On Fri, Jul 22, 2011 at 4:30 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > dmb says to Dan: > I'm asking about the notion you've been hammering upon: the notion that it is > our behavior that is without choice, and not us. What is the difference > between our behavior being without choice and us being without choice. How is > that NOT the same thing? The question was, "if our behavior is controlled, > how does that fail to count as controlling us?" I didn't recognize anything > you said as an answer to that question. How do you figure that what we do and > say and think is not us? That's what doesn't make sense, as far as I can tell. > > > Dan said to dmb: > ...Your will is an illusion, an idea. Point to it. Where is it? > > dmb addresses that question again, just in case you missed it: > > > Well, the idea of the will is derived from experience.
Dan: That is what I said: will is an idea. dmb: If this concept is NOT reified or otherwise turned into a metaphysical entity, then the idea simply refers to actual, concrete experiences. Dan: I don't get this. To reify means to make the abstract concrete. So to reify a concept is to turn it into actual, concrete experience. You seem to be saying the opposite here. dmb: As Siegfried puts it, "To call this phenomenal experience of activity a MERE ILLUSION is to prefer a hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation." Dan: I didn't call it a "mere" illusion. An idea or a concept isn't concrete experience. It will never hit you upside the head because you didn't open the door far enough before you tried to walk through it or trip you up when you're walking down the stairs. In the MOQ, an idea is static intellectual quality... non-physical. >dmb: > As Charlene Siegfried explains it, "The first step in the investigation must > be to seek 'the original type and model of what it means' in the stream of > experience." She is telling us that concrete experience - as opposed to > abstract thought - is the only place to look for the meaning of our activity. Dan: Then she is contradicting the MOQ. In the MOQ, ideas come before matter. Concrete experience of matter arises from abstract thought, not the other way around. dmb: To find out what words like freedom and causality mean, the first thing to do is return to the stream of experience to see what they are in the originally felt and lived experience. That is where our concepts and abstractions come from and that's where they are tried and tested. That's what our ideas are about; life as it's lived. Dan: Experience is synonymous with Dynamic Quality. As such, experience doesn't arise in the material brain. The idea that matter comes before ideas is a high quality idea. We for the most part live our lives by that idea. And this is to what Siegfried seems to be alluding to. dmb: > "William James offers this concrete description of human activity: 'But in > this actual world or ours, as it is given, a part at least of activity comes > with definite direction; it comes with desire and sense of goal; it comes > complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to, and with the > efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes; and it is in > complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents, and of > passivity as opposed to activity arise. Here also the notion of causal > activity comes to birth." (ERE, 81-2) James points out that our ideas about > about causality and freedom are abstractions or generalizations about the > 'ultimate Qualiia' of lived experience. These ideas refer to experiences of > process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release' and James concludes that > we cannot conceive of it as lived through except 'in the dramatic shape of > something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles, and overcoming or > being overcom > e'." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of > Philosophy", page 319.) Dan: Yes... I would say James' "ultimate Qualia" might be seen as synonymous with RMP's Dynamic Quality although process, obstruction, striving, strain, or release must refer to static quality patterns. >dmb: > This are not questions about the number of angles that can fit on a pinhead. > This is about human life. Big time. Dan: I agree. >dmb: > As Charlene says, "...We want to know whether we are responsible for our > activities or are determined by events outside of our knowledge and control. > The phenomenal level cannot be superseded if we are even to ask the right > questions or frame the experiments correctly. The issue is precisely whether > events which we experience as ours are in fact so, or whether they should be > reductively attributed to brain cells. In returning to the metaphysical > question James defends the position that the nature, meaning and location of > causality can be determined only at the phenomenal level of concrete > experience Dan: The phenomenal level of concrete experience must refer to inorganic/biological patterns of quality. Abstract ideas are not concrete! And again, she seems to be saying experience is reduced to the activity of brain cells. dmb: (Essays in Radical Empiricism, 91). It it thus not a metaphysical question at all, but a concrete one, or one answerable within the parameters of radical empiricism. Not only does he show that the metaphysical question must be dropped as unanswerable on its own terms, but taking activity at its face-value, or as we experience it, we also discover 'the very power that makes facts come and be'. In arguing that facts are interactively constituted by us, he has finally explicitly drawn the consequences of his break with the empiricist assumption that our percepts passively mirror reality as it is in itself." (Charlene Seigfried in "William James's Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy", page 322.) > > "To the objection that our felt activity is only an impression and the facts > are to be found elsewhere he [James] responds with the principle of the > radically empiricist philosophy according to which anything, to be considered > real, must be located within experience. If creative activities are to be > found anywhere, 'they must be immediately lived' (ERE, 92). > > "To call this phenomenal experience of activity a MERE ILLUSION is to prefer > a hidden ontological principle, that can never experienced and thus never > verified, to an experientially verifiable level of investigation." Dan: I didn't say experience is an illusion, though of course what else could it be? I said will is an illusion. Will presupposes that the mind has power over matter. The idea of will is rooted in the notion of a subjective being asserting an objective choice. What is being discussed in the above passages does not address my original question. Where is the will? Thank you, Dan 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
