[MD] subject/object: no quality?

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, Platt --


> As always you supply food for thought. Here is an excerpt from a
> recent article about the ideas of Pinker. I wonder if they fit with your
> own.  Offhand I would say you and Pinker have something in common.

Steven Pinker was new to me, so I did some research and learned that he is a 
Harvard psychology professor who has written a lot of books about language 
as related to (Gav's word) "ideation".  This would tend to position him 
closer to the semioticists here than to "valuists" like Pirsig and myself. 
I also read his long essay "The Mystery of Consciousness" which is 
accessible at TIME's website.  Proof that Pinker is not an essentialist is 
this statement that appears under his heading "The Brain as Machine":

"Scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine not because they are 
mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every 
aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain."

That conclusion is not only unfounded but is more evidence of the drift 
toward psycho-cybernetics that characterizes our postmodern thinking.  It is 
what Richard Schain, a psychiatrist, describes as "the modern view that 
there is no such thing as the self, that there is only a complex arrangement 
of synapses and neurons in the brain, giving rise to the illusion of self."

No neurophysicist, cognitive scientist, or brain surgeon has found, or will 
ever find, subjective consciousness in the brain.  He may discover 
"ties"--evidence of responsive mechanisms linked to conscious behavior--but 
not consciousness itself.  By the same token, no cyberneticist or 
nanotechnician will ever build a machine with consciousness in it.   These 
are myths of New Age pseudo-scientism.  (It angers me to see the conscious 
self explained as a digital mechanism, especially by intellectuals who 
should know better than to confuse information with awareness.)

> Maybe I get it wrong but it seems the division of subject/object
> in your metaphysics would be one of items in Pinker's "cast of basic
> concepts" if not indeed the primary concept.

Your reviewer states that the cast of basic concepts "...includes notions of 
things happening (not anything happening in particular; rather, the idea of 
happening). We all contrast ... coming from going; human from nonhuman, 
animate from inanimate. We cause things to happen; we prevent things from 
happening.  These are the most general kinds of states, actions, and 
conditions, and these are what Mr. Pinker avers 'to be the major words in a 
language of thought.'"

I don't see the "division of subject/object" in this analysis.  I take it to 
mean simply that we are all aware of change as a continuum of connected 
events and exercise some control over them.  That's hardly a profound 
revelation.  We observe reality from an infinitesimal point in the 
space/time system and ascribe dimensionality to it. This illusory 
perspective is partly due to the limitations of organic sensibility.  But I 
believe it has more to do with the primary division of sensibility from its 
source, which is at the root of all differentiation.

That we see the universe as an intelligently designed, orderly system 
indicates that we "make sense out of it", which is precisely what human 
reason is designed to do.  When it doesn't make sense, something has gone 
awry with the main apparatus of reason, the brain or its ability to 
integrate sensory data.  But the disoriented psychotic person maintains 
selfness, even if he loses all sense of time, space, or the knowledge of 
what objects and people are.  He is still a conscious self capable of 
value-awareness.

Thanks for introducing me to Pinker, Platt, even though the views of Pinker 
and Priday hardly go together like two P's in a pod  ;-)   But can you be 
more specific regarding the primary subject/object division about which you 
seem to have some reservations?

Cheers,
Ham