[Krimel] I find it laughable that Dave runs away with his tail between his legs after this post:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-June/037181. html Now he comes back to commiserate with gav with the same tired line of thinking previously dispensed with. This really is a repeat of previous discussions along these same lines but since Dave has never addressed these issues; I guess we need to review... ---------------------------------------------------------- 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. [Krimel] First of all the issue here is whether or not radical empiricism completely over turns sensory empiricism. I stand by my statement above which you have with good reason chosen to avoid. Since I have already had my say, let's look at what William James says: "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 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. Sounds a bit like a reductionist, doesn't he. Doesn't sound all that pissed off at Hume either. But he does have a beef with Hume's version of empiricism and so he says: "...Hume's statement that whatever things we distinguish are as 'loose and separate' as if they had 'no manner of connection.' James Mill's denial that similars have anything 'really' in common, the resolution of the causal tie into habitual sequence, John Mill's account of both physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what I mean." All he is saying is what he always says. Experience is not made of unconnected discrete elements it is a continuous stream. It is not a set of fixed static events, it is a dynamic every changing stream. Rather like James says later in "Some Problems of Philosophy" perception is dynamic and continuous but ideas, concepts, mental representations are discrete. Once again there is nothing in my statements that require SOM any more than James' statements imply it. With regard to the issue of sensation and perception I think Dave really needs to start with a dictionary to be clear on the meaning of these terms. But here is what James says: "Moreover, the chapters on 'Perception' in the psychology- books are full of facts that make for the essential homogeneity of thought with thing. How, if 'subject' and 'object' were separated 'by the whole diameter of being,' and had no attributes and common, could it be so hard to tell, in a presented and recognized material object, what part comes in thought the sense- organs and what part comes 'out of one's own head'? Sensations and apperceptive ideas fuse here so intimately that you can no more tell where one begins and the other ends, than you can tell, in those cunning circular panoramas that have lately been exhibited, where the real foreground and the painted canvas join together." -William James: Does Consciousness Exist? With regard to "pure experience" which Dave loves to make so much about James says this: "'Pure experience' is the name which I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. Only new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses, or blows, may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what , tho' ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness, but in respects that don't appear; changing throughout, yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points, either of distinction or of identity, can be caught. PURE EXPERIENCE IN THIS STATE IS BUT ANOTHER NAME FOR FEELING OR SENSATION." The caps are mine for emphasis. Dave really needs to deal with this or apologize and shut the fuck up. Dave then goes on with extensive Pirsig quotes. Let be clear that I have no beef with Bob here. What I am objecting to is Dave the Apologist's attempt to canonize these statements. [dmb quoting Pirsig] "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." [Krimel] I see nothing in this statement to contradict my original statement above. Apparently, Dave doesn't either. [dmb quoting more Pirsig] "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?" [Krimel] Again there is nothing wrong with this as far as it goes but Dave wants to push it as an article of faith. The brain can be seen as a kind of archeological structure with ancient layer of evolution overlaid with increasingly new adaptations. At the lowest regions, near the brain stem in, we find the functions that any animal needs to survive. Respiration, heart rate, balance and so forth, this is sometimes called the reptilian brain. The next layer is the midbrain or mammalian brain with includes emotions as I have said many times. [Note to Marsha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain] The higher brain functions in man serve to override and check emotional responses that are not going to be effective. Or as I have said before in reference to Benjamin Libe's work, rational thought does not give us 'free will' so much as it gives us 'free won't'. You can really get up to speed on this by watching a recent program from NOVA call Ape Genius: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/apegenius/program.html I seriously do not see how one can talk at all about these issues without addressing or understanding the points raised in this program. But to get right at the point of inserting values into the brain. First many 'values' are directly hardwired. Infants respond negatively to pain, hunger and overstimulation and positively to comfort, food and soothing sounds. Those are built in Values. We like what makes us feel good and don't like what makes us feel bad. In fact in this sense Value and "feeling" are the same thing. This gets elaborated throughout our lives. As for inserting our removing values by tinkering with the brain; I already gave the example of Phineas Gage which neither gav nor Dave has seen fit to address. I have previously given the example of a stroke patient who experienced damage to the pathways that connect the emotions to the neo-cortex. This patient has many of the physiological responses to emotions but none of the 'feeling' or experience of the emotion. As I have said previously such a patient rather than becoming free of his emotions ans thus able to be purely rational, is unable to make even simple decisions because he has no emotional commitment to one thing or another. Other examples of inserting, removing or altering values would include gav's beloved fungal sacraments or pretty much any psychoactive drug. Brain lesions in animals and in human suffering brain injuries provide a host of examples of how various areas of the brain can be changed to produce radical changes in thoughts, mood, motivations and actions. Values are not things or substances that reside in the brain or anywhere else. They are processes that arise from interactions of mind/body and the environment. If the environment changes our Values change; when my beloved enters the room my moods changes in her presence. If the body changes, our Values change. If I had a stroke, I might no longer remember my beloved and her presence would have no impact on my mood. [dmb quoting Pirsig] "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." [Krimel] Back to the bitching about reductionism, huh Dave. You have a lot of balls to bring it up after refusing to address the issue previously. But since Pirsig is trying to reduce everything to Value here it seems an especially silly point to try to sneak in. But just to make a point more clear here the unification of the world of objects and the world of values is unified in each individual. We experience the continuous dynamic stream of experience and understand it by cutting it up into discrete static concepts. [dmb] 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] [Krimel] I have already addressed much of this but I would like to point out that our first impression of anything carries with it some kind of emotional assessment. This is good or this is bad. But those Values are analyzed and questioned by the higher brain functions. I see a woman who looks like my beloved and my heart leaps. She turns out to be someone else and I chose to turn away from her. Immediately felt Values are sometimes right and good and other times dead wrong. It is our rational, uniquely human powers that helps overcome the limits of being purely and completely guided by Value. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] It should be clear to anyone who has read this far that Dave understands neither James nor me. He has totally miscast 'radical empiricism' and the only argument he has is to try to characterize my position with broad generic meaningless labels. As I have tried to show explicitly, my position is not rooted in anything like SOM. Dave and gav just say it is and turn away without showing how or why. The statement, "It seems pretty clear to me..." offers nothing at all explicit and in fact demonstrates that Dave doesn't understand what I have said in the least. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] There certainly are lots of examples of scientist having "mystical" revelations that formed scientific break throughs. I have given Otto Lowie and the discovery of the chemical component to nerve transmissions as an example in the past. The discovery of the benzene ring is one that I believe Kuhn gives in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. That really isn't the point at all. When a scientist has this kind of insight they don't stop there and say "what a good boy am I." They don't tell their colleagues, "I had this vision of the truth. You should try sleeping with your head on my pillow." They test their mystical ideas with the same vigor and rigor they test any kind of idea. The whole point is to express their revelation in a fashion that can be understood verified and tested by anyone. The point is not the source of the idea but the meaning and utility of the idea and how that idea can be communicated to others in such a way that they too can attach Value to it. Dave raises the specter of mysticism once again without showing any Value to it what-so-ever. Please note that I have time and time again begged him to show what is special, cool or even interesting about this and he fails every time. Artists communicate by attempting to directly stimulate us emotionally. Alfred Hitchcock, one of the great artists of cinema, acknowledged this fully and said it that in the future directors might actually tell their stories by directly stimulating the emotions instead of having to use narrative tricks and music. Art is a good and true and beautiful way to communicate. But it lacks precision. It is landscape to the trompe l'oeils of science. Mysticism on the other hand is a form of spirituality and as such is more or less on the same footing as any form of spirituality. I have asked Dave countless time to show how Christian accounts of speaking in tongues are more easy to dismiss than the claims of eastern mystics. Again all I ever get is a hasty retreat. What are you running from Dave? Scoffing is not a reasoned argument. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Here we see Dave at his disingenuous best, preaching to the Aw Gi Cult Choir. If he was talking about epistemology, how we know, then how can studying the brain and the processes that give rise to perception be irrelevant. I would say of course that psychology and the neurosciences are aimed directly at answering this fundamental philosophical question. I suspect what bothers Dave is that to a large extent the last century of research on these matters has rendered the chattering of "philosophers" largely irrelevant. Notice how he pays lip service to "data' but hides under the covers every time 'data' is mentioned. Perhaps, Dave does have a love and respect 'data.' After all he says as much. But he never refers to it, never responds to examples of it, never offers up any of his own. I will be filing this post so that I can refer to it in the future when Dave gets all puffed up and blows hard about this or that. But I will lay odds that if he has the stones to respond at all it will be to some silly little thing along the lines of his last retreat: Krimel said to dmb: Now you trot out a new label, "anti-reductionism." What is that? What is it opposed to? dmb says: Well, if anti-intellectualism is opposed to intellectuals and if anti-semitism is opposed to Semites and if anti-aircraft weapons are used to destroy aircraft, then anti-reductionism is, um, well, Jeez I have no idea what that could mean either. Okay, now I am officially bored with your nonsense. ZZZZZzzzzzzz Good night and good luck. That was his response to this: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-June/037181. html Sounds all clever and witty but I call it cowardly. 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/
