[MD] Mystics and Brains

[david buchanan]

DM and y'all:

Huh? I think you have confused my position with some kind of romanticized 
version of SOM. I mean, your description (below) seems only to add feelings 
and emotions to sensory data. This is just the traditional notion of 
subjective experience. The Romantics thought it was important and the 
positivists thought is was misleading, but they both recognized it as 
experience. I mean, it seems like a mistake to interpret the MOQ as 
Romanticism because it merely emphasizes the underdog within a SOM 
framework.

dmb

David M said:
>Some interesting suggestions below. I think you are right
>here and Case's talk seems to make the mistake of reducing experience to
>sensations. For me we need to consider what we know is the full
>richness of experience and how we interact with the contents
>of our experience. Sure we have sensations of light and smell and
>touch that allow us to make out different static and dynamic qualities
>in our experience, but what do these do to us? We do not experience
>only colours and light, or pressures on the skin. We find what we
>experience to have value and meaning within a complex context.
>So the person coming towards us with a knife, may not generate
>fear, she may be a kind doctor come to help us, and we may not only
>take her to be a doctor, but maybe she is an attractive doctor, and
>some of those love reactions may get going to. I think trying to
>understand our experience in causal terms looks pretty useless
>if a few million photons being absorbed because they have bounced
>off the skin and clothing of an approaching human being are supposed
>to cause the stuff going on in our experience. Of course there is stuff to
>consider here about the physical state of the recipient/creator of these
>images,
>but the dynamic process that such a being is going through, and which we
>call living, is so far from the methods, ideas and metaphors of a science
>that is still gripped by mechanism and machine metaphors when it comes to
>looking
>at sensations that it is a non-starter. Of course, you can get into
>evolutionary psychology to say more interesting stuff, but not that
>much more interesting. Biography and fiction remain vastly more
>interesting at understanding human experience.
>
>This is does not mean stop the science, but get it in perspective
>and see it with its currentlyn huge limits.
>
>Regards
>David M

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