[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Scott Roberts]

Matt K,

Matt said [to DMB]:
Okay, so you basically agree that, _if_ we define knowledge as intellectual,
then "we can only have static knowledge of static things."  What I'm still
not sure of is what it means to say that we have, so to speak, Dynamic
knowledge of Dynamic Quality.  What does it mean to "know" Dynamic Quality,
when "knowing" in this sense has nothing to do with "knowing" (and
knowledge) in the static sense?

Scott:
Sri Aurobindo and Franklin Merrell-Wolff call it "Knowledge by Identity". I 
think it is, or is like, the following. When I was a child I used to wonder 
what it is like to an adult. Now I am an adult, and I know what it is like, 
but there is no way I could explain it to a child. I think that knowledge 
could be called knowledge by identity. It is different from what might be 
called knowledge by acquaintance, but I think it is correct to call it 
"knowledge".

Matt continued:
  And how do the two "interact"?

Scott:
I suspect that knowledge by acquaintance is not what it appears to be --  
that is, that the S/O picture we have (our glassy essence mirroring an 
external world) is not what is "really" going on. To put it another way, 
because we are fallen beings (we don't, or are not aware of having, this 
mystical Knowledge by Identity), we have an artificial separation, and so 
things appear to us as static knowledge of static things.

Of course, I am deliberately pressing a pragmatic button here (I am 
affirming an appearance/reality distinction, which I think goes with the 
mystic territory). The thing that seems to be missing from this discussion 
about pragmatism, physicalism, and mysticism is what mystics (at least the 
ones I pay attention to) are saying. They deny physicalism. They accept the 
supernatural (where the "natural" is the sense-perceptible, what has 
microstructural explanations). They say that the natural is a manifestation 
of the supernatural, and so on. In sum, I trust these mystics (because I 
find what they say that I can understand to be rational), therefore I am not 
a physicalist. You are a physicalist, therefore you must reject what these 
mystics say.

- Scott