dmb says: You use your non-verbal brain to talk to your wife? Sounds like quite a trick. But yea, the rituals and routines of life are sort of given over to the autopilot. Once we've learned and mastered a certain task, that "knowledge" fades into the background so that we don't have to be thoughtful or deliberate about tying our shoes or brushing our teeth. That sort of thing might count as unpatterned in SOME sense but then again we are talking about thought habits and patterns of behavior.
[Krimel] Are heart beat and respiration patterned or unpatterned? I sincerely hope that they are patterned but my experience of them is almost always transparent. Nothing fades into the background like that without first becoming a habit. Krimel asked: How does you unpatterned experience differ from Freud's unconscious or Gazzanaga's non-conscious? dmb answered: Don't know about Gazzanaga but I have read some Freud. His notion of the unconscious was very different from this. It was the home of primal instincts and all the repressed material that was too ugly to see the light of day. You know, a life full of fucking and killing is what we really want, he thought. The unconscious both the source of these motivates and the place where their true nature is hidden from the conscious mind. All of human culture, he thought, is nothing but the sublimation of these instincts toward sex and aggression. We dress them up in fancy clothes to make them seem sublime. Things like romantic love and a warrior's courage are really just window dressing for basic animal drives. His unconscious has a specific structure and function. He's also a kind of reductionist. This notion of an unpatterned, pre-intellectual experience goes in the opposite direction. While it's true that in both cases we're talking about something that is not conscious, preverbal experience is not about instincts or repression or anything like that. If it HAD to be described in terms of a structure of the mind (at gun point, say), I'd point to the brain's right hemisphere. As opposed to the differentiations of thought and language, it has a all-at-once way of processing "things" resulting in an undifferentiated awareness. Remember the Harvard brain scientist named Jill Bolte Taylor? When she only had that hemisphere working, due to a stroke, she experienced nirvana, she says. If the two hemisphere can be correlated to the dynamic-static split (big IF), then it does have some structural basis that we can point to. But I really don't know if that works because that could get pretty reductionist too. [Krimel] So the winner must be Gazzanaga. Bolte Taylor framed her experience the way she did because of Gazzanaga. For more than forty years he has done research on people who were cured of severe epilepsy by having their left and right brains separated. He talks about a non-conscious; which is mainly anything verbal or conceptual... basically your list of static patterns. In the lecture I recommended, Keltner talks about one side of the brain being more emotionally responsive in approach situations while the other side lights when it's time to get away. I think if you look back, using the model Bolte Taylor articulates, you can read Freud without feeling wood, or revulsion or both. [dmb] Think of that analogy in ZAMM where our our understanding of the world (conceptual, static world) is just a handful of sand from all the endless beaches. The thing to notice here is how much bigger the unheld sand is. You can't reduce your handful to that. The contemporary pragmatists express the same same idea, I think, when they talk about this kind of experience as "rich", "thick", "overflowing" and maybe even "inexhaustible". And they talk about the concepts and ideas derived from it in terms of "takings" rather than reflections or representations. In this proportional sense, concepts are derived from the pre-intellectual reality the way a cup of salt water is derived from the ocean. Our concepts "take" a tiny, tiny fraction of what could be taken. Just a handful of sand. [Krimel] I think I agree with this, but, for me it is easier and clearer to say that the beach is continuous, while handful is discrete. Nevertheless, flimsy as they are, we use those handfuls of sand to build castles and high rises. We literally turn those bits of sand into iPhones. An act of God or a twist of fate can shake the foundations of our thoughts and deeds. "When the levy breaks you got no place to run." Every cup of salt water that is dipped from the ocean, one way or another finds its way home again someday. After that it gets complicated. 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/
