John said to Dan:
All experience is dependent upon prior experience and a cognition that frames
the experience meaningfully. Without this meaning, there is no experience. ...
Without conceptualization, there can be no experience. The very essence of
experience is a realization of a something which requires a concept of some
kind.
dmb says:
The infant is used as an example of non-conceputal experience or pure
experience used by both Pirsig and James. You know, because babies don't have a
concept of their mother's breast even though they experience it directly.
They're not motivated by the idea of hunger and they don't plan meals but they
experience hunger all the same. There are perceptions and feelings and
reactions going on of course. Infants are far from inert. But concepts come
with the acquisition of language. Some researches push this absence of thinking
pretty far, chronologically speaking. I heard one psychologist recently who
claimed that we don't really doing any "thinking", properly speaking, until we
can talk. It seems to me that this very much supports the thesis of
psychological nominalism, which says thinking is just inward talking.
If memory serves, John replied to that example by claiming that infants DO have
ideas. As far as I know, there isn't a psychologist in the world who believes
that.
I'm tempted to say that it depends on how you define "concepts" and
"experience". But I think those words, and words like them, are referring to
actual phenomena. Terms like "pure experience" are abstractions or
generalizations that can refer to a wide range of actual situations with actual
babies or actual Zen monks. He's talking about something athletes and artists
talk about all the time. Brain scientists have been documenting this stuff too.
Go check out some reviews of Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide". It opens with a
fairly ordinary example of somebody who uses this pre-conceptual awareness to
make millions of dollars a year as an NFL quarterback. You know, just in case
you wanna know the cash value.
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