Krimel said to dmb: Yeah, it was really funny to hear you expounding on Pirsig's leading edge of the train on the track metaphor while discussing James' essay that explicitly condemned all such metaphors.
dmb says: James condemned all train metaphors? That's weird. Why would he do that? Since James himself uses images of continuous motion or a leading edges, I have to assume you've badly misread something. Go ahead. Dish it up. Splain yourself. [Krimel] I freely confess an error here. James does not condemn train and chain metaphors in "Does Consciousness Exist" He does it in "The Stream of Thought" chapter in his "Principles of Psychology": "Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life." Surely, you might argue that this is young James and you love old James but here is old James from "Some Problems of Philosophy": "The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes. But before tracing the consequences of the substitution, I must say something about the conceptual order itself. Trains of concepts unmixed with percepts grow frequent in the adult mind; and parts of these conceptual trains arrest our attention just as parts of the perceptual flow did, giving rise to concepts of a higher order of abstractness." You are supposed to be the James scholar not I but I suspect that a careful reading of James use of the terms chain and train will reveal that he reserves trains and chains for discrete concepts and streams for perception. dmb said to Marsha: My expectations? Doesn't everyone expect grandparents to be mature? There is a limit to how young a grandparent can be, see, and older people are supposed to be more mature than younger people. But I think Krimel's style is childish and painfully undignified. Go ahead, make a case that the following is not childish... I also characterized it as "vague" and as "snarky bullshit", so those descriptions are already taken. But if you have a better word for this, please do tell. [Krimel] I left high school with two goals in mind. One was never to "specialize" and the second was never to "grow-up". It's good to know I succeeded in at least one of them. Dmb objecting to Krimel's snarks tone: ... That is obvious but hardly from lack of trying on my part. You keep talking about Bolte-Taylor. But what you say about her TED talk makes it obvious you did not understand it at all. [Krimel] Here are a few of your past statements on Taylor: "And if you want to put it in terms of evolved brains, the left hemisphere is good at words and concepts while the right hemisphere takes in the whole undifferentiated, unconceptualized experience. Jill Bolte Taylor had a stroke, lost her ability to make conceptual distinctions and experienced Nirvana, experienced pure Dynamic Quality. And since she also happens to be a Harvard brain scientist, she understood how her way of knowing shifted from the conceptually dominated ordinary consciousness to the other kind." -dmb 5/23/10 "The case of Jill Bolte Taylor makes a similar point from the opposite direction. She was a brain scientist who has a stroke and lost the use of her rational, verbal hemisphere and could only experience reality as a whole, so much so that she could not tell where she ended and the universe began. She now says that what she experienced was Nirvana and she cries tears of joy when she tells the story. We can think about this pure experience or undifferentiated experience in terms of the lack of distinction between subject and object but it is a lack of all distinctions." - dmb 5/5/21/10 "It's sometimes put in terms of quieting the mind or finding peace of mind, or even like nirvana as Bolte-Taylor described it." - dmb 2/13/09 Please note that Bolte-Taylor is a neuroscientist, who has done a lot of work for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Her book "My Stroke of Insight" gives a first person account of her experience with stroke. In her book she goes to some pains to explain not just the activities of the two hemispheres of the brain but the various other structures involved in her feelings and perceptions or lack thereof. Her purpose is to help stroke victims understand what has happened to them as a result to the specific kinds of structural damage that stroke can cause. What, other than flowery language, exempts her from your charge of reductionism? Or for that matter lets you off the hook for my charge that you misunderstand and misrepresent her? dmb said: Your complaints are too vague for me to know what you're talking about, what it is you think I don't understand. The other 90% of that was about the same. But your comments make one thing perfectly clear; you're a dick. I don't think your snarky bullshit is cute or clever or respectable in any way. You're just a dick. You're a grandfather, for Christ's sake. What the hell is wrong with you? Seriously, grow up. [Krimel] While I have no desire to "grow up" I do occasionally get a pang of guilt about being a dick. I took this charge of snarkiness seriously for a while and it cause me to reflect. Here are a couple of examples of this same argument from the archives. Who's snarkier than who? I'll let the reader decide. http://lists.moqtalk.org/htdig.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2008-October/0300 21.html http://lists.moqtalk.org/htdig.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-June/037221. html The point is we have had this discussion many times and you predictably retreat into this charge of reductionism and ignore the issues at hand. Now most recently there was this: Krimel said: ... I think any belief or position someone holds is derived from the interaction of reason and emotion. Damasio's research is primarily in the area of emotion. He claims what without the ability to experience emotion people find it very difficult if not impossible to make decisions. Our commitment to ideas is likewise a function of right brain emotional commitment reinforced, balanced and guided by rational left brain functions. Emotion is almost always what guides us in the final analysis. That's why commercials are about sex and status and not about the chemistry of your tooth paste. But in a philosophical discussion, it is one thing to express emotion for rhetorical purposes but what really should be important is reason. In reading your stuff it is often hard for me tell whether you know the difference... dmb said: I think the work of guys like Dimasio lends support to Pirsig's aim of expanding rationality at its roots. It's not just that reason and emotion interact or that emotion plays an important role in the overall cognitive process, although that's certainly true too. The interesting thing is that rationality is paralyzed without these underlying unconscious processes. There is a case wherein a dude had brain damage in such a way that all he had was rationality but no ability to feel the situation. As a result, he couldn't make the simplest decisions. He'd stand in the cereal isle in the grocery store for hours trying to rationally evaluate the relative merits of each kind and there was just no end to this process. [Krimel] Damasio is the guy who came up with this bit of research you are citing. Here he is explaining it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I When I mentioned this research to you specifically in 2008 and again in 2009, it was specifically in response to your charges of reductionism. I also pointed out at the time how this research impacts on Pirsig's ideas about the pre-intellectual. You never addressed this research or its importance at the time and now you bring it up to support you ongoing charge of reductionism. One of my favorite quotes from Damasio is, "We are not thinking machines. We are feeling machines that think." Sounds pretty reduction by your standards doesn't it? It seems as though you are taking the very research I am talking about, calling it reductionist then citing it back to me as not reductionist. WTF, Dave? Austin and Davision talk about how the practice of meditation produces changes in the way that people think and the way that the brain functions. Neither of them seems to think that brain states are irrelevant to the practice of meditation. Davidson especially talks about these changes also happen when we learn any skill. This has come up in a different context when Matt and I were talking about Jaynes. Different ages require different kinds of thought processes. The reading brain functions differently than a purely oral brain. Damasio illustrates that thought and memory are heavily influenced by emotion and that emotion and the feeling of emotion are governed in specific regions of the brain. Bolte-Taylor points out that language and reason are control in two areas of the brain and that if those regions are cut off we are left with feeling and non-conscious processes. VS Ramachandrian talks about the boy who thinks his "parents" are imposters because he "feels" no emotional attachment to them. He also talks about the effect of temporal lobe seizures and how they produce feelings of extreme religious connection. There is a whole field opening up to study this called neurotheology. If you want to dismiss my comments as "reductionist" fine. But please stop citing them back to me two years later as examples of why I am a reductionist for using them and you aren't. I don't think I have ever brought up data from the neurosciences in a reductionist context or claimed that they fully account for explain anything in the way you keep repeating that I do. 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/md/archives.html
