dmb quoted from William James's essay "A World of Pure Experience":
"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome." Krimel replied: Good examples, not deep into history but good examples. James seems to be saying that an object is nothing more or less than the focus of perception. Conception is the meaning, or reduction in uncertainty, derived from this. Perhaps we can agree that his distinction between perception and conception does indeed help make this problem more clear. dmb says: The point of posting the quote above was to show that James saw subject-object philosophies as a problem to be solved, particularly as it exists in traditional empiricism. Rather than correct the statements you made in response, which seem quite unrelated to this point, I'll just unpack the quote and try to carefully explain what it means. He's saying that radical empiricism will save us from "an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known". He's saying this artificial conception is a "great pitfall" "which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome". This artificial conception is SOM. "The subject and it's object" is just another phrase for "knower and known". This artificial conception is exactly what Pirsig is talking about in explaining the difference between the MOQ's radical empiricism and traditional sensory empiricism. There, he says the traditional empiricists have excluded a whole range of things that people actually experience and that this is not a very empirical thing to do. "They have been excluded", he says, "because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It's just an assumption." The mind-body problem, which you've mentioned once or twice recently, would be a prime example of the paradoxes created by this artificial conception. Also, please notice the part where James talks about the problem of treating subjects and objects as discrete entities so that you have to figure out how the one apprehends the other. He's talking about the correspondence theory of truth. How do you really know when you have objective knowledge, a belief that corresponds to objective reality? Kant's idea that things-in-themselves and things-as-known would be among the "theories invented to overcome" the gap between subjects and objects. He thought he was taking the best from each side, the idealists and the empiricist. But as the radical empiricist sees it, this is only a solution to an artificial paradox created by the underlying assumptions about subjects and objects as the starting point of reality. Krimel said: As I understand it conjunction is generalization and disjunction is discrimination. These are the two great superpowers that give us pattern recognition. dmb says: Conjunction junction, what's your function? It's not about generalization so much as the continuity in experience. See, in the quote his complaint against the traditional empiricists is that they make subjects and objects into discrete entities, discontinuous entities and so James is saying that that experience is a continuous stream in which a complex series of transitional moments that seemlessly takes us from thought to thing or from thing to thought. In other words, subject and object are already unified in experience and there is no need to invent theories to connect them. All we need to do is pay attention to experience as it is had and count the experienced relations between things as equally real. dmb quoted more James: "The instant field of the present is always experienced in it's 'pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple THAT, as yet undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as objective fact or as someone's opinion about fact. This is as true when the field is conceptual and when it is perceptual." Krimel replied: Right, perception precedes conceptual classification... We 'know,' we 'value' before we can talk about what we know or why. Awareness precedes analysis. dmb says: I think you might be working with the traditional meaning of "perception" and that would drastically alter the meaning of this quote from James. I mean, he's talking about pure experience here. Pure experience or "the instant field of the present" ought not be conceived in terms of raw sense data, which is how these things are conceived among the traditional empiricist. That traditional conception entails the assumption that the external, objective reality is coming into the subjective perceiver of that reality through his senses. That is to say, sensory empiricism operates within the assumptions of SOM. It is a subject-object philosophy and radical empiricism sees that as a philosophical problem to be overcome. Notice what he's saying here about the instant field of the present. It is "as yet undifferentiated into thought and thing". This is another way of saying that pure experience is prior to the distinction between thought and thing, prior to the subject and the object. It's another way of saying that the primary empirical reality is undivided, there are no disjunctions, there is no gap between subject and object. You can't even say that it is the subject that is experiencing the pure experience. And, as you can see, "this is as true when the field is conceptual and when it is perceptual". That distinction, in this case, simply isn't relevant to what he's saying here. The radical empiricist will say that even "raw" perceptions like shape and color are among the differentiations of consciousness too. Even at that level, you're already into the realm of static interpretations. To put it loosely, the eye and the mind both impose a limit and a shape on this undifferentiated continuum. Like I said, though, this comment is part of his attack on SOM too. Even though pure experience lacks ALL differentiations, he names the subject-object distinction in particular to describe the experience in the instant field of the present. This is the move that takes the metaphysical muscle, the primary status of subjects and objects and relegates them to concepts, to ideas derived from experience. They are demoted from existential to conceptual status. The are ideas about reality, not reality itself. They are the products of reflection and not the metaphysical realities that make reflection possible. dmb quoted from John Stuhr's anthology: "In beginning to understand his view, it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word 'experience' in its conventional sense. For Dewey, experience is not to be understood in terms of the experiencING subject, or as the interaction of a subject and object that exist separate form their interaction. Instead, Dewey's view is radically empirical: experience is an activity in which subject and object are unified and CONSTITUTED as partial features and relations within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity. Dewey warns us not to misconstrue aspects of this unified experience-activity: distinctions made in reflection do not refer to things that exist a separate substances prior to and outside of that reflection. If we do confuse them, we invent the philosophical problem of how to get them together". "The error of materialist and idealist alike - the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection - is the result of neglect of the context of reflection on experience." Krimel responded: Ok but here your boy has experience unifying subject and object, which is like backasswards from your contention that subject and object are derived from experience. Experience is not something that happens to us. It is a process that we both participate in and result from; a feedback loop. dmb says: No, he using slightly different terms but this is just another way to describe radical empiricism as James just did. In Stuhr's description, for example, "this ongoing, unanalyzed unity" is what James was just calling "the instant field of the present". Or to pick up Northrop's term, "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum" is another way of saying "unanalyzed unity" or "as yet undifferentiated" field of the present. All these various terms refer to the same basic concept. In defiance of the traditional empiricist's notion of subjects and objects as discrete entities with existential status, and creating the problem of how to get them together again, Dewey is saying, like James, that they "unified and constituted as partial features and RELATIONS within this ongoing, unanalyzed unity". This doesn't mean they are unified by the experiencer. Quite the opposite. It "is the error of conferring existential status upon the products of reflection. Subjects and objects are the particular products in question here. Again, Dewey is relegating subjects and objected to a secondary status so that they are derived from experience rather than experience being derived from them. Again, Dewey himself says, "the philosophical 'problem' of trying to get them together (subject and object, man and world, self and not self) is artificial. On the basis of fact, it needs to be replace by consideration of the conditions under which they occur as DISTINCTIONS, and of the special uses served by the distinctions". In a different post, Krimel said to Ron: ...the assumption of independence is a big problem. But one can accept the assumption of an external world that we arise from and interact with. ...But is the answer a world of our own imagining that depends completely on us? Don't we interact with a 'world'? Does it act like we are controlling it? ...It is a bleak nihilistic world forever just outside our grasp. dmb says: Granted, this series of snippets is taken out of it's original context. Sorry if you think that's unfair but the point is simply to show a pattern in your thinking. It seems pretty clear to me that this pattern of thought betrays the fact that you're operating with the assumptions of SOM. You agree that the assumption of independence is a big problem but then say one can accept this very same assumption. The idea of an independent reality and the idea of an external world is the same idea. This is SOM's idea of objective reality, an independently existing reality that is what it is objectively whether there is anyone there to perceive or not. The radical empiricist says that belief is based on the error of conferring existential status to the products of reflection. In other words, that belief is based taking subjects and objects as the basic structure of reality rather than secondary concepts. In the quote above, Stuhr says this quite explicitly. He says, "distinctions made in reflection do not refer to things that exist as separate substances prior to and outside of that reflection". But this is not solipsism or magic and it doesn't mean the world was just made up arbitrarily. The external, physical, pre-existing objective reality is replaced with the world of pure experience. Experience is what limits our conceptual realities, what tests the truth of our ideas, but this is simply NOT conceived in terms of the experiencING subject in an objective world. That is exactly WHY Stuhr says, "it cannot be overemphasized that Dewey is not using the word 'experience' in its conventional sense." He uses the word differently because he's a radical empiricist and not a traditional empiricist. As wiki article says. which Ron recently posted, the traditional "empiricists unjustly try to reduce experience to bare sensations, according to James" because guys like Locke and Hume saw "experience in terms of atom like patches of color and soundwaves". That sounds very much like your descriptions of the way energy is transduced by our sensory organs and brains. I'm not saying your descriptions don't reflect what's going on in that branch of science. I'm just saying that this science is working within the assumptions of SOM and within the traditional empiricism. It's based on the very assumptions that radical empiricism is attacking and sees as a problem to be solved. "James put forth the doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism, inspired by the advances in science, has or had the tendency to emphasize 'whirling particles' at the expense of the bigger picture" That is a neat little description of James's anti-reductionism. It's another one of the problems created by SOM in general and scientific materialism in particular. Whirling particles are the far simpler constituent parts of those bigger picture items. Like cutting the lady up to find her beauty, it just doesn't work. Anti-reductionism is just a sophisticated form of the sentiment that says the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. It simply asks that complex phenomena be assessed in their own terms, on their own level of complexity and that they not be reduced to whirling particles. Such is the case for experience. It is far more complex than any of the physiological processes that can be correlated to any given experience. To use one of your old examples, the fact that we can detect the kind of brain state that exists in a person who is meditating simply doesn't mean that the meditative state of consciousness IS a brain state. In fact, under normal circumstances the brain state itself in not even a part of the meditator's experience. People have been able to get at the point, purpose, effect and meaning of the meditative states long before there was anything like knowledge of what the brain is doing at the time. It's interesting enough and I'm not saying that sort of inquiry is worthless. It's just that meditation is more than a brain state just like a road trip is more than burning gasoline. Those thing happen no doubt, but what do such things really tell us about meditation or road trips? Not much. And in the hands of a reductionists, this relatively trivial knowledge becomes extremely misleading and distorting. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive™: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_SD_25GB_062009 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/
