[MD] Mystics and Brains

[Case]

David M and dmb,

First of all I have mainly been addressing, dmb's contention that James's
radical empiricism provides a foundation for the MoQ and mysticism. James
states pretty clearly that he sees thoughts and "consciousness" as arising
out of physiology. I happen to agree but that is beside the point. dmb along
with Pirsig has discussed the "pre-intellectual" "pre-rational"
"pre-linguistic" experience. With all those "pre's" in there about all you
have left is sensation. There is non-linguistic cognition which may actually
account for the bulk of how we think and act but it seems, this does not
qualify for this discussion either.

As I mentioned earlier to dmb, mysticism seems overwhelmed with "randomly
sliding criteria" as to what is and isn't a mystical experience. I mention
the insights of scientist who turn their revelations into theory but that
doesn't qualify. Likewise I suppose Pirsig's peyote illumination and seed
crystal experiences would not either. I am certain this one won't pass
muster either but in the Nova Episode "Secret Life of the Mind" there is
this:

"It has been known for a long time that some patients with seizures
originating in the temporal lobes have intense religious auras, intense
experience of God visiting them. Sometimes it's a personal god, sometimes
it's a more diffuse feeling of being one with the cosmos. Everything seems
suffused with meaning. The patient will say, "Finally I see what it's really
about, Doctor. I really understand God. I understand my place in the
universe, in the cosmic scheme." Why does this happen and why does it happen
so often in patients with temporal lobe seizures?"
- V.S. RAMACHANDRAN

These experiences reported by epileptics have been consistent across culture
and across the ages. Are we to make them the foundations of our metaphysics
or just slide our criteria over a few notches and pretend they are
irrelevant?

As I have tried to point out it is not as though studies of consciousness
are not being done, it is that they are not showing what dmb and the mystics
would like them to show.

The episode David gives below about the lady with the knife takes us far
beyond all those pre's imposed above. We are now in the realm of matching
the circumstances of the present to recalled experiences of the past. Our
temporal buffer is engaged and we are working with memories of the past and
models of the future. There is causality and determinism involved but the
situation becomes so complex as make them next to useless. The point of
complexity theory is that while events may follow deterministic rules they
are still not predictable. When speaking of the internal states of humans
this is particularly true.

Beyond this I seriously do not see how understanding these things from a
scientific point of view detracts from them. To claim that it does is, as I
said earlier to dmb, just vestigial Romanticism. 

David talks about "mechanism" below as though that is the current state of
science or even materialism for that matter. I take your concern to be the
lingering view of mechanism retained in the popular culture at large. If so
I share your concern but that is certainly not the state or view of most
working scientists. Nor can you seriously expect the public at large to be
current on scientific theories about the nature of matter. Those insights
seep in slowly. 

Biography and fiction, art and poetry are not diminished by more complex
understanding. They are enhanced by them. No one anywhere that I know of has
claimed that anyone anywhere should view the world exclusively through a
scientific monocle. Science does not deny or diminish the Quality of any
experience. 

It can however cramp the style of those seeking to propose philosophical and
metaphysical assertions based in flights of fancy. Such flights are fun but
call them fiction and enjoy them. All this sniveling about souls being
destroyed and life being sucked out of living is just silly. It is as though
the whiners are seeking a return to their caves or to reclaim their tails or
at least a return to the early 80's:

they tell us that
we lost our tails
evolving up
from little snails
i say it's all
just wind in sails
are we not men?
we are DEVO!
-Devo "Jocko Homo"





[David M]
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