusing on one such term "reduction" you asked me to tell you what I think it means. I gave you four different meanings of the term. Your responses to them ranged from no problem to befuddlement. But you absolutely presented no challenge or opposition to any of them. I then suggested that you just hang with "greedy reductionism," a position held by few but which seems to exhaust the limits of your understanding of the term. Now here we are. You do not address anything I said, you just go off on this tangent about "greedy reductionism" without bothering to call it that. You hope, I suppose, that no one will notice the fundamental dishonesty in this and you can just go on calling people names and ignoring what they have said. But even at that, sticking with greedy reductionism, your arguments are weak. But before I yield to the temptation to label them as ill conceived sophomoric romanticism let's take a look at them. dmb says: I've reproduced a few of the first paragraphs from Fish's article. His description (reproduced below) very much gets at my complaints about reductionism. It also gets at the difference between the classical Aristotelian narrator and the Phaedrus, the romantic Platonist. As you can see from Fish's description (he's a philosopher), the Aristotelian classicist is a reductionist while Phaedrus is not. This is why it's important to properly understand the literary structure of ZAMM; it has a huge impact on the books fundamental meaning, as Pirsig said in the intro. [Krimel] As I said earlier I will not pursue this line of conversation. Just carry on but don't expect comment. In the future I will just snip it. [dmb] More specifically, I'd draw your attention to the part where Fish says, "knowledge of the world cannot be achieved by inventorying its discrete parts"... [Krimel] Nor can knowledge be achieved by sitting in the corner staring at your navel. Or oh humming about how pretty it all is. The acquisition of knowledge requires a variety of tools and techniques. Or you might say different points of view. That is what Tomasello claims is our greatest superpower; to be able to look at things this way and that way; to rotate and rearrange them in our heads and try them out in different combinations of wholes and parts and partly wholes. If you see some virtue in avoiding this, God bless you. But it seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face. It might help if you could explain what the great virtue you see is. [dmb] ...and the part where Pirsig says, "the division of the world into parts is something everyone does" but in doing so "something is always killed". "And what is killed", Fish adds, "is an awareness of and contact with the world before analytic has done its (necessarily) reductive work". That is a good description of what radical empiricism says. [Krimel] I have tried to explain this for you a couple of times but here we go once more. Again since you fail to address my previous comments except with a bunch of labels and chest thumping I will assume you just didn't get it before. When we have an experience, we are essentially filtering in certain stimuli from the environment. Something is lost right at the moment of sensation since our senses only respond to a certain range of input everything outside of that range is killed. Once we have a sensation and we try to assimilate it into our conceptual schema those parts of it that don't fit are either killed or held in abeyance waiting to pile up enough incongruity to force our schema to accommodate to new data. This is a lossy process. Things keep getting dropped out. When we reduce our concepts to words there is a further loss of meaning as our concepts fail to capture the entire experience or fail to excite the same response in our listeners than the concepts do in us. That essential lossiness happens at the most basic level of sensation and is amplified as we seek to employ the experience of the past to the present. As it turns out it very often is the fact that information is lost that makes communication useful. Concepts focus our attention on particular details of communicative messages because they do not distract us with useless crap. As I sit here trying to reduce my thought into a reasonably decodeable set on concepts, I can hear people talking in the hall, furniture being shoved about in the next room. I am aware that it is past lunch time and that my office mate ought to straighten up his side of the room. But none of this matters to the task at hand. So yes when we divide the world into parts something is killed. When we do it well, what is killed s specifically and intentionally a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter at the moment. It is true that sometimes what we elect to ignore or what we are unable to perceive turn out to be important. If that's the case we will discover it soon enough and no about of wandering about aimlessly looking for it in advance is going to help. [dmb] That, Krimel, is the problem with reductionism. It kills the thing being reduced. And that's exactly what you do to pure experience. By defining experience as a physiological process, you're asserting the parts and denying the whole. For a reductionist, the whole is nothing but a collection of parts. By dismissing the romantic whole, the MOQ is reduced to pure squareness. As I see it, Krimel, you've only managed to re-create the MOQ in your own reductionist image. (This reductionistic stance is very much connected to your rejection of the MOQ's mysticism and your tacit acceptance of SOM.) [Krimel] Let me call this quote from the Fish article to your attention: "What has become an urgent necessity," Pirsig announces (he is hardly the first in history to do so), "is a way of looking at the world that does violence to neither of these two kinds of understanding and unites them into one." I always thought that was the point of ZMM and my interpretation flows from that. You on the other hand twist it into a shape you think overthrows science and naturalism. I agree your reading does that and as I have said I think you are completely misguided. But let's look at your specific charge of "greedy reductionism" with regards to experience and physiology. We know and have known for a long time that emotions are a form of mental activity that is favored among mammals. As an evolutionary event, emotions contribute to the survival of individuals through the flight or fight response. They also contribute to the survival of mammalian young as a bond between parents and among parents and offspring. We know that emotions are localized in the brain in the evolutionarily significant parts of the midbrain where they are found in most mammals. We also know that humans have evolved large areas in both hemispheres of the brain that give us rational thought. Those areas in the neo-cortex work for us by combining inputs from all over the brain. They allow us to access our senses and our memories and to compare the past with the present. The net effect is to help us rationally decide whether to go with our automatic habits or our emotional inclinations or to come up with something completely novel. It isn't emotions or rational thought broken into pieces that matters it is the integration and synthesis of this different modalities that get us through the night. The idea that science or any form of rational inquiry can be divorced from emotion turns out to be false. Without emotional valence, facts, knowledge and ideas are meaningless. We can't make decisions without some form of emotional commitment. Following our emotions can lead us astray but ignoring them just leads us in circles. Since we are not, at least in the absence of some pathology forced to pick just one or the other way of being, taking a look at they individually and together helps us gain an appreciation for the roles emotion and intellect play in our survival. [dmb] But I suppose none of that matters to you Krimel. As you see it, apparently, you know better than me. You know better than Stanley Fish. You are here to correct Pirsig. You also happen to know better than Ken Wilber too. Seriously, dude. I'm not sure I've ever encountered anyone with such an over-inflated opinion of their own intellectual superiority. As I see it, you have no sense of proportion, no sense of who can be taken seriously as a thinker. Let me know when Ivy Leaguers devote their academic careers to your brilliant work. Maybe then it'll be reasonable for you to compare yourself to these guys. Maybe then it'll be believable that you could compete. Until then, you should think about the possibility that you are fallible and that you don't know better than them. Thanks Ian. [Krimel] It is truly odd that in a forum devoted to the exploration of ideas you would prefer to focus on personalities. Your best shot here is to appeal to higher authorities based not on what they say but on who they are and you criticize not my ideas but me. I take some comfort in this because it means you really don't know what to make of what I am saying so are left with limited options. I don't or at least don't recall comparing myself to anyone, with the possible exception of Brad Pitt. It's not my job to focus on my fallibility in my posts. I try to do that before I write them. Why would I sit around thinking of things I don't belief and typing them here? If my arguments are bad or misguided or flat out wrong, isn't it your job to point this out? If all you can think of is name calling, appeals to authority and broad brushed labeling I can see where it would be frustrating, but shelve the self righteousness. It's really inappropriate. Let's face it Dave you are in the difficult and I think boring, position of being Pirsig's apologist. You seem to feel compelled to argue in favor of some formal dogma as you think he sees it. As a result, it is your conclusions that drive your reasoning. You become one of Santayana's squirrels spinning your cage chasing some ideal of your own imagining. I have never had much respect for that approach. It's like reading Ireneaus, Origin or even Aquinas. They are so trapped by the position they are forced to defend that pretty much everything they say is determined in advance. Any evidence or reason to the contrary must be suppressed if not with reason then with righteous indignation. I would actually appreciate a reasoned and reasonable attack on my position. That is why I put it out there. I think you are actually capable of it and you could help me gain a better understanding of the issues that I tend to be unhealthily obsessed with. Although I do still hold out hope that you can do this, I have been so frequently disappointed that I am beginning to see that hope as evidence of my own fallibility. So to that extent your shallow presentations are beginning to bear fruit. 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/
