[MD] What is SOM?

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
You want to claim that pre-intellectual experience is a unity. I have presented facts to assert it is not. I claim that unity is a cognitive illusion that only occurs at the level of perception. It is the result of the synthesis of multimodal sensory input and memory of past experience.

dmb says:
Yes, the mind synthesizes and unifies experience but that is not a pre-intellectual experience. It is a cognitive process. The unity of the pre-cognitive experience is as yet undifferentiated precisely because cognitive processes have not yet entered into it. I mean, basically, you're talking about a different unity. You're talking about the integration process whereby the present experience is taken up and understood in terms of conceptual knowledge with ego consciousness, everyday consciousness. The unity I'm talking about is what James calls pure experience, what Northrop calls the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, what Pirsig calls the primary empirical reality, immediate experience, the undivided experience or the Quality event. This is another case where we're talking past each other, although for slightly different reasons this time. 

Also, it may help to realize that there have been alternative to our Western ideas about the five senses. They seem to be predicated on indisputable physiological facts but that's not exactly true. Don't get me wrong. These ideas work, especially at the doctor's office. But I've seen some pretty wild alternatives from the East and the some of the conclusions drawn by those working on the philosophy of perception right now in the West would defy common sense in many ways too. The da Vinci story, for example, is a contemporary example. Dreyfus too, is essentially challenging traditional Western assumptions about perception and cognition. I understand it, THESE are the facts that bare on the question of perception and cognition. Your facts merely beg the question. Or they address the wrong question. I guess I could make lemonade from it, but philosophically speaking its worse than irrelevant because your "facts" are predicated on the very ideas in question. That's what it means to beg the question.

Seems to me that psychology is your thing and on some level you believe philosophical questions can be handled with psychology and related sciences. I'd be a little more sympathetic with such a stance if the psychology were more Jungian and less Skinnerian, but not much. For the most part psychology has inherited Dreyfus's proverbial lemon and so have you. You're defending assumptions that have been obsolete since 1910 or 1957, depending on who you ask. Its not like we have to throw everything out the window and start all over and like I said, most of the time these ideas work. But when science goes so far as to try and duplicate intelligence in a machine on that model, the flaws and limits are going to show up. It should be added that Dreyfus was around when AI was just taking off and in 1964 wrote a paper predicting failure and explaining why. This was turned into a book called "What Computers Can't Do" in 1972, with a second edition in 1979 and the title was changed to "What Computers Still Can't Do" for the third edition in 1992. These ideas are also included in last year's lectures on Heidegger, which you have.

 

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