Krimel said: >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."
dmb says: You can't be serious. You've read Pirsig's attacks on scientific materialism and you've seen Wilber's complaints about flatland so I'm guessing you have your tongue firmly in your cheek. I can see how a person might not understand the problem or agree that there is a problem. But if you think I'm making this up then you're about half as smart as I thought you were. [Krimel] Do I sound like I am kidding? I have given specific and detailed reasons why Wilber's concept of flatland is nothing more than new age gibberish. I have pointed out that he has grossly distorted the meaning of Abbott's term. I have pointed out that nothing in science suggests the need or desire to reduce anything in the way Wilber claims. Biology does not try to explain itself in terms of quarks and leptons anymore that history and psychology seek explanations from genetics. Further more I think Wilber and you have obviously confused reductionism with determinism. And that Wilber actually advocates extreme reductionism. He claims that everything can be reduced to Spirit and or holons; whatever that is supposed to mean. Reductionism is the flip side of emergence. Determinism in the Laplace sense was the casualty or the last century and rightly so; it was the villain all along. I don't see where anything I have ever said could be construed as what Pirsig claims is scientific materialism. I have never characterized the inner awareness as imaginary or outside the ability of science to study. I have in fact cited specific studies of subjective phenomena and pointed out whole branches of science devoted to investigating such things. These include psychology, sociology, economics, medicine, anthropology, archeology, linguistics, ethnography, political science and biology. The understanding of what mater and "objects" are was altered dramatically over the past 100 years from solid lumps to fields of probability. You came in on the tail end of it. Were you asleep? Even the field of 1940's style anthropology that Pirsig rants against was long gone by the time Lila was published and altered largely in the direction and for the reasons he cites. Did mystics work this transformation? Was it philosophers who found the underlying indeterminacy at the root of materialism? Not hardly. I have asked you repeatedly to provide some indication of how this imaginary new science of yours would proceed and what new form of evidence it would produce. I have given specific accounts of how such an approach in the form of introspectionism was tried and failed after two or three decades of wasted effort. I have pointed out many times that Wilber's talk of expanded consciousness is nothing more than pandering to empty headed rich new agers. From his bogus distinctions between nature, theistic and non-dual mysticism to his acceptance of such rubbish as reincarnation, intelligent design, dogs with Buddha natures, tree with great souls, telepathy, psychokinesis, morgenic fields and color coded consciousness. All this while virtually ignoring the emergence of real expanded awareness and consciousness that is booming around us in the form of cell phones, instant messaging, e-mail, Google Earth, GPS, webcams, Alternative Intelligences, the expansion of identical shared memory in the form of film and voice recording and the sum total of human knowledge instantly available at the touch of a button. All of this higher level consciousness emerges specifically from the direction of rational thinking suggested by Piaget whom Wilber butchers while you applaud. And your response? Little more that hipster Ludditisms: "I love my iPod! Computers geeks are icky. Non-Duals Rules." And then there is William James. I have shown on each and every occasion that you have dropped his name, specifically why you haven't a clue what he is talking about. I have presented quote after quote from young James, old James, Billy the Kid James disputing your shallow reading. At one point you had young and old James arguing with himself in the same paragraph. Please note the James whom you succeed in butchering without help from Wilber wrote at the dawn of the last century. It was the beginning of the immense technological snow ball that rolled across the 20th century. The pace of change crawled compared to the present but it was the calm before the storm. In the opening paragraph of his essay "A World of Pure Experience" we wrote: "It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophic atmosphere of the time, always loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another reflecting on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity. Transcendental idealism is inclining to let the world wag incomprehensibly, in spite of its Absolute Subject and his unity of purpose. Berkeleyan idealism is abandoning the principle of parsimony and dabbling in panpsychic speculations. Empiricism flirts with teleology; and, strangest of all, natural realism, so long decently buried, raises its head above the turf, and finds glad hands outstretched from the most unlikely quarters to help it to its feet again." And lest you think he is advocating navel gazing quackery he later adds: "Radical empiricism has, in fact, more affinities with natural realism than with the views of Berkeley or of Mill, and this can be easily shown." And your best response to all of this? I must be kidding... I must be stupid? If you are half as smart as you think you are you can do better than this. 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/
