gav said to Krimel: [your] statement presupposes SOM. (subjective) experience begins (occurs after) the transduction of energy into neural impulses (object). it reduces experience to a physiological (materialistic) base.
Krimel replied: Regardless of the alleged advantages of radical empiricism, it builds on sensory empiricism. We can not experience relations between our sense impressions if we have no sense impressions. ...James is not overturning sensory empiricism in the slightest. He is adding the connectedness of our senses; our ability to match faces and voices. It is the appreciation of figure ground relationships, innate rules for constructing faces and seeing how things relate. He is expanding empiricism to include both sensation and perception. But he says time and again that concepts or ideas or rationalism are derived from experience or perception. dmb says: The idea that concepts arise from perceptions is traditional empiricism in a nut shell. Adding sensation to that formula hardly changes a thing and it most certainly is not enough to change it into radical empiricism. If a guy were interested in distinguishing traditional sensory empiricism from radical empiricism, he would read what James had to say about Hume. Or he could read Pirsig. In either case, they differ from the traditional form by rejecting the assumptions of SOM. As James and Pirsig see it, these assumptions artificially imposed restrictions which in turn caused distortions and limits. In both cases, subjects and objects are demoted to a secondary status. I mean, Gav is right. Krimel is simply re-asserting the kind of traditional empiricism that radical empiricism was designed to replace. Apparently, even to the extent of reading James as if he were Hume. "The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is compose of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classifieds as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption." "For years we've read about how values are supposed to emanate from some location in the 'lower' centers of the brain. This location has never been clearly identified. The mechanism for holding these values is completely unknown. No one has ever been able to add to a person's values by inserting one at this location, or observed any changes at this location as a result of a change of values. No evidence has been presented ...Yet we're told values must reside here, if they exist at all, because where else could they be? Persons who know the history of science will recognize the sweet smell of phlogiston here and the warm glow of the luminiferous ether... This problem of trying to describe value in terns of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. [This is a kind of reductionism] Value is not a subspecies of substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a 'stable pattern of inorganic values'. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified." And as you can see, hopefully, radical empiricism lines up quite nicely with this reversal of containers. By "radical empiricism", James... "meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience [DQ] cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction." [Pure experience = undifferentiated experience] "Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession." [the cutting edge of experience, the front edge of the train] It seems pretty clear to me that Krimel's scientific explanations of experience are predicated on the the assumptions that radical empiricism seeks to overcome. The materialistic, physiological, brain-centered, SOM assumptions all come into play in Krimel's explanations. This is exactly the kind of thing the MOQ is NOT saying. There are some interesting cases even within science where the front edge of the empirical procession shows up pretty much as James and Pirsig describe it. But artists, mystics and meditators have known this from experience for ages. There are lots of ways to get at this idea. BUT the empiricism of Hume, of the positivists or of scientific materialism is NOT one of them. That kind of old-school empiricism is the problem and radical empiricism is the solution to that problem. See, the thing is that Krimel could be 100% true and accurate in reporting the findings of brains studies and the science of perception and it still wouldn't matter. As far as they go, these things are not in dispute. Data is data and the radical empiricist cannot ignore any kind of experience. The dispute, as I see it, is all about how we understand the data and how we understand its relevance to these two forms of empiricism and their differing assumptions. That's where Krimel goes wrong. He offers the problem that is solved by radical empiricism as if it were the other way around. In latin we call that preposterous and in english we say that's bass ackwards. Thanks.dmb _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! 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