[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

At the end of his post Krimel said to dmb:
You have shown no indication, ever, what is specifically reductionisticabout anything I have ever said. It is always a blanket charge full of soundand fury signifying nothing. I am left to conclude that indeed this is aclassic/romantic issue and that you really are just using it as a kind ofsissy rhetorical tactic.

dmb says:
You really don't see it, do you? Your denial comes at the end of a post in which you reduce the immediate flux of experience to nothing but brain states and physiological processes. That's reductionism, sir, and here you are practicing it...

Krimel said:
.., 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.

dmb says:
Yes, there is undeniable evidence that James's empiricism was in part an effort to solve some issues raised during the writing of his psychology book. This evidence come from James himself and from James scholars. But more to the point, you apparently think that these scientific facts contradict what I'm saying about pre-intellectual experience and yet you don't actually connect them to what I'm saying in any way. In fact, all you did was negatively characterize my view without saying what it actually is. What is it you think I'm saying and how does any of this dispute it? I mean, it's all snark and no substance. I honestly have no idea what your complaint actually consists of. 

Krimel continued:
... 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.

dmb says:

Again, to explain the hot stove example in terms of sensory nerves is reductionism. That is just one of many specific cases. You always do that and so my charge is about your position in general. I mean, it's not just one or two particular comments but the general tenor of your thinking. But that's not the only problem here. Pirsig and James are radical empiricists and one of the things that this means is that they no longer view experience as limited to the senses. This is how the traditional empiricists operated, especially the positivists, but the radical empiricist points out that this limit is artificial and has been imposed for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They also point out that SOM is the metaphysical framework that leads to this artificial limit. These are among the issues that were raised for James in the writing of the psychology book and they were addressed in his empiricism. 


Krimel said:

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.


dmb says:
That's exactly the problem with reductionism. It doesn't explain anything about the object of inquiry. Knowing what happens in brains or sensory nerve loops can't be used to explain it away either. They are simply two different things, the way string vibrations and music are two different things. To explain one in terms of the other is simply to confuse one thing with another.  


Krimel said:
You wax misty eyed about the undivided purity of pre-intellectual experience when it is nothing of the sort. ... 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.)


dmb says:


I don't think we need a scientific study to find out why you're angry. Nobody likes to be told that they're wrong about something, especially if they take pride in their knowledge of that thing. But no reasonable person could enter a discussion forum like this without fully expecting disagreement, right? No reasonable person believes she is beyond correction, right? So, just be angry and know that it's normal and then just deal with it like a grown up does. Take a deep breath and do some thinking. Chances are, the anger is in direct proportion to the doubts raised by any given challenge. I mean, who ever got angry at a totally invalid criticism? Your charge that I want to ignore brain science because it challenges my metaphysical assumptions, for example, only makes me chuckle. Same with the idea that I'm using anti-reductionism as a smoke screen or that I'm offering some kind of romantic new age mysticism. (Actually, my point is only that we can have philosophical mysticism without any supernaturalism, miracles, religion or faith.) If these kinds of criticisms bother me at all, it's only because they expose the fact that I have an insincere and disingenuous debate opponent who doesn't understand what he criticizing.


Deep breath. ...Anger is normal here... Now let it fade and when it's gone do some thinking.


Then write.


 


 
 		 	   		  
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