dmb said to Krimel:
Also, you are trying to refute the notion of undivided experience by pointing
out that the sense organs use separate pathways... The undivided experience is
undivided only in the sense that it is not yet conceptualized, in the sense
that concepts have not divided it. This has nothing to do with weather or not
the sense organs work independently or in concert. That's just not part of the
dispute and the claim does not depend on those facts.
Krimel replied:
Your notion of undivided experience as an illusion. It is nothing more that
your own particular conceptualization of experience. I am saying that
experience is the a synthesis of an enormous number of infinitely complex
processes that as far as we can tell now begin in subatomic physics and end in
"Inception" and "Avatar". From brute facts to speculative fantasy. Everything
that we can become "conscious" of is the chatter of our neurons cycling through
feedback loops.
dmb says:
Okay, since you put it that way, let me take a slightly different approach this
time. What you're doing here is perpetuating an old myth from the enlightenment
period, the notion that there is no mediation between brute facts and what we
become conscious of. "As the atomic physicist, Neils Bohr, said, 'We are
suspended in language'. Out intellectual descriptions of nature are always
culturally derived." Pirsig is saying this to address the mind-matter problem,
see? And he's saying that part of the MOQ's solution means paying attention to
the role that language plays. He's getting at the same idea when he corrects
Descartes. It is culture and language that allows us to think in the first
place, the point being that mind is not just a matter of perceptual processes
and cycling neurons. You literally cannot think without language. It's the
vital missing link between brains and minds, see? That's what you're
overlooking and this is causing a lot of the confusion.
"Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never
from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with
no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this
myth of independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close
examination shows it isn't so." (lila 155)
SEe, this is the thing that really killed old-school empiricism, like the
positivist project for example. In philosophy they call this the linguistic
turn. Rorty is real big on this and wrote a book by that title. That why
contextualism is so widely accepted now, because language and culture has
everything to do with our conceptualizations. Let me explain in terms you can
relate to.
They did an experiment with rats wherein they hid a cookie in the corner of a
room. In this room there were two corners that were basically identical. The
rat was shown the cookie in the corner, taken back to the middle of the room
and spun around to disorient it and then it was let loose to go find the
biscuit. As you might expect, they picked the right corner about half the time.
They couldn't tell one corner from the other so they had a 50-50 chance of
getting it right.
Then they painted one of the wall blue. (Yes, rats can see color.) By doing
this, the two corners were no longer identical. The cookie was now either in
the corner that had a blue wall to the right or it was in the corner that had a
blue wall to the left of the cookie. All they had to do was connect three basic
perceptions; corner, cookie and blue. As you may or may not expect, the rats
still scored a biscuit just 50% of the time.
Even more interestingly, they did similar experiment with young children and
found that some of them were as old as 6 before they could score better than
50%.
Testing the children was not an afterthought. This experiment was an
investigation into the role that language plays. As it turns out, the thing
that allowed the older kids to put three or four separate perceptions together
into a coherent thought is language itself. It is as if the perception of blue
was in one part of the brain, the perception of a treat was in another part and
the perception of a corner was processed in yet another of the brain. Without
language, rats and very young children can't think "the cookie is in the corner
to the left of the blue wall" unless and until they learn to understand that
sentence. Language is what creates concepts, it adds something more to the
otherwise incoherent jumble of perceptions such that conceptualization becomes
possible. See, so the mind is not just what the brain does and its not just the
result of complex perceptual processes. It's cultural. The brain and the sense
organs simply are not capable of thought without also addin
g language.
This is a highly simplified version of the idea, of course, because the
language we inherit comes with countless connections that seem perfectly
natural and real but were actually carved out and created by some distant
ancestor. The cultural eye glasses we're handed and through which we view the
world is made of countless ghosts who made connections big and small. So we
inherent a giant complex web of concepts as we learn the language. These are
evolved habits of mind. The concept of a thing does actually have to be
learned. You probably know this as leaning "object permanence". The same is
true of the self. Pirsig and James are saying these are socially constructed
and conceptual rather than being the ontological structure of reality. The idea
of a "thing" is so handy that it is not likely to go away anytime soon and even
science can function with the concept most of the time. But it's still just a
concept and when you take it for reality, it creates a lot of fake problems.
Equating brains with minds doesn't really solve the problem. I'm pretty sure
that's what Chalmers means by the hard problem of consciousness.
"The term hard problem of consciousness refers to the difficult problem of
explaining why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. In considerations by
David Chalmers,[1] this is contrasted with the "easy problems" of explaining
the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus
attention, etc. Easy problems are easy because all that is required for their
solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is,
their proposed solutions, regardless of how complex or poorly understood they
may be, can be entirely consistent with the modern materialistic conception of
natural phenomena. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct
from this set, and he assumes that the problem of experience will "persist even
when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".[2] The
existence of a "Hard Problem" is controversial and has been disputed by some
philosophers."
"...refers to the difficult problem of explaining why we have qualitative
phenomenal experiences..."
Quality or pure experience or the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum seems
quite comparable to the qualitative phenomenal experience that Chalmers says
cannot be explained by materialistic conceptions of functions and mechanisms.
He is also saying that minds are not just what brains do. He is going to be
opposed to eliminative materialists like Rorty, the latter probably being a
better match for your intellectual tastes.
You can spew more vitriol at this if that's what it takes to keep your blood
pressure up. But I think your response should include little phrases like,
"that's helpful" and "thank you" and maybe even a "oh, now I see what you mean"
or two. Whatever, man. It's your health.
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