[MD] Tit's

[Krimel]

gav: 
if you are talking of S and O (as primary; and you are), then we are in SOM.
yep that old familiar terrain where objects are objects and subjects are
subjects and never the twain shall mingle.

do you see what a radical stance it is to deny the primacy of subject and
object? it is a revolution of copernican scope.

and it is not heretical to be in SOM, in fact it is very very normal. we are
all immersed in it. the reason i shout it out is to show how ubiquitous and
pervasive it is. getting out of SOM is a team effort: the more we bolster
each other's forays into novel non-SOM territory, the more we can start to
map out the new reality that is the goal of Pirsig, this list (by
association) and the bona fide new age movement.

[Krimel]
I would say that the really critical problem with SOM is the implicit
duality of the mind body problem. I do not think that in general science
embraces such duality. Pirsig's indictments of science passes over this and
focuses on aspects of SOM that really have little to do with metaphysical
dualism.

The criticism of science as a materialistic monism rather ignores the fact
the science is not particularly dogmatic about describing what matter is.
Rather it treats its subject matter not so much as undefined but as
provisionally defined. As I said in an earlier post the task of science is
to find a vocabulary that reduces the uncertainty we find in the world about
us. It also serves to reduce ambiguity in our attempts to communicate with
one another about that world. It is in fact the rejection of dogmatism that
makes science effective, attractive and successful.

I would add that science is nothing if not map making of the sort you
mention. I do not think we or anyone else can map a "new reality." Reality
is very old. What we or anyone else might do is apply new maps to this very
old countryside. The mapmaking metaphor has been widely used and raises an
important point. The more precise a map is in many ways the less useful it
is. Jorge Luis Borges wrote a story in which the king's cartographers
created a map so accurate that it covered the kingdom from border to border.
Accurate perhaps, but useless. What makes a map useful it its ability to
compress lots of information into a small space. Compression in this way is
a cornerstone of information theory. The idea is to find the smallest
possible amount of information that allows the reconstruction of an entire
complex pattern. Jpg's and Mp3's are examples of this. But this is not
something new to science. Pi is an example of a very tiny amount of
information that allows the reconstruction of an infinite pattern. What we
have learned in the last century is that extraordinarily complex patterns
can emerge from very simple rules.

hey krimel,
i am not sure we are quite in sync yet but getting there.
looking forward to your temporal stuff. had to pull this up. don't know if
you are being disingenuous, cos it seems quite a simple point:

[Krimel]
Sorry I got sidetracked recently trying to "defend" the obvious to the
oblivious.

Much what I am about to say comes from the research of Benjamin Libet. I
believe it was in the late 50s and early 60s that Libet worked with a
neurosurgeon to map out the way the body is represented on the surface of
the cortex. To do the surgery the patients remained awake as the surgeon
opened a hole in the skull and then operated on the brain. The patients
remained awake because the brain does not contain pain receptors and the
patient's ability to respond to questions from the surgeon was crucial to
the success of the operation.

Libet's participation involved the consent of the patient to be involved in
pure research. Libet would apply electrical stimulation to the surface of
the cortex and ask the patients to describe their feelings. He would
stimulate a particular spot and the patients would report sensation in
various parts of the body, hands, feet, face, etc. 

Among his findings was the fact that unless stimulation was applied for some
fraction of a second it would not be reported as an experience by the
subjects. He later expanded his experiments to look into the role of
volition or conscious decision making. What he found was that in the process
of making a voluntary act the brain begins to respond before people report
having made a conscious decision to act. In fact the brain begins to gear up
to respond about a half second before they are aware of having made the
decision. Libet theorizes that what is happening is that decision making is
essentially an unconscious process and the consciousness serves to review
and override decisions.

My own speculations on the role of time in experience are much more
speculative. The conquest of time begins with the replication of patterns or
memory. This is what allows experiences of the past to carry forward and
impact the present. In its most rudimentary biological form that is what DNA
does. It allows the experience of the past to be duplicated in the present.
The miracles of modern science enhance imbue the modern mythos with brand
new examples of this process in the form of video and audio tape and digital
recording. We know from our own experience that something of this sort is
going on in our heads. One of the chief abilities that set us aside from
other animals and indeed from machine intelligence is our skills at
recognizing patterns. This skill depends almost entirely on our having
access to our past experiences in the present. Learning is in fact the
influence of past experience on present behavior. We know that we can learn
things unconsciously. But then not all memory, or representation of the
past, seems to require conscious involvement.

One of the first detailed accounts of how memory works comes from Donald
Hebb. Hebb advanced and associationistic theory derived in part from
Aristotle and Locke's associationism. More recent work has altered Hebb's
theories a bit but has focused mainly on the physiological processes by
which associations are formed and strengthen by experience.

As an aside I would note that this process of strengthening patterns of
association results in a fractal structure of consciousness. Pirsig provides
an elegant if simplistic account of the process when he describes his use of
his trays of slips as a research tool. The more a pattern of association is
invoked the stronger and more robust it becomes in the same way and for
essentially the same reasons the branch of a tree becomes thinker are more
branches form along its length or one of Pirsig's groups of slips grew
larger and needed to be fragmented as his research progressed.

What has evolved in our species is greater brain volume, more neurons and
more interconnections between neurons. This expanded brain capacity allows
us the ability to recall and process more and more information about the
past with greater and greater fidelity. It also at some critical point
allows us to use data from the past to model the future. This ability gives
us the capacity to simulate travel backwards and forwards in time. This is
analogous to our ability to construct a 3D world from 2D data. In other
words the 3D structure of our brains allows us access to a 4D simulation of
the past and present. It is also what allows us to take other points of view
and to see ourselves as both subjects and objects.