[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
Dave's author is confused when he says, "These are the scientific specialists, scholars, Gelehrten, and all like-minded types who have dominated philosophy for the past two centuries. For them, the problem of existence has become a matter of cognitive science to be answered through analysis of the brain-mind problem, using techniques borrowed from neurophysiology, linguistics and computer science." ..First of all if it is true that science has dominated philosophy for the past two centuries then I would say it is because philosophers have had so little of value to say. But he is confused when he says that the cognitive sciences are in the least concerned with "existence". Cognitive sciences in a philosophical sense are not concerned with ontology. Their concern is epistemology.

dmb says:
First of all, is it really your contention that the domination of the scientific worldview is the result of philosophy suckiness? Are you really that silly or are you just impersonating a 15 year old boy for kicks? More to the point, you are apparently confused about what Ron's author means. He's saying that "the problem of existence HAS BECOME a matter of cognitive science" FOR these "like-minded types". And this point is very well illustrated in our recent conversations, where you predictably and typically trotted out neurophysiology as an answer in a metaphysical dispute. The author is talking about people of YOUR temperament and worldview exactly, my friend. And this worldview is no mystery to anyone. Its common sense among educated Westerners. Its nothing to be ashamed of, but it just kills me that you dish it up as if it were news. You're like the bible thumper who thinks I never heard of Jesus.

Krimel summed it up:
Perhaps someone has claimed that science is free of assumptions but certainly not me. I have in fact said point blank what my assumptions are. 1. I think therefore I am. 2. There exists a world external to me. (BTW, this says nothing about its nature or source only that I am not all that is.) 3. In that world there are other minds like mine. 4. Nature is orderly, it contains patterns. 5. We can know nature. 6. All phenomena have natural causes. 7. Knowledge is derived from acquisition of experience.

dmb says:
That is very clear and familiar. It also happens to be SOM, complete with an allusion to Descartes. Did I mention how adorable you are?

Krimel continued:
Remember our chats about faith Dave? I believe I have been honest on that score. How about you? Just what are your assumptions? Something you don't like about these?

dmb says:
I don't think I understand the connection between our chats on faith and your seven assumptions or my alternatives to them. And where the question of honesty comes from, I have no idea. But let me say my temperament is such that Pirsig and the other pragmatists seem quite right to me. For Pirsig, experience is reality. As John McDermott puts it, "the drama of experience is the fulcrum" of Dewey's work. And you know my fondness for James's Radical Empiricism, which they all share. I don't know that it is an assumption, but experience seems impossible to deny. If there is going to be anything like valid knowledge about anything, it has to be based on experience and tested in experience. If there is a reasonable way to avoid this conclusion, I honestly don't know what it is. And if faith is a belief that is not empirically based or can't be tested, then I have no respect for it.

By the way, there is nothing supernatural about philosophical mysticism and it fits quite nicely with radical empiricism. The mystics say that reality is intellectually unknowable and radical empiricism explains what this means in epistemological terms. If the primary empirical reality refers to a pre-conceptual moment of awareness and conceptualization follows from it and is distinct from it, then the most immediate reality is intellectually unknowable. That isn't really very hard to swallow when you realize that the claim amounts to. They're saying, basically, that reality isn't conceptual. Or, as I said to Platt, having an experience and knowing you had an experience are two different things.

If you assume "there is a world external to me" and "there are other minds like mine" and "we can know nature", then you subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth. You're using terms like mind and nature but this is just another way to say that we are subjects in an objective world. This is common sense realism. The things you see around in the world are real and your perceptions more or less correspond to them. In this view, experience is conceived pretty much as you explained it, a transduction of energy. Ultimately these subjects who take in the world around them are also objects in the world and their capacity to transduce is a physical phenomenon too. Thus your essentialist monism.

But the MOQ says this external world is not reality. Its a concept. The so-called things you see are not really things at all. They're concepts. 

Remember way back when I first jumped in with the Leonardo da Vinci story, where he drew what he knew rather than what was "objectively" there? I was trying to make the point, that we see with the mind more than with the eye. That was a less sweeping form of the same idea. Read up on "the myth of the given". This is another way of describing that common sense realism. The idea here is that the things in the world come in through the senses and we see them pretty much as they are, so that the external world is simply "given" to the senses. They say this is a myth for exactly the reasons I'm hammering on so annoyingly, namely the external world is NOT just given, its a concept. You see only what the culture allows you to see because that where all our concepts come from, see? This shapes the world as we know it so profoundly that some people will even tell you it IS the world as we know it, every last bit of it. Here's where I'd counter by putting experience over language, because the latter is derived from the former. As John McDermott puts it, guys like Rorty (who also call themselves pragmatists) think, or at least used to think, that the task of philosophy was language and not experience, but "that's not what James would hold at all, nor would Dewey" and Rorty "never really, publicly recanted" on that point. There is a range of dispute about HOW profound that influence is, but you're not even in the ballpark.

Romantically yours,
dmb  

  


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