dmb said to Krimel:
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.
Krimel replied:
He does it [James condemns train and chain metaphors] 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."
... 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."
Krimel continued:
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 says:
That's about what I figured. James was objecting to train and chain analogies
WHEN and IF they are used to construe flowing consciousness as chopped up in
bits or jointed. This can not rightly be used to condemn Pirsig's use of the
train metaphor simply because he and James are still saying exactly the same
thing. The boxcars and their contents are discrete concepts in Pirsig's
description too. The cutting edge of experience, the perceptual order as James
is calling it here, is out in front of the engine and all the other cars
pulling the whole thing along. These James quotes only support my position and
it is rather bizarre of you to suggest otherwise.
Krimel said:
What, other than flowery language, exempts her [Jill Bolte Taylor] from your
charge of reductionism? Or for that matter lets you off the hook for my charge
that you misunderstand and misrepresent her?
dmb says:
You still haven't explained what it is you think I do not understand or what I
have misrepresented. What are you objecting to, exactly? What do you think my
point is in making reference to her case and what's wrong with that point? Like
I said already, "Your complaints are too vague for me to know what you're
talking about, what it is you think I don't understand."
Krimel said:
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: ... Damasio is the guy who came up with this bit of
research you are citing. ..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?
dmb says:
Research data is never reductionistic all by itself. It it the interpretation
of the data that can be reductionist or not. You seem to be confused about
this, as if anti-reductionism were the same thing as being opposed research
data. Obviously, the issue is HOW to read the data. Nobody thinks the data is
irrelevant. Nobody is against brain studies or science. That would be absurd,
obviously. And yet you seem to think anti-reductionism is some kind of new-age
romanticism that prefers flowery language over scientific data. Those attitudes
simply have nothing to do with it. Reductionism is simply that; a reduction. It
boils down the higher to the lower. It explains the complex in terms of the
simple. It treats the more evolved as if it were the lesser evolved. It's a
category error, a conceptual error, an intellectual blunder based on a dismal
worldview. If I raise the problem of reductionism repeatedly, it is because you
still have yet to address the problem and continue to construe this kind of
data in reductionist terms.
See, I think the findings of brain researchers are very exciting because of the
way they can be used to help explain what James and Pirsig are saying. But
you've been using it to explain it AWAY. That's all the difference in the
world. We are reaching the opposite conclusions about the same set of facts.
The facts are not in dispute. It's all in the reading.
Krimel said:
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.
dmb says:
Yea, okay. But WHO ever said brain states were irrelevant? I didn't say that
and I certainly don't think that. So what are you talking about? This is the
kind of comment that makes me think you don't understand what reductionism is.
I mean, anti-reductionism is definitely NOT the view that brain states are
irrelevant to states of mind. It simply opposes the reduction of the latter to
the former. It seems you want to use this science to mock the aspects of
James's and Pirsig's work whereas I see this same data as profoundly supportive
of what they're saying. Our readings are so different that you can even
conclude that I am ignoring it. Nope. I'm just not reading it like you are.
Obviously, I think you're reading it badly.
Check out Wiki exerpt. There's yet another book about the brain that I find
very supportive of Pirsig's work, although I only know about it from a radio
interview with the author....
"The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western
World is a detailed and extensively documented scientific study of the
specialist hemispheric functioning of the brain. The differing world views of
the right and left brain (the "Master" and "emissary" in the title,
respectively) have, according to the author, shaped Western culture since the
time of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and the growing conflict between
these views has implications for the way the modern world is changing.The
Master and His Emissary is written by Iain McGilchrist, a former Oxford
literary scholar, now a doctor, psychiatrist and writer.
"The divided brain
In the first part, "The Divided Brain", McGilchrist describes the functioning
of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and their respective and at
times conflicting "world views". One of the core themes of the book is the
importance of differentiation and integration, and of the integration of the
two.
Superior-lateral view of the brain, showing left and right hemispheres.Speaking
about the book on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, McGilchrist dismisses what
he sees as some popular misconceptions about lateralization of brain function,
such as one hemisphere handling reason and the other language (etc), stating
that such processing involves both sides of the brain. McGilchrist points out
that the idea that "reason [is] in the left hemisphere and something like
creativity and emotion [are] in the right hemisphere" is an unhelpful
misconception. He states that "every single brain function is carried out by
both hemispheres. Reason and emotion and imagination depend on the coming
together of what both hemispheres contribute." Nevertheless he does see an
obvious dichotomy, and asks himself: "if the brain is all about making
connections, why is it that it's evolved with this whopping divide down the
middle?"
The author holds instead that each of the hemispheres of the brain has a
different "take" on the world or produces a different "version" of the world,
though under normal circumstances these work together. This, he says, is
basically to do with attention. He illustrates this with the case of chicks
which use the eye connected to the left hemisphere to attend to the fine detail
of picking seeds from amongst grit, whilst the other eye attends to the broader
threat from predators. According to the author, "The left hemisphere has its
own agenda, to manipulate and use the world"; its world view is essentially
that of a mechanism. The right has a broader outlook, "has no preconceptions,
and simply looks out to the world for whatever might be. In other words it does
not have any allegiance to any particular set of values."
Writing about the book in The Guardian, the philosopher Mary Midgley explains
that "The bifurcation seems to have become necessary in the first place because
these two main functions – comprehensiveness and precision – are both
necessary, but are too distinct to be combined."
McGilchrist explains this more fully in a later interview for ABC Radio
National's All in the Mind programme, stating: "The right hemisphere sees a
great deal but in order to refine it and to make sense of it in certain ways in
order to be able to use what it understands of the world and to be able to
manipulate the world, it needs to delegate the job of simplifying it and
turning it into a usable form to another part of the brain" [the left
hemisphere]. Though he sees this as an essential "double act", McGilchrist
points to the problem that the left hemisphere has a "narrow, decontextualised
and theoretically based model of the world which is self consistent and is
therefore quite powerful" and to the problem of the left hemisphere's lack of
awareness of its own shortcomings; whilst in contrast, the right hemisphere is
aware that it is in a symbiotic relationship. The neuroscientists Dennett and
Kinsborne, for example, conducted experiments which involved temporarily
deactivating one of the brain's hemispheres. In their research they found that
"when completely false propositions are put to the left hemisphere it accepts
them as valid because the internal structure of the argument is valid."
However, the right hemisphere knows from experience that the propositions are
false. McGilchrist further points out that where people have suffered a stroke
involving the right hemisphere of the brain, they tend to under-estimate or
even deny that they have a disability. Again, research has shown that the right
hemisphere tends to hold a more realistic personal assessment than the left.
Another issue that McGilchrist points out is that the two hemispheres "inhibit
one-another across the corpus callosum" between the hemispheres when one of
them is active. This he sees as a natural reciprocal action. However, the issue
which arises is that the left hemisphere is better able to inhibit the right
than the right is able to inhibit the left.
How the brain has shaped our world
In the second part, "How the Brain Has Shaped Our World", the author describes
the evolution of Western culture, as influenced by hemispheric brain
functioning, from the ancient world, through the Renaissance and Reformation;
the Enlightenment; Romanticism and Industrial Revolution; to the modern and
postmodern worlds which, to our detriment, are becoming increasingly dominated
by the left brain.
According to McGilchrist, interviewed for ABC Radio National's All in the Mind
programme, rather than seeking to explain the social and cultural changes and
structure of civilisation in terms of the brain — which would be reductionist —
he is pointing to a wider, more inclusive perspective and greater reality in
which there are two competing ways of thinking and being, and that in modern
Western society we appear increasingly to be able to only entertain one
viewpoint: that of the left hemisphere.
The author argues that the brain and the mind does not simply experience the
world but that the world we experience is a product or meeting of that which is
outside us with our mind. The outcome, the nature of this world, is thus
dependent upon "which mode of attention we bring to bear on the world".
McGilchrist sees an occasional flowering of "the best of the right hemisphere
and the best of the left hemisphere working together" in our history: as
witnessed in Athens in the 6th century by activity in the humanities and in
science and in ancient Rome during the Augustan era. However, he also sees that
as time passes, so the left hemisphere once again comes to dominate affairs and
things slide back into "a more theoretical and conceptualised abstracted
bureaucratic sort of view of the world." According to McGilchrist, the
cooperative use of both left and right hemispheres diminished and became
imbalanced in favour of the left in the time of the classical Greek
philosophers Parmenides and Plato and in the late classical Roman era. This
cooperation and openness was regained during the Renaissance 1,000 years later
which brought "sudden efflorescence of creative life in the sciences and the
arts". However, with the Reformation, the early Enlightenment, and what has
followed as rationalism has arisen, our world has once again become
increasingly rigid, simplified and rule-bound.
Looking at more recent Western history, McGilchrist sees in the Industrial
Revolution that for the first time artefacts were being made "very much to the
way the left hemisphere sees the world — simple solids that are regular,
repeated, not individual in the way that things that are made by hand are" and
that a transformation of the environment in a simar vein followed on from that;
that what was perceived inwardly was projected outwardly on a mass scale.[8]
The author argues that the scientific materialism which developed in the 19th
century is still with us, at least in the biological sciences, though he sees
physics as having moved on. McGilchrist does not see modernism and
postmodernism as being in opposition to this, but also "symptomatic of a shift
towards the left hemisphere's conception of the world", taking the idea that
there is no absolute truth and turning that into "there is no truth at all",
and he finds some of the movements' works of art "symptomatic of people whose
right hemisphere is not working very well." McGilchrist cites the American
psychologist Louis Sass, author of Madness and Modernism, pointing out that
Sass "draws extensive parallels between the phenomena of modernism and
postmodernism and of schizophrenia", with things taken out of context and
fragmented.
Asked in an interview whether he blamed the loss of "our relationship to
beauty, to body, to spirit and art" on the left hemisphere, McGilchrist pointed
to an article by Stanley Fish, entitled Does Reason Know what Reason Doesn't
Know? and stated that the essence of the problem is "that the left hemisphere
is not aware of what it is not aware of" and that the difficulty we are faced
with is giving the right hemisphere a fair hearing. Whilst agreeing that
beauty, spirit and art are not the sole preserve of the right hemisphere, the
author does see a reductionism not only in science but in popular culture and a
loss of "the power of art to alert us to things beyond ourselves", to the
transcendent.
Asked whether he was giving the left hemisphere "too much flak", given that
reason and rationality formed the basis of modern, scientific society,
McGilchrist stated that he believes that modern science began earlier than the
Enlightenment and that there was "an enormously rich period in the 15th, 16th
and early 17th centuries", as seen for example in "the spirit in science from
Bacon through to Goethe". McGilchrist went on to point out that "the left
hemisphere is not devoid of feelings at all, it has its own range of emotions
and the capacity to appreciate emotions." To the author, sequential reasoning
and rationality are important. To argue that the the right hemisphere is right
and the left is wrong is an "either/or black and white misconception" which is
in itself indicative of the left hemisphere's view of the world."
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