Krimel said to dmb: The process of science minimizes the impact of the individual scientist's personal experience, through replication and peer review. What Wilber proposes makes the individual experience everything. ...
dmb says: I understand the point but it is based on the same narrow conception of what counts as valid kinds of experience. Scientific materialism and sensory empiricism go hand in hand and the goal is objective knowledge or knowledge of objective realities. And so the scientist's "personal experience" isn't supposed to play a role or, as you say, it is minimized. Because its just subjective, right? See, this sort of limited empiricism is exactly the problem to be overcome. [Krimel] The "limits of empiricism" are exactly what science has succeeded so wildly in overcoming. You seem to have some distorted notion of what objectivity is. It is not the study of TiTs as TiTs it is the study of what we can say about TiTs. It is what we can communicate about our internal states that matters. Objective knowledge is knowledge that can be communicated and shared through common points of reference. [dmb] Replication and peer review aren't abandoned just because we adopt a more expansive notion of what counts as valid empirical evidence. [Krimel] What are these expansive notions? What new kinds of evidence do you suggest? What specifics techniques would help us get at them? [dmb] And actually the its not that hard to think of the traditional scientific methods as a detailed prescription for generating certain kinds of personal experience. Its not that hard to think of a physics experiment as a carefully defined sensory experience. And then the papers and articles allow other physicists to repeat that experience for themselves. And of course they are usually observing "physical" things. But there is no scientific reason for this narrow empiricism. [Krimel] Please define "narrow" for me. These techniques have been used to study everything from how stars for to why my nuts itch. You continue to offer high minded vaguery to criticize short coming that seem to exist only in your head. Is that your prescription? Let's improve science by making it more ambiguous? [dmb] It's based on metaphysical assumptions. Radical Empiricism says we ought not exclude any kind experience for metaphysical reasons. (And there is also a epistemological pluralism that goes along with this wherein different categories of experience are judged in their own terms rather than weighing everything as if it were physical.) [Krimel] Dave, why do you embarrass yourself this way? Do yourself a favor and do not mention James or Radical empiricism to me again. Every time you do, you demonstrate that you know nothing about it. Save it for someone who might be impressed. James in no way endorsed psychology or philosophy as a purely interior study of the self. He was no fan of the kind of fuzzy thinking you endorse. Near the end of section IV in "The World of Pure Experience" he says this: "Round their several objective nuclei, partly shared and common and partly discrete, of the real physical world, innumerable thinkers, pursuing their several lines of physically true cogitation, trace paths that intersect one another only at discontinuous perceptual points, and the rest of the time are quite incongruent; and around all the nuclei of shared 'reality,... ...floats the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world -- they're mere day-dreams and joys and sufferings and wishes of the individual minds. These exist _with_ one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any kind will ever be made." [dmb] So anyway, it seems to me that you are (once again) offering the problem as an objection to the solution. [Krimel] No, I am saying that to the extent that there is a problem you have done nothing to define or clarify it. The "problem" in fact seems to exist, to paraphrase James ever so slightly, as "floating in the vast cloud of experiences that are wholly subjective, that are non-substitutional, that find not even an eventual ending for themselves in the perceptual world -- they're mere day-dreams and joys and sufferings and wishes of the your mind. These exist _with_ one another, indeed, and with the objective nuclei, but out of them it is probable that to all eternity no interrelated system of any kind will ever be made." 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.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
