Dave, I would make some crack about the pot calling the kettle black. This is pretty verbose. But I do think you have addressed these issues well. This is a debate that spans centuries. If there was a clear answer there would be nothing to discuss. All I ever ask is a thoughtful reply and you have given one. That really drains the rancor. As you might expect I agree with very little of what you have said but you have said it well.
I think what I don't understand about where you are going is why you would even want to go there. You talk about achieving higher levels of consciousness in terms of stroke, catatonia, seizures and intoxication. Then turn your nose up at the higher levels of conscious we experience every day as a result of technology. You want to brand science as SOM/bad when it has affected more consciousness raising that any institution in human history. I think you are blind to the radical changes in human consciousness that have occurred over the past century. You remind me of that frog who gets boiled to death because it doesn't notice minor increases in the temperature of the stove. The modern transformation of information from analog to digital format is causing seismic shifts in awareness, connectedness, and our understanding of who we are and what it is possible to become. I think you want to warp the MoQ into a static latch to ignore all this, or to pretend it is metaphysically inconsistent and therefore non-existent. Look at your approach below. You adopt and claim that Pirsig adopts an almost purely phenomenological reading of James. This is the kind of reading that turns him into one of the pure idealists he was so vehemently opposed to. All you are doing is solving the SOM problem by denying that anything outside of your personal immediate experience has value or even exists. This is not what James is saying at all. You don't solve this kind of problem by pretending half of it doesn't exist or by defining it away. Since I have mainly used my own idiosyncratic reading of James in the past I too sought an expert to help clarify my perspective on James. I will be quoting: "William James and the Metaphysics of Experience" by David C. Lamberth as well as James himself. [dmb] 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". [Krimel] Right and this pitfall exist for both rationalist and empiricist. In fact James treats rationalists about the way Pirsig treated romantics. They are all warm and fuzzy but where the rubber meets the road you need to keep your eyes open. James isn't saying there is no relationship between knower and known. He is saying we have to be careful of an artificial one. Here is what Lambert says: "In "A World of Pure Experience," James offers a threefold categorization of what he calls the cognitive relation - the relation of the knower and the known. According to James the knower and the known are either: -1 The self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are -2 two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or -3 the known is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive relations would lead, if sufficiently prolonged. Interpreting this list immediately afterwards, James claims that class 3 may always be hypothetically reduced to class 2, with the differences between classes and being simply the difference between the mind enjoying " 'direct' acquaintance" with an object and the mind having "knowledge about" it. This distinction between "knowledge about" and "'direct' acquaintance" is a favorite of James, recurring throughout his published record." Or here: "James's aim in deploying pure experience epistemologically, however, is to articulate a sort of limit conception both theoretically and experientially, a limit at which the knower and the known actually do come together, a limit at which two knowers can and do meet in a concrete, shared world. Theoretically this conception is a limit in that it is the required base notion for conceptual knowing to be meaningful." [dmb] 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." [Krimel] All I can add is that you are doing nothing more to solve the problem than inverting it. Instead of saying that internal ideas are not "real" you want to say that any external reality is not "real". You are trading one extreme position for another. I do not think this is what James is after. [dmb] 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] I think James chief approach to the problems is via empiricism versus rationalism and with regards to "t"ruth he is pretty clear: "While one might pursue meaning (or clarity) virtually in a world merely thought of, finding out concretely what a concept means on James's rendition of the pragmatic principle requires tracing that concept through its intermediaries to its actual terminus." That is one of his earlier statements on the matter from a speech in 1898. Here is what he says a bit later in Some Problems of Philosophy: "The pragmatic rule is that the meaning of a concept may always be found, if not in some sensible particular which it directly designates, then in some particular difference in the course of human experience which its being true will make. Test every concept by the question 'What sensible difference to anybody will its truth make?' and you are in the best possible position for understanding what it means and for discussing its importance. If, questioning whether a certain concept be true or false, you can think of absolutely nothing that would practically differ in the two cases, you may assume that the alternative is meaningless and that your concept is no distinct idea. If two concepts lead you to infer the same particular consequence, then you may assume that they embody the same meaning under different names." Lambert provides a bit of insight into the very discussion we are having here: "One of the more difficult and pressing problems for understanding James's radically empiricist Weltanschauung as a whole concerns the terms "experience" and "experienced" themselves. What he means by "experienced" in his statement above, as well as by "experience" in his thesis of pure experience, has been a subject of great debate among his interpreters, with no real consensus emerging. A number of different interpretations have been suggested, ranging from a variety of phenomenalist and panpsychist interpretations, in which to be experienced might mean to have an actual experiencer, or to be experienced by something, or even to be self-experiencing, to a rather moderate and inclusive methodological interpretation, in which "experienced" means to be experienceable or describable in terms of experience." I think you are arguing for an extreme phenomenalist, panpsychist position. Obviously I think its rubbish. But the inversion of the problem as a whole from "thoughts" aren't real to "things" aren't real is exactly your program. I don't think an exclusive position either way works at all and I really don't think that is what James is after. And just to restate the obvious: I do not think subjects and objects are starting points of anything. I don't think those terms even describe the problem well as they are full of internal problems of their own. 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. [Krimel] Those were James' terms. I was merely putting them into terms that make more sense to me. Actually he thinks the problem of traditional empiricists is that they have no way to account for relationship like Kant's a prioris: time, space and causality. James is just saying that these are part and parcel of actual experience and not separate categories. Pirsig's talk about our ability to sense value is an extension of this that falls in line with Kahneman and Tversky's ideas in prospect theory which I have mentioned several times. 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. [Krimel] Since James is among those who helped to define the traditional meaning of perception this hardly seems like a reasonable criticism. As far as pure experience is concerned he claims that it IS sensation. He states this in pretty unambiguous terms here: "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 simply but another name for feeling or sensation. -William James, "The Thing and its Relations," Essays in Radical Empiricism, Lambert talks about your confusion on this point: "This understanding of the concrete and frequently sensible character of experience draws attention to a streak in James's thought that often disturbs his modern-day readers - an apparent romanticism concerning the relation of thoughts to sensation. Some of his pithy remarks to the contrary, James does not ultimately mean simply to take up a romantic position against thought with his thesis of pure experience, thus preferring an un-"conscious," mystical state to the abstract one that follows upon reflection. Commenting in 1909 on his own essay "The Function of Cognition," where percepts are treated as the only realm of reality, James writes that he "now treat[s] concepts as a coordinate realm." Clearly, if percepts and concepts are coordinate, there cannot be a philosophical preference for the perceptual or sensory order, whatever his rhetoric may suggest." [dmb] That traditional conception entails the assumption that the external, objective reality is coming into the subjective perceiver of that reality through his senses. [Krimel] And that is exactly what James says is happening. In "The Perceptions of Space" James responds to a lengthy quote from Schopenhauer outlining the Kantian position that sensation purely phenomenological and can not refer to anything external: "I call this view mythological, because I am conscious of no such Kantian machine-shop in my mind, and feel no call to disparage the powers of poor sensation in this merciless way. I have no introspective experience of mentally producing or creating space. My space-intuitions occur not in two times but in one." [dmb] 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". [Krimel] Yes and notice here what he says about that very point: "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 simply but another name for feeling or sensation." [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I guess if you think "...new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows..." have the inside track to Nirvana but I don't think that is what James is about. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I don't at all agree that James is the phenomenologist you would make of him. With radical empiricism James is allowing that the memories, thoughts, and the relationships that we experience count as experience or even re-experience. This is what the sensory empiricists were not allowing. In "A World of Pure Experience" James says: "Relations are of different degrees of intimacy. Merely to be "with" one another in a universe of discourse is the most external relation that terms can have, and seems to involve nothing whatever as to farther consequences. Simultaneity and time-interval come next, and then space-adjacency and distance. After them, similarity and difference, carrying the possibility of many inferences. Then relations of activity, tying terms into series involving change, tendency, resistance, and the causal order generally. Finally, the relation experienced between terms that form states of mind, and are immediately conscious of continuing each other." Lambert adds: "In its statement of the factuality - and thus the potential givenness or irreducibility - of certain determinate relations, radical empiricism seeks to be "fair to both the unity and the disconnexion. It finds no reason for treating either as illusory. It allots to each its definite sphere of description." Thus in his factual statement of radical empiricism, James takes a cue from his methodological emphasis on inclusiveness, merging this notion with a realistic reading of the independence of certain aspects of the world of experience from the structure of our thoughts about them. [dmb] 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". [Krimel] First of all one could imagine a world with no subjects and just objects which is materialism or a world of just ideas and no objects. I don't think you have to seek hard for quotes of mine that suggest which way I lean. I won't even bother searching to show which way you incline. But neither is any less of an assumption than the other. I have made this point crystal clear many times. I understand full well that it might be impossible to decide conclusively between these two extremes. I have also stated many times that my inclination toward a pre-existing world external is an act of faith. I don't think your clinging to idealism is any less so. These are assumptions and James is saying that they are always subject to justification. One is not more privileged than the other. One of the reason I have been perceived as vigorous in my defense of science is that this idea of provisional truth and challenging assumptions lies at its very heart. James suggests a way of settling our dispute: "If, questioning whether a certain concept be true or false, you can think of absolutely nothing that would practically differ in the two cases, you may assume that the alternative is meaningless and that your concept is no distinct idea. If two concepts lead you to infer the same particular consequence, then you may assume that they embody the same meaning under different names." [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Except that a world of "pure experience" is impossible and not even desirable to acquire or sustain unless you want to live as "...new-born babes, or men in semi-coma from sleep, drugs, illnesses or blows..." Here is how Lambert frames the problem: "By speaking phenomenologically of a pure experience, James does not mean to indicate the narrow, solipsistic view that only that which is in the instant field of the present has reality. Rather, he means to underscore his idea that the generic metaphysical characteristics of pure experience informing his philosophical Weltanschauung must be found in the concreteness of real experience, experience had by, among others, philosophers living and thinking in the world. Not only, then, does he not restrict reality to the instant now of the present; in addition, James opens out reality to include our thoughts and ideas. Although these do involve abstraction from the stream of experience, reflection (or conceptual thinking) for James is fundamentally an additive process, a process that contributes to reality, building it out by the edges." James does offer phenomenological explanations at times but he is not the radical phenomenologist you would have him to be. I think it is an open question whether Pirsig is. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] That view of atomic experience was being actively pursued by Wundt and even more aggressively by his student Titchner. The introspectionists where among the first approaches taken in psychology and the first to be utterly abandoned. Sensations result totally from different kinds of energy, modes of transduction and pathways of processing. Sensations are received separately and combined in the process of perception. Hearing and seeing are two different kinds of experience. But they do not constitute discrete elements of experience as they too are continuous. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] That is because you think it is important to over turn all of science. Your SOM label is just your way of feeling justified about refusing to address the obvious. Stuff like: hearing and seeing being different modalities, systems theory as a good way of analyzing process, information theory as a road to understanding the concept of meaning, chaos theory as a way of seeing how static patterns emerge from the dynamic flux of chance, probability theory as an explanation of everything from evolution to decision making, causality as probability and probability as an actual biological "sense". As I believe I have said before, Dave, you are not making an argument here you are making an excuse. [dmb] "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. [Krimel] As I said if I HAD to choose between idealism and materialism I wouldn't because I think we need a bit of each. If you stuck a gun to my head, I would pick materialism but even materialism today is not "whirling particles" it is probability fields. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] One more time there is nothing wrong with asking what conditions are necessary for a whole to exist at all. The astronomer Frank Drake came up with an equation listing all of the factors he thought would be required for life to evolve on a planet. Such an equation could never specify exactly what form that life might take. The exact forms of life would result from all kinds of interrelationships and factors not included as necessary but without these necessary factors no life would exist. All this killing through dissection is similarly bogus. If one wanted to know what makes a woman beautiful, one wouldn't cut anyone up, one would ask people what they find beautiful. Or we might ask them to rank and series of pictures in sequence of attractiveness. In fact this is exactly that approach that has been taken. Unlike your clinging to the SOM label as the only tool you have, scientists have lots of tools in their box and not every problem looks like a nail. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] The fact that meditators can be shown to have similar patterns of brain activity is what actually leads us to say that meditation is a brain state. The same way that sleepers have a similar brain states as to drunks and pill poppers and people watching movies. Those it is the common features that make them brain states. Those similarities may not account of the felt experiences of individual meditators but the similarity of their descriptions is what contributes to calling this a "state" in the first place. The real problem for you I would think is accounting for what to make of these states and the descriptions of them special. [dmb] In fact, under normal circumstances the brain state itself in not even a part of the meditator's experience. [Krimel] >From one point of view that state IS the meditator's experience. But any experience can be understood from many points of view. [dmb] 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. [Krimel] Right and looking directly at what is going on at the biological level helps account for what makes those states significant evolutionarily. The Dalai Lama for example thinks his meditators are developing heightened compassion. EEG recoding show increase activity in the areas of cortex previously associated with such feelings. Learning to feel more open to others is a healthy, socially desirable way to be, a good skill to acquire. But how is this philosophically or metaphysically significant? [dmb] 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. [Krimel] I have never said that meditation can be described purely or exclusively as a brain state or that a road trip ought to be described in terms of gas mileage. There are many ways of describing things depending on the context and what is important within the context. Sometimes it is the poetry of the road and sometimes the chemistry of combustion. You on the other hand seem to want to throw out any form of explanation that requires you to think. You want to "feel" and call that thinking. 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/
