[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

Krimel said to dmb:
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 says:
James condemned all train metaphors? That's weird. Why would he do that?
Since James himself uses images of continuous motion or a leading edges, I
have to assume you've badly misread something. Go ahead. Dish it up. Splain
yourself.

[Krimel]
I freely confess an error here. James does not condemn train and chain
metaphors in "Does Consciousness Exist" He does it in "The Stream of
Thought" chapter in his "Principles of Psychology":

"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such
words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself
in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a
'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In
talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life."

Surely, you might argue that this is young James and you love old James but
here is old James from "Some Problems of Philosophy":

"The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substitution of
a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience
originally comes. But before tracing the consequences of the substitution, I
must say something about the conceptual order itself. Trains of concepts
unmixed with percepts grow frequent in the adult mind; and parts of these
conceptual trains arrest our attention just as parts of the perceptual flow
did, giving rise to concepts of a higher order of abstractness."

You are supposed to be the James scholar not I but I suspect that a careful
reading of James use of the terms chain and train will reveal that he
reserves trains and chains for discrete concepts and streams for perception.

dmb said to Marsha:
My expectations? Doesn't everyone expect grandparents to be mature? There is
a limit to how young a grandparent can be, see, and older people are
supposed to be more mature than younger people. But I think Krimel's style
is childish and painfully undignified. Go ahead, make a case that the
following is not childish... I also characterized it as "vague" and as
"snarky bullshit", so those descriptions are already taken. But if you have
a better word for this, please do tell.

[Krimel]
I left high school with two goals in mind. One was never to "specialize" and
the second was never to "grow-up". It's good to know I succeeded in at least
one of them.

Dmb objecting to Krimel's snarks tone:
... 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.

[Krimel]
Here are a few of your past statements on Taylor:

"And if you want to put it in terms of evolved brains, the left hemisphere
is good at words and concepts while the right hemisphere takes in the whole
undifferentiated, unconceptualized experience. Jill Bolte Taylor had a
stroke, lost her ability to make conceptual distinctions and experienced
Nirvana, experienced pure Dynamic Quality. And since she also happens to be
a Harvard brain scientist, she understood how her way of knowing shifted
from the conceptually dominated ordinary consciousness to the other kind."
-dmb 5/23/10

"The case of Jill Bolte Taylor makes a similar point from the opposite
direction. She was a brain scientist who has a stroke and lost the use of
her rational, verbal hemisphere and could only experience reality as a
whole, so much so  that she could not tell where she ended and the universe
began. She now says that what she experienced was Nirvana and she cries
tears of joy when she tells the story. We can think about this pure
experience or undifferentiated experience in terms of the lack of
distinction between subject and object but it is a lack of all
distinctions."
- dmb 5/5/21/10

"It's sometimes put in terms of quieting the mind or finding peace of mind,
or even like nirvana as Bolte-Taylor described it."
- dmb 2/13/09

Please note that Bolte-Taylor is a neuroscientist, who has done a lot of
work for the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Her book "My Stroke of
Insight" gives a first person account of her experience with stroke. In her
book she goes to some pains to explain not just the activities of the two
hemispheres of the brain but the various other structures involved in her
feelings and perceptions or lack thereof. Her purpose is to help stroke
victims understand what has happened to them as a result to the specific
kinds of structural damage that stroke can cause.

What, other than flowery language, exempts her from your charge of
reductionism? Or for that matter lets you off the hook for my charge that
you misunderstand and misrepresent her?

dmb said:
Your complaints are too vague for me to know what you're talking about, what
it is you think I don't understand. The other 90% of that was about the
same. But your comments make one thing perfectly clear; you're a dick. I
don't think your snarky bullshit is cute or clever or respectable in any
way. You're just a dick. You're a grandfather, for Christ's sake. What the
hell is wrong with you? Seriously, grow up.

[Krimel]
While I have no desire to "grow up" I do occasionally get a pang of guilt
about being a dick. I took this charge of snarkiness seriously for a while
and it cause me to reflect.

Here are a couple of examples of this same argument from the archives. Who's
snarkier than who? I'll let the reader decide.

http://lists.moqtalk.org/htdig.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2008-October/0300
21.html
http://lists.moqtalk.org/htdig.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/2009-June/037221.
html 

The point is we have had this discussion many times and you predictably
retreat into this charge of reductionism and ignore the issues at hand.

Now most recently there was this:

Krimel said:
... I think any belief or position someone holds is derived from the
interaction of reason and emotion. Damasio's research is primarily in the
area of emotion. He claims what without the ability to experience emotion
people find it very difficult if not impossible to make decisions. Our
commitment to ideas is likewise a function of right brain emotional
commitment reinforced, balanced and guided by rational left brain functions.
Emotion is almost always what guides us in the final analysis. That's why
commercials are about sex and status and not about the chemistry of your
tooth paste. But in a philosophical discussion, it is one thing to express
emotion for rhetorical purposes but what really should be important is
reason. In reading your stuff it is often hard for me tell whether you know
the difference...

dmb said:
I think the work of guys like Dimasio lends support to Pirsig's aim of
expanding rationality at its roots. It's not just that reason and emotion
interact or that emotion plays an important role in the overall cognitive
process, although that's certainly true too. The interesting thing is that
rationality is paralyzed without these underlying unconscious processes.
There is a case wherein a dude had brain damage in such a way that all he
had was rationality but no ability to feel the situation. As a result, he
couldn't make the simplest decisions. He'd stand in the cereal isle in the
grocery store for hours trying to rationally evaluate the relative merits of
each kind and there was just no end to this process.

[Krimel]
Damasio is the guy who came up with this bit of research you are citing.
Here he is explaining it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wup_K2WN0I 

When I mentioned this research to you specifically in 2008 and again in
2009, it was specifically in response to your charges of reductionism. I
also pointed out at the time how this research impacts on Pirsig's ideas
about the pre-intellectual. You never addressed this research or its
importance at the time and now you bring it up to support you ongoing charge
of reductionism. 

One of my favorite quotes from Damasio is, "We are not thinking machines. We
are feeling machines that think." Sounds pretty reduction by your standards
doesn't it? 

It seems as though you are taking the very research I am talking about,
calling it reductionist then citing it back to me as not reductionist. WTF,
Dave?

Austin and Davision talk about how the practice of meditation produces
changes in the way that people think and the way that the brain functions.
Neither of them seems to think that brain states are irrelevant to the
practice of meditation. Davidson especially talks about these changes also
happen when we learn any skill. This has come up in a different context when
Matt and I were talking about Jaynes. Different ages require different kinds
of thought processes. The reading brain functions differently than a purely
oral brain.

Damasio illustrates that thought and memory are heavily influenced by
emotion and that emotion and the feeling of emotion are governed in specific
regions of the brain.

Bolte-Taylor points out that language and reason are control in two areas of
the brain and that if those regions are cut off we are left with feeling and
non-conscious processes.

VS Ramachandrian talks about the boy who thinks his "parents" are imposters
because he "feels" no emotional attachment to them. He also talks about the
effect of temporal lobe seizures and how they produce feelings of extreme
religious connection. There is a whole field opening up to study this called
neurotheology.

If you want to dismiss my comments as "reductionist" fine. But please stop
citing them back to me two years later as examples of why I am a
reductionist for using them and you aren't. I don't think I have ever
brought up data from the neurosciences in a reductionist context or claimed
that they fully account for explain anything in the way you keep repeating
that I do.