[MD] Experience, essentialism, physicalism

[Matt Kundert]

Scott,

Scott said:
You seem to be ignoring Rorty's word "every" in his definition. If accepting 
the usefulness of physics, biology, etc. in dealing with the "natural" is 
all there is to physicalism, then it is a useless word to describe someone 
philosophically. The question is whether there are events that have no 
physical component. I say that the physical is derived from consciousness, 
and so there can be conscious events in the absence of all physicality. A 
physicalist -- if the term is to have any philosophical use -- says that 
consciousness is derived from the physical, and so there can be physical 
events in the absence of consciousness.

Matt:
Mmm, indeed, I have been ignoring Rorty's "every" in his definition.  I was 
going "off book" as it were, but a couple of days ago I went back to look at 
that particular essay and noticed that same thing.  So I've been ruminating 
about that.  (It just goes to show how similarly we reason; I had the 
strongest hunch you were going to mention it just insofar as its the place I 
would first attack.)

But since I've been trying to make whatever-it-is-that-science-does 
coextensive with physicalism, my inclination is indeed to follow out on the 
consequences of the argument I've been making, that indeed there _is_ 
nothing philosophically interesting about physicalism.  That's why I've been 
thrusting _everybody_ willy-nilly into the "physicalist" camp.  Because who 
could deny physics's utility?  The pragmatist project is one of 
philosophical therapy, removing the objects of consternation, making things 
seem less and less philosophically interesting (where "philosophy", in this 
case, is essentially taken to be an armchair, reflective enterprise about 
the roots of reality--i.e., bad essentialistic metaphysics).  I remember 
Rorty pointing out how physicalism/materialism _isn't_ an interesting 
philosophical thesis once one becomes a pragmatist and ties off some 
bleeding epistemological/metaphysical wounds.  (I think he did so in his 
early "Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories" paper and in another 
obscure, even earlier paper called "Empiricism, Extensionalism, and 
Reductionism."  Once you take out reductionism, materialism is no longer 
philosophically interesting.  Which means nothing for science and is bad 
only for reductionists.)

I don't know if you remember, but sometime last year or something, I wrote 
some posts about consciousness in which I was very insouciant about where we 
put it.  The effect is that, if you describe everything as 
consciousness-dependent, you still have to account for the differences in 
behavior between rocks and people.  You can do that.  I've been arguing in 
variation for years, in agreement with you, that to have values is to have 
consciousness, but that simply means that Pirsig's located a locus of 
consciousness wherever there is a locus of value.  And then you still have 
to account for the apparent behavioral difference between rocks and humans.  
And so the physicalist, neo-Darwinian idea that "there can be physical 
events in the absence of consciousness" just has to be redescribed to 
account for whatever way a person has split the difference.  Because if you 
hold that there are conscious events in the absence of physicality, and we 
take both "conscious" and "physical" in their pre-redefined sense (so that 
there is something like a mind thinking without a brain), then that looks 
analogous to God as Prime Mover, where we posit something that is difficult 
to say what would count as evidence for or against.  And I'm not sure we 
need that posit.

Scott said:
Yes, the philosophical difference between you and Merrell-Wolff is that M-W 
says that there is something else that really is the reality behind the 
natural. However, he says that he Knows this (through Identity), so for him 
it is not, strictly speaking, a philosophical difference. It is a difference 
-- for him -- in moving from one "appearance" to another, so to speak. Or 
one could say from one reality to another. Hence if you see Pirsig as 
removing the A/R distinction from mysticism, I would see that as removing 
the only thing that matters in mysticism, namely self-transformation. So I 
would say that mysticism is drained of all that is important by removing the 
A/R distinction -- if that is what it is. After all, M-W would not say that 
the natural is not real. Just that the way we think about it (that is, in 
Cartesian terms) is contingent and, in a sense, false. When the self is 
transformed, so is nature. And a transformed self would reject physicalism 
as I think Rorty defined it.

Matt:
I'm not exactly sure I understand you here, but let's start with 
self-transformation.  If you take the wind out of the appearance/reality 
distinction as you've done here (where it doesn't really matter if we call 
it "moving from one 'appearance' to another" or "from one reality to 
another"), it looks like the same thing pragmatists like Rorty say when they 
talk about moving from one language game to another.  We'd be inclined to 
say, under this context, that "when the self is transformed, so is nature."  
What you seem to be saying, though, is that you know a priori what a 
transformed self would believe, that it only counts as "self-transformation" 
if a person is transformed from a Cartesian into a Merrell-Wolffian, rather 
than from, say, a Platonist to a pragmatist.  I can't attach any sense to 
that except to reinflate the sails of the appearance/reality distinction, 
but that eventually bounces you outside the bounds of conversation--which, 
if I'm not mistaken, is what you'll agree.  That at a certain point, we are 
dogmatists.  You trust Merrell-Wolff, I trust somebody else.  But taking 
that road just leaves me in the position of having to shrug my shoulders and 
wait for enlightenment to suddenly take me.  Which makes me wonder why you 
(or, say, the mystic) enter in conversation at all, and what the point of 
all the dialectical agility you so evidently display is.  You say it does 
help with self-transformation, but I'm not sure how it would.  But the 
moment of dogmatism is still a few paces away, so let me continue on down.

Scott said:
How, then, could an anti-essentialist argue for neo-Darwinism as an 
explanation for the existence of language and consciousness? If I say that 
physical reality derives from consciousness, does that make me automatically 
an essentialist, while saying the opposite (as a promoter of neo-Darwinism 
must) is somehow able to do this without being an essentialist?

Matt:
The idea is that you _can_ say that physical reality derives from 
consciousness and still be an antiessentialist.  You'd just have to do it in 
the manner that Pirsig, under a certain interpretation, does (a way I see 
you as either expressing or flirting with).  This brings us 'round to the 
discussion about Darwinism we've had intermittenly for the last several 
years.  I don't know how to move that conversation forward.  I'm not sure 
I'm sophisticated enough.  The position I've taken from Rorty and Dennett is 
still that "consciousness" (as a demarcation point between us and rocks), 
like everything else, is something that's created in a language-game.  That 
being the case, there aren't any features of it that can't be explained by 
an evolutionary tale about the creation of a way of speaking.  And then we 
just move back and tell an evolutionary tale about the creation of language 
itself.  I think we can more or less do those things.

The difference between us is still, I think, that you think there is 
something ineffable about consciousness.  And arguing about that launches us 
high into metaphilosophical territory, about how we tell when something is 
ineffable or not, what we do about it, how we stay conversable, do we want 
to stay conversable, etc.  You don't think consciousness can be explained at 
all and so root it way back into the very fabric of reality.  I'm not sure 
what our conversation would look like, how we talk--in this oxygen depleted 
sector of the mountain--about why we should think one way or the other.

Scott said:
I would say that the difference between us is that I pay attention to what 
mystics like FM-W, Bernadette Roberts, John Wren-Lewis, and Rudolf Steiner 
say, and you don't. From what they say (and from my own reflections on 
things like evolution, perception, and quantum reality), I philosophize, and 
what I come up with are various conclusions. One is that idealism of some 
form or other is a better way of thinking about things in general than 
materialism of some sort or other. I don't see how this makes me an 
essentialist (see above). Another conclusion is that short of 
self-transformation of the sort they talk about, one isn't capable of 
Knowing What is Really Going On. But this does not imply that one should 
deny the supernatural. It only implies that we are limited in our ability to 
think about it. This, I argue, makes me an anti-essentialist in your sense 
of the word. That is, because we are fallen (ignorant), we should be 
pragmatic. Otherwise we get drawn into error. The Buddhist tetralemma is a 
good guide to how one can avoid falling into error. Hence I see Ham, and 
Pirsig, and physicalists (as I understand the term) as people who have 
violated the tetralemma in one way or another.

Matt:
I guess I'm not sure what these mystics could convince me of if its simply 
about taking their word for it.  It almost seems like Pascal's wager.  If 
you are an antiessentialist until the day you become transformed (and on 
that day you transcend antiessentialism/essentialism because you Know What's 
Really Going On, and until that day essentialism is the nonsense it is), 
then what reason do I have for listening to the mystics?  I've come to 
antiessentialism by a different route after all.  If they can't communicate 
their knowledge of What's Really Going On, then why should I think 
antiessentialism will get me closer to the day of transcendence?  How is 
this not like "I'll believe in God just in case He's there"?  I'll act like 
a perfect, conversational pragmatist until the day I'm self-transformed.  
Antiessentialism is better--until you are enlightened and loosened the bonds 
of fallen experience.

We have no reason, except for dogmatic trust, to think that the mystics will 
get us closer to self-transformation because for them to give us reasons 
would mean that we've become essentialists---thinking we've found a 
discursive route to What's Really Going On when enlightenment is all about 
stilling our discursive habit of thinking we Know What's Really Going On.  
So we have to be antiessentialists, because it is better, and I can't help 
but think that leaves us in a very willy-nilly position.  For instance, 
what's going to happen to me if I don't start listening to the mystics?  I'm 
going to stay fallen?  Which means I'm going to act just like you, an 
antiessentialist (assuming for the sake of argument that we both act like 
consistent antiessentialists).  I can't figure out how I'd be convinced to 
suddenly think I have the possibility of being enlightened---except for the 
totally random event of a mystical vision.  Then I'd be changed.  But before 
that day, I don't have any reason to even desire a mystical vision except in 
the same way I hope to wake up tomorrow with the ability to fly.

This brings us around to the shibboleth problem.  Why should I think the 
mystics you tout are speaking the magic words and not some other ones?  And, 
even more to the point, why should I think there are magic words to be 
spoken at all?  I'd assume that you'd throw out the possibility of magic 
words as being another piece of essentialism (as I would), but that still 
leaves us waiting to fly.

This isn't to say that the mystics may not have words of wisdom to teach us. 
  Not at all.  It isn't to say that my life wouldn't benefit from reading 
them.  To be an intellectual is to be open and curious in search of life 
wisdom.  But I don't, for typical antiessentialistic points we hold in 
common, see why we need to posit a strange looking, dogmatic 
appearance/reality distinction that plays no real part except to point out 
that we all may wake up one day and believe something completely different 
from what we did the day before--specifically that we Know What's Really 
Going On.

To return to the original topic about physicalism and idealism, I'm not 
sure, given my philosophically deflated definition of physicalism, why you'd 
want to stylize yourself as an idealist.  And maybe you wouldn't in this 
case.  It seems to me to be an essentialist mistake.  The scientific 
materialists made the mistake of thinking science got at What's Really Going 
On.  The inverse was the idealists who thought Spirit was What's Really 
Going On.  Its all bouncing particles, no its all idea/spirit.  But if we 
become antiessentialists, we leave that fruitless debate aside, don't we?  
We simply suggest better and more fruitful ways of speaking for different 
purposes, right?  So what is the philosophically useful way to describe 
oneself as an idealist without becoming an essentialist, positing What's 
Really Going On?

Matt

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