[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

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.

[Krimel]
At least you have "attempted" to address the issue for a change. Thanks for
that. But now you have pre-intellectual experience as a non-cognitive
process. Puleez! Since I don't get any indication here that you even know
what a cognitive process is, I let that slide. There is no weasel wording
around that fact that every fool knows that sound and light are separate
modalities. Touch and emotion are different things. Memory and imagination
are separate modes of understanding. The world never presents itself to us a
unity. We construct the illusion of unity through the process of perception.

Just to illustrate how confused you are in this regard I turn to your own
beloved Williams James. In part IV of "A World of Pure Experience" he
clearly states:

"But the whole system of experiences as they are immediately given presents
itself as a quasi-chaos through which one can pass out of an initial term in
many directions and yet end in the same terminus, moving from next to next
by a great many possible paths."

Perhaps as James scholar you would care to square this with your slanderous
abuse of the man, who also says, "This is why I called our experiences,
taken together, a quasi-chaos. There is vastly more discontinuity in the sum
total of experiences than we commonly suppose."

[dmb]
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. 

[Krimel]
Personally I would make some additions to the notion of five senses but you
have really hit a new low to suggest that our knowledge of the world is
derived from ESP. I have no doubt that there are those who would support you
in this. There are people who believe in demon possession, Mayan prophecy
and morphogenic fields. I have no doubt that they are as smug about being
ridiculous as you are.

[dmb]
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.

[Krimel]
The da Vinci story was a sterling example of your failure to understand what
you were talking about. I gave you the reference that talked about the
incident in detail. Maybe you should read it and stop embarrassing yourself.

Since you have never actually addressed how I have applied the "facts" it is
hard to evaluate your comments here. You are constantly talking to some
caricature in your own head. Frankly, your romantic abuse of metaphysics
seems like nothing so much as an excuse to avoid taking a math class.

[dmb]
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. 

[Krimel]
I don't know how you would be in a position to characterize my views as
either Jungian or Skinnerian. But you are correct in recognizing that I do
believe psychology consciously separated itself from philosophy in 1879 as a
direct attempt to steer away from the muddled thinking you personify. I have
always thought it was a mistake but you present a strong argument that it
was not.

[dmb]
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.

[Krimel]
Wowzers, Dave and Dreyfus smack down the double D and all the AI folks took
to the hills. What an impact you are having there, sport. I have been
looking forward to listening to those Dreyfus lectures but you are turning
into something of a buzzkill. I take heart from your demonstrable lack of
clarity on James and Pirsig. Surely, anything a scholar of your stature has
to say about computer technology can be banked on... in Bizarro, Backwards
Land.