[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[Krimel]

Dave,
And my conviction that this is insincere smoke screen to avoid the issues I
have raised. For example, you make much about the pre-intellectual as though
it, must be undefinable mystical or have some unknown special status that I
have begged you to reveal. 

But the pre-intellectual is not messy or mysterious or especially
metaphysical. James maintains that concepts are derived from precepts and
that perception is the product of sensation. Sensation and perception are
psychological terms that James uses in their psychological sense. There is
nothing to suggest that James ever renounced his psychological writings. In
fact "The Principle of Psychology" is so shot through with philosophical
argument it is hard not to read it as a philosophical work. I don't doubt
that some of his later writing may stand as correction to earlier work, he
had a long career. But sensation and perception? Sensation is the receiving
of input from the world. Perception is creating meaning from sensory input.
Some of that meaning in fact most of it requires no conscious, logical
sequential processing at all. The hot stove example is not particular a good
one because the heat input to sensory nerves loops to the motor output to
get you off of the stove without the need for mediation by the brain at all.

But if you step in dog shit you will have a visceral response, a disgust
response that will change the muscles in your face, the tone of your voice,
your heart rate and breathing, the electrical conductivity of your skin in
fair predictable ways. All of this is without the slightest bit of conscious
processing. Consciousness is always an add on, literally and "afterthought"
It is conceptualization that flows from perceptual experience.

I am not sure what has been "explained" in the preceding paragraph. We
evolved in a way so that hot stoves and shit of any kind, provoke unlearned
biological responses. It is not hard to see why that ought to be so. I am
making no metaphysical claims however. I suspect what bothers you is that
such accounts do challenge your metaphysical assumptions. Science may not
provide us with much that is useful in terms of philosophy or metaphysics
but it can often show us where such ideas are wrong and why. After all, that
is what science does; show us what was wrong with our ideas.

You wax misty eyed about the undivided purity of pre-intellectual experience
when it is nothing of the sort. As Bolte-Taylor describes it, when the
conscious, verbal, logical, sequential center of her brain were damaged by
stroke she was left in the realm of the spatial, feeling, parallel
processing world of the right hemisphere. Parallel processing means that
multiple functions are performed at once. Sensation, as James well knew,
includes sight, hearing, smell, taste and several other typical
unacknowledged senses like heat, pressure, balance, pain, etc.

All of these are processed in parallel and "perceived" in a variety of ways.
Without a functioning verbal system, one is left with an unverbalizable set
of qualia which is what Bolte-Taylor proceeds to describe in glowing terms.
But inability to articulate does not mean that they _are_ united and pure
only that that is the only way she can describe them. 

Davidson and Austin, authors of two works you recommended for people to read
in your Oxford talk, both conducted research to look at what is happening in
the brains of meditators. Essentially what they saw was that in meditators
certain functions that are normally held under unconscious, involuntary
control now show a measured increase in conscious control. The act of
meditating changes brains and the way brains work. So does reading, watching
television, playing tennis or thinking about the MoQ.

I have continually cited research like this to show specifically how it
related positively to the MoQ. Read the links I posted earlier to our
previous conversations. You claim not be against neuroscience, or science or
anything of the sort and yet you scream "reductionism" every time I bring
them up, no matter what the context or how I elect to apply them. Then a
year or two later you cited my own examples back to me as your own and as
further evidence that I am a reductionist.

As I have said many times looking at the biology of our nervous systems may
not tell us specifically why certain social rituals take the form they do,
but it does set limits on the kinds of forms our social interactions can
take. Neurosciences may not provide a complete explanation for why talking
to you pisses me off so much but it does tell me which emotional centers
your mindless rants are activating and why they interact in such a way as to
raise my blood pressure and why my logical brain has to work so hard not to
call you a... (ok, I had to censor that). 

You have shown no indication, ever, what is specifically reductionistic
about anything I have ever said. It is always a blanket charge full of sound
and fury signifying nothing. I am left to conclude that indeed this is a
classic/romantic issue and that you really are just using it as a kind of
sissy rhetorical tactic.

Krimel