[MD] The Trouble With Wilber

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
I have previously addressed the problem with this view of materialism and 
determinism. They are both carry-overs from the by gone days of Newton and 
LaPlace. Only the uniformed or willfully ignorant cling to this view of 
science any more. So tilt away at that windmill if you like, the miller left 
for an office job a century ago and no one has been doing even routine 
maintenance on the mill since.

dmb says:
I think lots of well-educated people still hold to scientific materialism 
and the metaphysical assumptions behind it. There was the Positivism of 
Comte and more recently we had the Vienna circle. Rorty was still working 
these issues, trying to convince the many hold overs, until just the other 
day. To suggest that my complaints are about a dead and buried problems 
seems even more strange since you are demonstrating the same problem even as 
we speak. This topic came up big time in the class I took last semester. The 
professor, who was trained in psychology, got into an interesting discussion 
with a retired physicist and they agreed that scientists are trained to 
think and work within the framework of realism. Philosophers of science are 
going to question this sort of thing if they're worth a damn, of course, but 
the people who do the actual lab work still function within that worldview. 
My late great father-in-law and his friends didn't question it either. 
Apparently I'm talking about something much broader than you imagine, a 
basic world view that included Einstein as well as Newton. Wilber discusses 
how even the most recent and wierd stuff in physics gets trapped in 
flatland.

Krimel said:
But I don't see Pirsig calling for the abandonment of the scientific method 
or the wholesale adoption of whatever flits through ones mind at any given 
moment or even that deeply held convictions about the oneness of nature 
should not be put to the test. What I hear him say is, "The real purpose of 
scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you 
know something you don't actually know."

dmb says:
Nobody is saying we ought to abandon the scientific method or replace it 
with capricious whimsy. And Pirsig's line here is only comforting insofar as 
it prevents one from interpreting the MOQ as a form of subjective idealism 
or solipsism. The MOQ has an element of realism that keeps it from being 
crypto-religious or Hegelian and I love that. Again, the MOQ's expansion of 
empiricism is not a rejection of empiricism. The idea is to improve it, not 
trash it.

Krimel said:
I think I have shown above that whether Pirsig and I see eye to eye he is 
not recommending that an individual's account of their interior state should 
be taken at face value. [The Dalai Lama said] "I have great respect for 
science," he says. "But scientists, on their own, cannot prove nirvana. 
Science shows us that there are practices that can make a difference between 
a happy life and a miserable life. A real
understanding of the true nature of the mind can only be gained through 
meditation." Clearly he thinks that greater understanding can be achieved 
through traditional practice but he seems neither hostile to research or in 
need of special treatment in how it is conducted. In fact he appears to 
welcome rigorous testing.

dmb says:
An individual's account should be taken at face value? Hostile to research? 
In need of special treatment? Rigorous testing is unwelcome? I'm not saying 
any of those things. In fact, the Dali Lama has expressed one of my most 
central points: A real understanding of the true nature of the mind can only 
be achieved through meditation. EEGs provide such data only if you believe 
that the brain and the mind are the same thing. That's materialism. That's 
reductionism. That's SOM. That's you, dude...

Krimel said:
You seem to be claiming that one can have an experience that does not 
involve the senses at all. All experience involves the senses. If senses are 
not engaged there is neither experience nor memory of the experience. It is 
one thing to claim that the inner world can be altered to have experiences 
that are other than ordinary but they are occurring in a particular body in 
a particular place. Having an experience that "feels" disconnected from 
space and time is not the same as being disconnected.

dmb says:
No, for the millionth time, I'm not saying sensory experience is false. The 
complaint is about the limits of what can be learned through the senses and 
that it ain't the only kind that counts...

"The MOQ subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all 
legitmate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what 
the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge 
gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical 
reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and 
metaphysics as unverifiabvle. The MOQ varies from this by saying that the 
values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and 
that in the past they have been exclued for metaphysical reasons, not 
empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical 
assumptions that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and 
anything that can't be classified as a subject or an object isn't real. 
There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an 
assumption." p99

Krimel said:
Having an experience that can only be observed by the observer may be 
entertaining; it may be profoundly spiritual but what meaning does it have 
beyond the individual? The isolated experience of this kind means nothing to 
anyone else. Furthermore...

dmb says:
Again, you are exhibiting the very problem you deny. "Everyone seems to be 
guided by an 'objective', 'scientific' view of life that told each person 
that his essential self is his evolved material body (a particular body in a 
particular place, as you put it). Ideas and societies are a component of 
brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and 
therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of 
ship's radio operatiors sending messages back and forth in the night. A 
scientific intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated 
people living and dying in little cells of psychic soltary confinement, 
unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another 
because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so." p283

"By this (radical empiricism) he (James) meant that subjects and objects are 
not the starting points of reality. Subject and objects are secondary. They 
are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as 
'the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later 
reflection with its conceptual categories'. In this basic flux of 
experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between 
consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet 
emerged in the forms wich we make them. Pure Experience cannot be called 
either physical or psychical; it logically precedes this distinction." 
p364-5

Krimel continued:
...assigning meaning even to oneself without reference to anyone or anything 
is at best a risky business and at worst a path to self delusion. It may 
reveal profound truth and it may just be self delusion. The Apostle Paul had 
such an experience. So do people who have epileptic seizures. You want to 
put the Dali Lama and the schizophrenic on equal footing. You are not 
calling for an expansion of evidence you are calling for abandonment of any 
standard of evidence.

dmb says:
Without reference to anyone or anything? Huh? I've been going on and on 
about the scientific method, about the marriage of meditation and the 
scientific method. This would make plenty of references to plenty of things 
and people. It would involve publishing and peer review and all that. Its 
just that it wouldn't be limited to sensory data. In fact, the metaphysical 
premise behind that limitation has been replaced with one that sees subjects 
and objects as concepts, as interpretations of experience rather than the 
preconditions that allow experience. You've been criticizing this expanded 
empiricism in terms of the limited empiricism it was meant to replace. This 
is what I mean in saying that you repeatedly offer the problem as a response 
to the solution...

Krimel said (Frankly):
Dave is sounds an awful lot like, despite your denials, you are convinced 
that there is a Spirit external to the material world and that there are 
forces outside of nature that act on and alter experience. What else can you 
mean when you say, "This experience has to be observed with the eye of the 
mind or the eye of contemplation, not the eye of flesh, if you will. That's 
what I mean by expanding what counts as empirical evidence." Empirical 
evidence is sensory evidence. You can propose a new sense if you like but 
you are going to have to account for its physiological effect just like all 
the other senses are accounted for. If you want to step outside of Nature 
that's cool but don't complain about not being taken seriously by science.

dmb says:
See, the premise of you criticism here is that nature and the material world 
are the same thing, that empirical evidence is sensory evidence. This is 
flatland, my friend. And what I mean in saying that mystical experience 
can't be observed with the eye of flesh (sensory empiricism) is exactly what 
the Dali Lama said, that a real understanding of the mind can only be gained 
through meditation, not through scientific observation of the brains of 
mystics.

"Newburg was reiterating a position spelled out my William James a century 
earlier in THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. In a chapter titled 
'Religion and Neurology', James concluded that neurology can neither prove 
nor disprove the validity of specific mystical visions. If a mystic suffers 
from mental illness or brain damage, that doesn't mean that her visions are 
worthless delusions, any more than the mental illness of poests, artists, or 
scientist invalidates their achievements. We must judge these visions by 
their philosophical moral cojsequesnces. 'By their fruit ye sahll know them' 
James added, 'not by their roots." Rational Mysticism, Chapter 4, "Can 
Neurology Save Us?", page 82.

"Unlike Andrew Newburg, Michael Persinger, and Susan Blackmore, Austin has 
conducted little mysticism-related research on others; his primary research 
subject is himself. But his book represents one of the most thorough, not to 
say exhausitive, reviews of the neurophysiology of mysticism to date. Austin 
professes no interest in defending the prennial philosophy - or any other 
philosophy for that matter. He call his outlook 'perennial 
psychophysiology', to emphasixe its grounding not in philosophy or theology, 
which he views with suspicion, but in brain science." Rational Mysticism, 
Chapter 7, "Zen and James Austin's Brain." p 125

That'll have to do for now.

dmb

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