Blindfolding, sure, but can you hold your tongue and not hurl insults?
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of X Acto Sent: Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] The thing is Not the Word John Quotes Royce: Royce's letter verbatim, but the poetic spacing is my own. -John ----------------- To William James, Sept. 19, 1880 Now here again I think that people are pursuing this study in too superficial a way. Everywhere one meets the question thus put: What relation in the structure of knowledge, does thought-work bear to the contributions of experience? This is a great problem, but not the deepest one. The deepest question was Kant's, how is experience possible? Only this question can now be understood better than Kant ever understood it. What is experience? A series of states of consciousness, known as a series. The definition has two parts. Experience is a series: that everyone admits. Experience is known as a series: that most writers regard as too simple a thing to mention. Yet just here is the kernel. How is a series of states to be known as a series? Tell us this and you have a philosophy. Leave this untold and you stop half way. How is experience possible as a series of states known to be a series? So I put the case to myself, and here I make a beginning of all investigation.--My solution in general is something like this: For the series to be known as a series, each one of its states must know the others. But in each state only itself is given. Hence each state can know the others only by actively constructing or postulating them. Hence the series of states can be known as a series only through the conscious activity of each of its states or moments. Hence time as a series of states is never a datum, only a postulate or construction. Simple reception gives us no knowledge of anything beyond the present. Only spontaneity constructs the world in time. -- Now this looks very simple, but has in fact very far-reaching consequences. If experience is possible only through this constructive process, then what is the ultimate datum? Not matter. Not mind. Not a series of experiences, not the distinction of object and subject, but just this: a moment of reception of some content, joined with a constructive act that postulates a world of other consciousness beyond the present data. Reception means a passive state of consciousness, construction an active state. An Union of passion and action in one moment only, Herein is contained all we can think about the universe. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------ Ron: A great quote that goes abit further into the question of being and experience. In my own experiments with experience I have confirmed the series of states of consciousness the concept bears truth for me. As far as Hams position of "animal logic", I can only advance my own experiments of blind folding myself for hours. Objects ceased to be "objects" and became sensations, all consciouness became sensation. When sight was restored, I realized how the intersection of sensations helped to create the intellectual concept of the world I live in. Notice I use the term "intellectual" to mean abstract thought about experience. For to just be, to simply expereince, does not involve "spacial temporal locations" or subjects and objects or dynamic and static for that matter, it involves intuition and instinct. One thing I learned in the practice of martial arts is that instincts can be molded formed and created through repetition and renforcement until they become "second nature". We use that term frequently, implied is a learned behaviour which overlays or becomes instinctual or "natural". Cultural values are one such example of second nature collections or systems. 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/ 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/
