[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

Krimel said to dmb:
I think we are still on the same page except for this phrasing; "Just like
Quality itself..." This kind of makes it sound like Lao Tsu owes some debt
to Pirsig when the reverse it obviously the case.

dmb says:
Giving Pirsig credit for Lao Tzu would require a time machine or something
equally ridiculous. 

[Krimel]
Then maybe you ought to reconsider your phrasing as I suggested.

[dmb]
Besides, Pirsig says that the MOQ adds nothing to our understanding of
Taoism or mysticism. His focus is on our modes of rationality and so that
Taoism and mysticism are used to expand rationality at its roots. In fact,
he explicitly denies any expertise with respect to Taoism. But I think it's
perfectly reasonable for him to get excited about the parallels, to be
encouraged by the fact that he could read the Tao Te Ching while using the
"tao" and "Quality" as interchangeable terms. 

[Krimel]
As I have said many time I think it was a mistake to use the term "quality"
instead of "tao." I think it detracts from the whole enterprise. But when
you write one book admitting that Taoism is central to it and a second book
expanding on the dichotomy outlined by Lao Tsu and by his followers using
the same sort of terminology they use but claim it is different or unique
seems odd. In fact I never thought that is what Pirsig was doing until I
came here. 

dmb said:
... but the distinction between discrete and continuous is not exactly a
"metaphysical" cut. 

Krimel replied:
But it is; in the same way that Platonic idealism is a metaphysical cut or
the mind/body is a metaphysical cut. I was attempting to put this one made
by James in the same philosophical lineage as the split between Heraclitus
and Parmenides. Heraclitus thought the world was continuous and changing.
Parmenides, Democritus and Zeno thought it was discontinuous (atomic) and
unchanging. These are metaphysical positions that James locates in the
difference between conception and perception and which a great many thinkers
see in the difference between analog and digital information.

dmb says:
I think those are really bad analogies. I mean, if the idea were to balance
Heraclitus and Parmenides, then the radical empiricist would be claiming
that discrete concepts are eternal and unchanging.

[Krimel]
Talk about bad analogies. That's like saying that Berkley should have been
saying that all ideas are two dimensional and Hume should be talking about
the properties of light. These are historic conversations and the terms and
conditions of the debates changed as the conversations dragged on.

[dmb]
But Pirsig and James think that truths are provisional and plural and they
are drawn from the stream of consciousness. Discrete concepts are relatively
stable but they are nothing like "eternal". 

[Krimel]
Yeah, it was really funny to hear you expounding on Pirsig's leading edge of
the train on the track metaphor while discussing James' essay that
explicitly condemned all such metaphors. 


[dmb]
No, I think Pirsig and James are with Heraclitus all the way. I mean, how
neatly does James's "stream of consciousness" go with the Heraclitian (Is
that a dirty word?) idea that we can't stand in the same river twice? Very
neatly. 

[Krimel]
But that says nothing about the ongoing metaphysical implications of the
historic debate about a continuous or discrete universe. You are just point
out which side your heroes are on. I agree by the way. But it is not like
the debate has run out of steam or even addresses the point that one could
write a philosophical history framed in those terms just as many have
written such histories in terms of the mind/body debate. Both are about
fundamental metaphysical "cuts".

Krimel said:
... you say the James and Pirsig arrived at these conclusions independently.
That is just an overly polite way of saying Pirsig never bothered to do his
homework. You make James sound like Pirsig's John the Baptist. It is
positively Orwellian. Do you realize this is what you are saying or does
that claim of independence really sound coherent to you?

dmb says:
I don't see how the claim of independence is incoherent or Orwellian. 

[Krimel]
It is positively Orwellian to frame a negative in positive terms. Darwin and
Wallace arrived at the theory of evolution independently. But when you claim
an idea as original when someone else has stated it 100 years earlier and
richer detail that is just sloppy.

[dmb]
The fact is Pirsig did not see the parallel with James until it was pointed
out by a reviewer after ZAMM was published. 

[Krimel]
Can you spell peer review?

[dmb]
So how is that incoherent? How is that Orwellian? And the charge that he
failed to do his homework is predicted on the fact that Pirsig did not
carefully read every philosopher before writing ZAMM, as if that were even
possible. 

[Krimel]
If you are writing a piece you want to be taken seriously in serious circles
then you have an obligation to read people relevant to what you are writing.
If you don't do this you shouldn't complain about not being taken seriously.
You want to paint him as a pragmatist who knows nothing about other
pragmatists or who arrived at pragmatism "independently". I mean
seriously...

[dmb]
I mean, these complaints are way too goofy to be taken seriously. It's right
up there with you complaints about how Pirsig failed to include a chapter on
nano-technology and the awesomeness of Star Trek. Get real, will you?

[Krimel]
Actually it is more like my complaining about him writing a chapter on
evolution without reading Gould, Wilson or Dawkins. Or writing a book on the
metaphysics of values and talking at length about Kant's "Critique of Pure
Reason" then summing up Kant's entire corpus on ethics in less than a
paragraph and concluding it was "ugly". Or talking about Taoism, the
metaphysical underpinning of Zen without apparently having any serious
interest in what that metaphysics says. 

Krimel said:
I don't have a problem with Lao Tsu or James so far so I don't know why you
think I have a problem with Pirsig.

dmb says:
Are you kidding? I think you have a problem with Pirsig because you say so
in nearly every post. It's safe to assume you'd count "incoherence" as a
problem, right? That's what you've said most recently about the levels, for
example. 

[Krimel]
I never saw any of this as a problem until I started talking to you. I
always thought everything I mentioned above as problems were easily
corrected and a finger pointing in the general direction of the moon. I
thought Pirsig's lack of precision was more than made up by his breadth. He
was finger-painting the big picture and doing a damn fine job. My chief
bitch in all of this is that you are acting as an apologist emphasizing the
worst in what he says, ignoring the best and claiming some virtue in the
process.
 
Krimel said:
I have mentioned Gazzaniga and the spilt brain experiments to you about a
gazzilion times. Jung's problem was twofold. First, he was saddled with tons
of Freudian baggage both in his terminology and the his framing of the
problem of the "unconscious." Second, he was way too mystical in a purely
spiritual sense. Freud took a pretty biological view of his "unconscious"
but his concepts get all mushy in part because they originated in the
Victorian era and he and his followers focused on symbolic meanings in the
absence of access to biological facts.


dmb says:
I honestly do not recall any mention of Gazzillionaniga. 

[Krimel]
That is obvious but hardly from lack of trying on my part. You keep talking
about Bolte-Taylor. But what you say about her TED talk makes it obvious you
did not understand it at all. You won't until you pay attention to
Gazzaniga. He did the early psychological studies of epileptics who had an
operation in which their left and right brains were surgically disconnected.
It is from this research that we came to understand the different roles in
consciousness that the sides of the brain play. For example Bolte-Taylor
says that the left brain is logical and sequential while the right brain is
parallel and holistic. You take this as new age talk when in fact it is
derived from the cognitive neuroscience and information processing.

She describes what it felt like for her stroke to damage her speech and
language centers. Brocca's area control speech production and Werneke's area
controls understanding. Her difficulty in using a phone to call for help and
communicating her distress where first person accounts of the qualia of that
damage. I am speculating here a bit but much of the touchy feely gee whiz
part of talk; feeling connected to the universe that appeals to you so much
may have been the result of seizure or effects on her temporal lobes.
Epileptics with temporal lobe seizures are known to have profound religious
experience. James even mentions this back in the late 1800's.

Krimel said:
Well, do we disagree? Since I think emotional non-conceptual functioning as
well as verbal conceptual functioning are sets of biological patterns that
evolved in response to Quality.

dmb says:
Verbal conceptual functioning is biological? Yea, we disagree there. I'd
call that reductionism. 

[Krimel]
I think that would be a very difficult position to defend. As I just pointed
out, problems in the production and recognition of speech can be located
within particular brain structures. I know of no one in the field of
psychology, diverse as it is, who would argue your point for you. For that
matter no one in medicine or biology or any field that actually requires
familiarity with this research.

In your Oxford talk you mention two books on the neuropsychology of zen. I
really laughed at that since when I pointed this research out to you in the
past you dismissed it reductionist and irrelevant but I can assure the
neither Austin, (Zen and the Brain) or Davidson who worked with the Dalai
Lama's monks would agree with you; for that matter the Dalai Lama would find
you statements curiously out of touch.

Your charge of "reductionism" is just your blanket term to justify not doing
your homework. You remind be of the drunk looking for his car keys under a
street lamp because there is light there to guide his search. But you take
it a step further and claim some metaphysical reason for staying away from
the darkness as though it would be "reductionistic" to look in say your
pants pocket.

In isn't just your lack of depth in your own field that is a problem, Dave.
It is the narrowness of your vision and your absurd rationalization for
clinging to ignorance.

[dmb]
Jung broke with Freud because Freud held that... 

[Krimel]
Jung and Freud to the extent that they actually made contributions to
psychology and psychiatry made those contributions at a time before there
wasn't much understanding of mental disorders. Their ideas were useful
because they kind of worked at a time when nothing else did. Electro-shock
and lobotomies also worked and more effectively than talking cures but with
the exception of electro-shock they are not widely practiced anymore either.
Both Freud and Jung are of more interest to philosophers and literary types.
Within medicine and psychology they are primarily of historical interest.

[dmb]
Similarly, there is a position in the philosophy of mind called "eliminative
materialism" or rather "physicalism". Subscribers hold that mental states
are really just brain states and our common sense notion of having beliefs
and intentions is fundamentally bogus. Oddly, the whole thing is predicated
on scientific data that is only expected at some point in the future. Rorty,
for example, subscribes to a softened version of this position and it is no
co-incidence that he's also sympathetic with Freud. I find a certain
coherence of temperament in these kinds of connections. 

[Krimel]
Whatever side of this debate you choose to be on you will not be taken
seriously if you dismiss the extensive research in the field as
"reductionism" or "SOM". Talking about things like "preintellectual" without
looking at the input pathways to and within the brain and nervous system is
just indefensible or at least you have not mounted a defense that I have
heard. Just your typical romantic dismissal.

[dmb]
James and Jung, for example, were very interested in religious matters and
particularly with mysticism. By contrast, Freud thought of religious faith
as a kind of mental disease and Rorty says he finds nothing whatsoever of
value in James's work on religion or radical empiricism. And he sees human
literature as a series of marks and noises, no different in kind from the
scratches and grunts of the other animals. 

[Krimel]
I have not read Rorty nor have I seen anything to suggest that you have
either. I would defer to Matt on all things Rorty. But if you even glance at
James' work on psychology you will find an extensive summary of pretty much
everything known around the turn of his century about the anatomy and
function of the brain and an analysis of it implications for psychology and
philosophy. I am pretty sure he would take offense at your attempt to use
his name to justify ignoring the literature on neuroscience.

[dmb]
But I think it makes a lot more sense to think of language and culture as
different in kind from the biological platform on which it depends. I think
it makes a lot of sense to think of biological evolution and social
evolution as distinctly different, qualitatively different. Because of this
difference, I think you can't explain or understand the latter in terms of
the former. This is not to say that you can have culture and language
independently of bodies with brains. I'm just saying that culture is not
biological and language is not a property of the brain. 

[Krimel]
I don't think you can understand much about language or culture without
understanding their function as natural processes. Since they arise from
biological processes those processes are relevant at least as starting
points. James would not agree with your position either he was the chief
advocate for looking at the function behavior and language play in promoting
human survival. He explicitly brought Darwinian agreements into the study of
psychology and one of his lasting contributions to the field is within
evolutionary psychology.

[dmb]
There is an interesting relation, but it is largely a matter of the culture
putting limits on the biological. Rules governing our appetites for food,
sex, violence, and vice are universal, from the Kalihari to the Vatican. 

[Krimel]
As Wilson points out the universality of those rules results for the
constraints of human biological adaptation to the environment. In fact many
of the differences in specific practices can be traced to specific
difference in different geographies. Wilson says and I agree that the very
fact that these things are universal points to their biological and
environmental origins.

[dmb]
Pirsig claim that the levels have distinct purposes that are sometimes at
odds is just a matter of making sense of this anthropological fact. I mean,
the line between biological and social is something we can feel and know in
our own lives. 

[Krimel]
Levels do not have purposes nor are they "at odds" Social organization
exists in nature so that members of a species can act in concert to derive
maximum benefit from environmental resources. As I have mentioned many times
Pirsig is no expert on evolution.

[dmb]
What dog ever decided to go on a diet? Ever seen a wolf in an
anger-management program? 

[Krimel]
No but canines do hunt in packs and do have dominance hierarchies which
allow them to distribute resources and settle disputes with a minimum of
violence and conflict.

[dmb]
Do parrots ever have a life altering experience? 

[Krimel]
No, but they aren't particularly social either.

[dmb]
Are butterflies democratic or are they ruled by monarchs? What god does the
Mantis pray to? 

[Krimel]
Again not especially social nor would have a large brain to house a complex
nervous system serve them very well in their biological niches. They don't
do those things because they don't need them to survive. We do them because
we do.

[dmb]
Do bees feel patriotic when they sacrifice themselves for the hive? And do
ants hold parades for their war heroes?

[Krimel]
Bees and ants carry with them a host of genetic programs to control their
social behavior for the benefit of their colonies and hives. There is no
conflict for either of them between their biological programs and the
demands of the environment.

[dmb]
Don't get me wrong. We ARE animals. But that doesn't mean Einstein invented
E=mc2 just to get laid or get fed or whatever else Freud would have said. 

[Krimel]
Human behavior is extraordinarily complex because our nervous systems are
correspondingly complex. Explanations for either or both have proven
difficult but ignoring the link has not accomplished anything at all. And
once again please note few in the field take Freud's explanations
particularly seriously anymore and haven't for decades. I think that means
you should study him more.

[dmb]
Not to get all dramatic about it, but I think we all know what it looks like
to see a human who's been reduced to that level. The Donner Party or the
inmates at a concentration camp, for example. It's the stuff of horror
movies and nightmares. It's not quite the same, but I do get a little bit of
that sick, evil vibe from reductionist positions. 

[Krimel]
Those reactions to suffering and horror have clearly traceable biological
roots. They are encoded genetically to facilitate human interaction and
survival. At least that's what James would say. Your idiosyncratic reaction
to the findings of pretty much everyone who has considered to matter for the
past 50 years on the other hand might best be explained by a Freudian
although I would suggest medication.

[dmb]
Somehow, it just seems degrading, cynical and a generally bleak view of
humanity. Probably a matter of temperament that it bugs me, but I also think
it really makes more sense to recognize the distinction.

[Krimel]
It may "seem" that way to you but that is largely because you don't
understand it at all, have not attempted to look at what is being said and
you seem genetically incapable of straying outside your comfort zone. But to
paint this "romanticism" as somehow moral or philosophically justifiable is
just a form of self delusion.

Wow, I guess I was wrong. I thought you were starting to wake up since you
repeatedly cite Bolte-Taylor and recently referenced Damasio. Must have been
my super-ego trying to talk nice-nice to my id.