[MD] Mystics and Brains

[david buchanan]

Case and y'all:

dmb said previously:
The notion that language and intellect can be reduced to brain activity is, 
in my opinion, soul-murdering bullshit. ..., the worldview that would reduce 
mystical experience to a brain-state is the problem we're trying to solve. 
Or so I thought.

Case replied:
...Science rather than destroying souls offers new forms for the soul's 
expression. We moderns live in a world constructed almost entirely of 
ideas...

dmb says:
Um, my attack here is upon reductionism, not science. I'm saying that its a 
huge mistake to confused enlightenment with a brain fart. The reductionist 
approach commits a profound category error. Its like trying to measure the 
greatness of a novel with a ruler and a scale. One might discover the book's 
size and weight, but that has nothing to do with the accomplishment of the 
novelist. To discover that one would have to examine the novel in a more 
appropriate way, namely by reading it.

Case said:
I had a colleague once who talked often about the difficulty of working in 
an environment governed by "random sliding criteria". An example of RSC 
comes from a Woody Allen movie where a woman at a party tells Woody, "I 
finally achieved an orgasm and was feeling really good about it until I 
found out it was the wrong kind." Mysticism is fraught with RSC.

dmb says:
If memory serves, Woody said something like, "The wrong kind? The worst sex 
I ever had was still right on the money". However, sex is rarely a mystical 
experience.

dmb said previously:
I thought the topic here was about the metaphysical assumptions (SOM) behind 
all that. I mean, radical empiricism rejects those assumptions and expands 
the notion of what counts as valid empirical evidence so that we are no 
longer limited to sensory experience.

To which Case replied:
Radical empiricism does no such thing. I have explained this already. James 
came up with radical empiricism. He says that experience is a product of 
natural processes and should be understood in terms of them. To the extent 
that mysticism can be understood as experience he would say it can be 
explained in terms of bodily functions regardless of whatever other meanings 
one places on it.

dmb says:
Okay, time for a little reality check. As I often like to do (to keep out 
those darb RSC and otherwise keep things honest, I'm gonna quote from public 
sources. Like I said before when you made this point, you are using early 
James to quarrel with late James. You are using his less mature psychology 
phase with his final metaphysical phase in order to deny the claims of his 
radical empiricism. I think this makes very little sense, so little that I'm 
not so sure you're being entirely intellectually honest. Here is a quote on 
this part of the issue from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology...

"In 1890 he focused on a congitive psychology of consciousness, but by 1896 
he had turned his attention to a dynamic psychology of subconscious states. 
By 1902 he was arguing for the supremacy of mystical states of consciousness 
over purely discursive ones, and after 1904, while pragmatisim was the 
international rage, he developed a metaphysics called radical empiricism to 
account for pure experience in the immediate moment, before the 
differentiation between subject and object - a way of accounting for how we 
both observe and experience consciousness simultaneously. His pragmatism 
dominsted the final phase of his intellectual career despite the fact that 
radical empiricism remained the core of his metaphysical system, ...

And here is a piece of Wikipedia's description of radical empiricism...

"James put forth this doctrine because he thought ordinary empiricism has or 
had the tendency to emphasize 'whirling particles' and particulars at the 
expense of the bigger picture (connection, causality, meaning). Both 
elements, James claims, are equally present in experience and both need to 
be accounted for."

"Dewey... attacks the same dichotomies that bothered James: 
objectivity/subjectivity, mind//body and so on."

The Wikipedia entry on James also mentions that radical empiricism is 
"distinct from everyday scientific empiricism.".

And the Wikipedia on ZAMM says, "While Pirisg is not the first philosopher 
to try to bridge the gap between science and mysticism, with the MOQ he 
elevates the whole debate to a new level by structuring both paradigms 
around a single concept: value."

Thanks.
dmb

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