[MD] Mystics and Brains -- Matt has a question

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Case,

I don't pay much attention at all these days, so I really only have a 
cursory understanding of what everybody's talking about.  But I noticed that 
Ham dragged up an old essay of mine about mechanistic philosophy in relation 
to the position you've been taking, which apparently everybody thinks is 
reductionistic or positivistic or materialistic, or whatever.  Since I'm 
often thought to be any number of those things comparitively, too, I thought 
I'd ask you a question to help clarify if you're a degenerate like me or 
some other kind of degenerate.

In the essay that Ham found, it kind of suggests that we be able to bounce 
back and forth between "mechanistic explanations" and "teleological 
explanations" depending on situation.  Back in the day, a former poster that 
some will remember, 3dwavedave, grilled me for a while privately as to what 
in the hell a "teleological explanation" was.  I had no idea then, and I 
have no idea now.  That's why its an old essay.  BUT: the idea that I still 
find true is that of bouncing back and forth between different vocabularies 
of explanation.  I take that to be central to the pragmatist position, one 
that is central to Pirsig's position if you take seriously his comments 
about the general utility of causal accounts vs. preconditional evaluative 
accounts ("A causes B" v. "B values precondition A").

So, granted that people are describing your position as reducing the mind 
(which in this case swallows up pretty much all the other little bits being 
thrown around, sensations, consciousness, mystical experiences, etc.) to 
brain activity, and that you've said something like this to cause them to 
react like this, what would you say to this proposition:

We can describe various phenomena (like sensations, thoughts, experiences, 
pain) as brain activity, but we can also describe them as activity that 
occurs in the mind.

The question:

Do you think that scientific explanations are the only kind of valid 
explanations, or do you think that the phenomena of life admit to as many 
kinds of explanation as we can think up and that the only way we choose 
between them is experiential efficacy?

The first is certainly positivistic and materialistic, the kind that Pirsig 
hated, but the second is properly called pragmatic.  The former is pure 
Platonic metaphysics, by suggesting that we've found in science the real 
method with which to cut past appearances to reality (past the appearance of 
mystical experience to the reality of neurons), while the latter is entirely 
anti-Platonic in point, by suggesting that life is a play of values, we 
value this for this and that for that--what we value lives, what we don't 
dies.

I suspect your answer will be down the latter's lines, but I thought I'd 
ask.

Matt

p.s. Talk of "foundations" sounds Platonic, and I'd probably try popping 
that bubble, too, but in a play of values, we can have so-called 
foundations, they just aren't the rigid kind that Plato and Descartes 
wanted.  Descartes wanted to find dry land in the middle of the 17th 
century's intellectual ocean, but the pragmatists teach us that the ocean is 
infinite and that the ground beneath our feet is simply a raft we've 
constructed to stay afloat.  Instead of conceiving of philosophy like Plato 
did, as the search for the one, true Paradise Island, hopping from fake 
island to fake island in the mean time, pragmatists suggest we think of 
philosophy as the quest for better and better boats.

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