dmb says: Why should I care if Taylor's work fails to support the notion that James abandoned psychology? I don't think he abandoned psychology and I never said that he did. I'm saying that his work in psychology raised questions about the basic metaphysical assumptions, namely SOM, and that his empiricism addresses those philosophical concerns. Also, I certainly don't think we out to "omit James' psychology in reading his philosophy". I'm just trying to get you to see the difference between psychology and philosophy, between the empirical science known as psychology and radical empiricism as a philosophical position.
[Krimel] I think the mistake is in seeing James as either a psychologist or a philosopher. He was both. He saw himself as both and I fear you are trying to make distinctions where there are none. Especially in the period James was writing the difference between the two was clear to no one. Even today the distinction is muddy. Psychology for a great many people then and now is a way to apply empirical analysis to philosophical questions. Krimel said: ... Taylor and Wozniak seem to agree that with you that James claimed that there is "no world of objects". So I was wrong about that and apologize. dmb says: Well, that's the main thing right there. That little phrase "no world of objects" gets at the metaphysical assumptions that radical empiricism overturns. Pirsig and James are saying that "objects"(and subjects) are secondary concepts rather than the starting points of reality. They both say that these secondary concepts are derived from a more primary experience. James calls it pure experience and Pirsig calls it Quality. This is also what James was developing as a psychologist, which the Wiki article on "Sciousness" shows. [Krimel] Look here is the problem I have with what I take to be your point of view. I hear you saying that there is nothing outside of my personal experience. There is no world except the one I am making up as I go along. I get that. I agree that it is true from a first person ontological perspective. When I am snuffed out, the hall of mirrors I have build will be snuffed as well. The world I see in those mirrors is mine. It is me. We are one. When I go, it does. What I hear you saying is that when you go everything does. There is no third person ontology. But then later in this post you say, "We are not opposed to physical reality, we are within it, part of it, a feature of it." This seems very different from what I have always take as your denial of "physical" reality. I should point out that nothing I have ever said in the forum about the "physical reality" should be read as claiming that we are somehow divorced from it. Your repeated derision of "scientific materialism" for example. BTW, the whole idea of materialism and the nature of "matter" was so transformed during the last century I don't even know what matter is any more or how it ought to be conceived. I currently lean toward something like information or data, which sounds a lot like idealism only not. Krimel said: ... as you rightly point out he claims that subject and object are conceptual distinctions drawn from an aconceptual "pure experience" or "siousness". The problem here is that anything we say or any conclusions we draw from experience are rooted in the same aconceptual realm. It is perfectly possible for organisms to thrive on this planet without concepts of any kind. Humans however are not among them. dmb says: Whoever said humans can thrive without concepts? Why is it a problem that we all draw from the same pre-conceptual experience? [Krimel] The problem is that I don't see how it is even remotely possible for us to draw from the same pre-conceptual experience. Like James I don't think it is possible for one person to have the same pre-conceptual experience twice much less for everyone to share in the same experience of any kind. dmb says: Saying that subjects and objects are concepts does not support the notion of non-dualism. It's just what the notion means. Not being divided into those two ontological categories is the sense in which it is non-dual. And yes, of course we are now dealing in words and concepts. But in this case the concept to grasp is "non-duality". The central terms in radical empiricism and in the MOQ refer to this non-dual awareness, the pre-intellectual experience, because that's the non-dual awareness we're talking about. [Krimel] You seem to be missing my point. SOM is a concept. Non-duality is a concept. What makes one "better" than the other? What makes one the high road to truth and the other a stumbling block on the path to the high country of the mind? You claim this in all rooted in some special form of experience which is higher or mystical and I claim it is completely the opposite of that. Take James own description of "siousness." He grounds it in physical bodily sensations mostly in the head and throat. I laid out a series of his quotes on this earlier. Those quotes are reference by him in the very works you cite to boost your position. They are not abandoned by the various incarnations of James. They are part of both his psychological and philosophical writings. Or take the whole idea of meditation practices that focus on breathing. Breathing is for the most part an autonomic process. It require no conscious effort. Our nervous systems are bifurcated into parts that are under conscious control and parts that are under unconscious control. Breathing obviously fall in between somehow. I can control my breathing and be aware of it or not. This particle meditative practice seems to me to be aimed at bringing unconscious processes into conscious awareness and conscious control. It seems to me that this is what much of meditative practice is all about. It seeks to bring our unconscious processes into conscious awareness and control. Yogis controlling their heart rates, Wilber's phony stopping of his brainwaves, relaxation and stress control... etc. etc. I get it. This all has positive health benefits, physically and mentally. My point is that a "feeling" of unity or purity of experience is no better guide than a feeling of self versus other. Both are conceptualizations of experience. Furthermore I see James as less concerned with one versus two versus many, than he is concerned with how to decide, rationally versus empirically. After all that is the version of SOM he is arguing about. That is the problem his radical empiricism sets out to solve. James is arguing in favor of a bottom-up inductive style as opposed to a top down deductive style. When he is arguing that concepts emerge from and are secondary to percepts he is pointing to the intersection of biology and intellect. He says: "Instead of percept I shall often speak of sensation, feeling, intuition, and sometimes of sensible experience or of the immediate flow of conscious life." Although intuition seems a bit out of place here, he is pointing to perception resulting from biological functions: sensation and feeling. Intellectuals had been seeking and to some extent still seek to remove feelings as unreliable guides to reason. James at least as I see it was trying to include them as critical parts of our experience. Part of the problem is that James was writing in the pre-Freudian era were Freud's vocabulary of the unconscious was not widely accepted. Like Freud he was struggling to account for the fact that consciousness, however it is conceived, does not play the front seat driver role that many think it does. Freud thought conscious rationality was the tip on an iceberg and below the surface lay a seething mass of irrational animal instincts. In the modern post-Freudian era we see that these issues are alive and well but from my own point of view Freud overestimates the power of consciousness and misconstrues the nature of the unconscious almost completely. Consciousness, conceptualization, language, are evolutionary strategies employed by our species. Sensations and emotions are also evolutionary strategies employed by a variety of species. Conceptualization, as a strategy, rests on the complexity of our nervous systems. That complexity frees us from the immediate present of sensation and feeling and allows us to compare the present to the past and use both as guides to the future. I see no advantage whatever in your insistance that the road to Nirvana lies backwards on this evolutionary trajectory. I have gone on and on about Libet's work on this in the past but it all boils down to consciousness gives us "free won't" rather than "free will". (As a side note the only thing that stops me from throwing Bricklin out as a new age crank is that Libet includes an article by Bricklin in a volume he edited.) Conscious awareness allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our emotionally driven unconscious inclinations. But I think it is also wrong to see those unconscious inclinations as irrational or as essentially evil or amoral as Freud does. In fact we have emotions that are specifically social and moral, shame and pride. Our emotional responses are biologically encoded to promote our survival. The problem is biologically encoded responses are often not adequate to serve this end. In part this is because when we react based on them we do so from the single point of view of the immediate present. Our superpower is our ability to access the past and project into the future. Our brains allow us to make four dimensional temporal models in three dimensional space. It gives us the ability to randomly access past and future and relate them to the present. It is worth noting here that every sensory experience we have (with the exception of smell) follows a set of neural pathways that highlight the points I have been making here. Sensory data enters the midbrain regions and it routed in two "directions" the most primitive it toward emotion or feeling and the more advance is in the direction of memory both in toward the formation of a new memory an in terms of comparing current to past experience. Now I can here you revving up to whine about reductionism here. But spare me. We are well past that. What we are talking about here is ways to conceptualize experience. Our nervous systems are complex enough to allow us to move past the first person ontology of phenomenology and immediate experience towards a third person description of shared understanding. I am not talking about "the way things are" but about a powerful way of conceiving the details and process of experience. I am talking about the common aspects of our individual experiences rather than some imagined unity emanating from "spirit". But then my question to you remains what are you talking about? 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
