Marsha said:
Btw, here is a Paul Williams quote that I found in the MoQ Textbook: "Williams
(1988, p.83) states that the First Aspect refers to the falsifying activity of
language which implies independent and permanent existence to things."
dmb says:
Again, you're confusing the disease with the cure. This falsifying activity is
also known as reification and you keep insisting that this is inescapable. In
effect, this would be that a cure is impossible. It would mean that the MOQ is
impossible. It would mean that rejecting SOM realism is impossible. And I keep
telling you that you're wrong about that. If it were true, it would be
impossible for Williams to explain what is being said here about falsification.
But here is, doing exactly that: (Paul Williams, "Mahayana Buddhism",
Routledge, 1989, p.83/84).
"In order to understand what is being said here, one should try and imagine all
things, objects of experience and oneself, the one who is experiencing, as just
a flow of perceptions. We do not know that there is something "out there". We
have only experiences of colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on. We also
don't know that we ourselves are anything than a further series of experiences.
Taken together, there is only an ever-changing flow of perceptions
(vijnaptimatra)... Due to our beginningless ignorance we construct these
perceptions into enduring subjects and objects confronting each other. This is
irrational, things are not really like that, and it leads to suffering and
frustration. The constructed objects are the conceptualised aspect. The flow of
perceptions which forms the basis for our mistaken constructions is the
dependent aspect."
Many different philosophers are able to see this "falsifying activity" for what
it is. Here is Charlene Seigfried, for example, paraphrasing William James:
"abstractionism had become vicious already with Socrates and Plato, who deified
conceptualization and denigrated the ever-changing flow of experience, thus
forgetting and falsifying the origin of concepts as humanly constructed
extracts from the temporal flux." (William James's Radical Reconstruction of
Philosophy, 379.)
Confused much?
Marsha said:
I do like the use of the word 'process'. James really likes the word 'process'.
I take it, dmb, that you are using a definition of perception that is much
broader than 'sensory input', including such experiences as nighttime dreams
and daydreams? Paul William, though, seems to being using perceptions in the
sensory sense (colours, shapes, tactile data, and so on.")
dmb says:
If Paul Williams is not going beyond sensory sense, then he is not talking
about Mahayana Buddhism but traditional sensory empiricism or Positivism. Since
the title of his book is "Mahayana Buddhism," your interpretation is highly
implausible. Radical empiricists (the cure) like Pirsig and James certainly do
go beyond traditional sensory empiricism, which is predicated on subject-object
metaphysics (the disease).
Confused much?
Pirsig on the MOQ's empiricism:"The MOQ subscribes to what is called
empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the
senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the
validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or
purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality,
religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The MOQ varies from this by saying
that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are
verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical
reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the
metaphysical assumption that all the universe is compose of subjects and
objects and anything that can't be classifieds as a subject or an object isn't
real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an
assumption."
In other words, "To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its
construction any element that is not directly experienced NOR EXCLUDE from them
ANY ELEMENT THAT IS EXPERIENCED."
Still confused?
Until you can admit that you might be wrong, that you might need correcting,
you will never learn. In other words, you will never learn.
-------------------------------
"... what that one stuff of which things and thoughts are both made might be.
What is required, James argues, is an approach he calls radical empiricism.
Empiricism, he insists, is the opposite of rationalism. Rationalism tends to
emphasize universals and to make wholes prior to parts. "Empiricism on the
contrary lays the explanatory stress upon the part, the element as an
abstraction. To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into its
construction any element that is not directly experienced nor exclude from them
any element that is experienced.""
"that consciousness is a process and only a process, that what we call objects
are really bundles of relations, and that all we have to work with, think
about, or live with is somehow experience"
"James' factual statement is that our experience isn't just a stream of data,
it's a complex process that's full of meaning."
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