[MD] What is SOM?

[Krimel]

[Krimel]
What sets science and empiricism a part from dogma and rationalism is that
they do not make statements.

dmb replies:
Since when is it dogmatic to make statements? The claim that science makes
no statements is laughable. Science lays down laws. Its also pretty absurd
to claim that radical empiricism isn't empirical. C'mon Krimel, you're not
even trying. 

[Krimel]
What I had intended to say is that science does not make statements that can
not be challenged. All scientific statements are tentative. I don't get the
feeling you are at all comfortable with this. You insist that reality "must"
be a unity. Mystical experience "must" be treated and understood in a
particular way. In science that is regarded as a low quality position.

[dmb]
But more to the point, James describes pure experience in a single sentence.
He says, "The instant field of the present is always experience in its
'pure' state, plain unqualified actuality, a simple THAT, as yet
undifferentiated into thing and thought, and only virtually classifiable as
objective fact or as someone's opinion." That's all it means to call it a
unity. It is not yet rendered into parts. Think of that brain scientist who
had a stroke and achieved Nirivana. Because one hemisphere was not
functioning, she was temporarily unable to differentiate but could take in
experience as a unity.

[Krimel]
If what you are saying here is that experience prior to perception is not
classified, then sure I get that. I believe that's what Bolte-Taylor was
saying. The stoke disabled her language function and she was unable to make
distinctions and discriminations. Classification however is a distinctly
human function. It is experience written on biology. It is the pattern of
who we are and what we have done. In her case it was interrupted by a
stroke. I am tempted to suggest that what you are advocating is the active
pursuit of pathology. But I realize that mysticism is neither that nor a
regression to childhood ways of thinking. 

There is a bit of a paradox in both James' account and your interpretation
of it. That would be that we could never actually have an experience of this
kind. Since we would contaminate its purity by having it as an experience.
Bolte-Taylor for example was recounting her experience but what we get his
her recollection and classification of that experience.

dmb says:
If you think about it, in the classic scientific method scientists do
nothing but interpret their own experience. They carefully report the
circumstances of the experiment and the results they witnessed so that
others can duplicate the experiment and thus repeat the experience to see
these results for themselves. In principle, the mystical experience can be
handled in exactly the same way. The only difference is that mysticism is
not a sensory experience. Traditional empiricism (SOM) dismisses this as
merely subjective, just as you have done here. Despite your protests to the
contrary, these assumption are implicitly contained in your assertions. This
is just one of many examples. Here's another...

[Krimel]
Yes, yes this is Wilber's view as well. But the problem remains. If an
experimenter experiments of herself in this way how are others to interpret
her results. Should they just take her word for it? If they are unable to
replicate her results in themselves does that invalidate her results?

Or let me ask you what to make of this: in the town I where I live a revival
was held every night for nearly six months. Thousands attended every
service. During the services people claimed to be healed, they claimed the
dead were raised and thousands had mystical experiences that connected them
one on one with the Living God. They claimed to have had direct personal
experiences that certainly fell within your definition of radical
empiricism. The reported to all have similar experiences that were
replicable night after night. They undergirded their accounts with
metaphysical statements about the true nature of reality and the presence of
the creator.

Would you be willing to endorse their claims?

dmb says:
I understand that. Its common sense. Its traditional sensory empiricism. It
seems self evident because that is the worldview we've inherited. But its
also the obsolete model, the lemon that won't work for AI. And of course the
MOQ rejects the the limits of sensory empiricism. 

[Krimel]
Let's get clear on this one. Sensory empiricism: what does that mean to you
and how does it differ from radical empiricism. I seriously do not think
that James would endorse as experience anything that did not at minimum
involve activation of the nervous system. Feeling, values, the relations
between experiences and meaning are what I take it he wants empiricism to
give and account of.

dmb says:
A continuum has no breaks, no parts. To say the continuum is
undifferentiated is redundant, really. One is a noun and the other describes
it, but the both mean the same thing. James, as you just saw, describes pure
experience as undifferentiated also. The fact that he mentions thought and
things as not yet present is important too. He's talking about an experience
in which subjects and objects have not yet been distinguished. This is what
it means to say that subjects and objects are derived from Quality or to say
that experience comes first and subjects and objects come later. This is
what it means to say subjects and objects are concepts that follow from
experience. By saying that subjects and objects are inferred from experience
BY THE SUBJECT, you reverse this central idea. Instead of being an
alternative to SOM, you've turned it into an endorsement of SOM, a
re-statement of SOM.

[Krimel]
James is saying that the conceptions or concepts follow experiences. That
this is the classification of experience. It is not as though, as you would
have it that "experience" is some undefined universal intangible that
excretes subjects and object. James note that what is happening is the
classification of experience as subject and object and that any experience
might be classified as either.

I have no idea what would constitute an acceptable term in your lexicon for
a particular locus of experience. I call it "me". I am where these
discriminations are made. This it were the meaning of experience is happens.
This is what I take the MoQ to be giving and account of.

dmb says:
I tried to explain SOM in terms of your own assumptions recently, when you
listed them. I've tried to show where it is implied in your assertions. I've
explained it in terms of sensory empiricism, the correspondence theory of
truth, the myth of the given, and the postmodern view of language. You've
smoked me right down to the filter on this one. (Apologies to Tom Waits)
Would you say there is an external world to be perceived regardless of
whether or not anyone was there to perceive it? That's what it means to
believe in an objective reality. Would you say that the external world comes
in to us through our senses and that we organize that sensory data into a
picture of the world? That's what it means to be a subject in an objective
world. Aren't you saying exactly this, but in greater detail? That's how it
looks from here. 

[Krimel]
You addressed my assumptions, that is true, but as I responded what you
addressed were not particularly relevant to my assumptions. I pointed out
that I was using only terms that should be acceptable within the MoQ to
describe the formation of the patterns that make up "levels." None of my
assumptions addressed substance or truth whether correspondence or given. I
do not use or make assumptions about the kind of "objectivity" that is
damned as SOM. 

I do think there is an external world independent of any observer. But that
says nothing whatever about its nature. It does now claim that I am a
subject existing independently of that external world. As with all of my
assumptions, it is provisional. I do infer the existence of such an external
world as the overlap of shared experience with other observers who report
commonality in our experience. Such a reality is objective in that sense. As
Ham might point out not much can be said about such a reality in the absence
of any observer. But I don't think that the MoQ demands that we discard
inference as a tool for acquiring knowledge. It is after all vital to
pattern recognition.

I would say that claiming that "the external world comes in to us through
our senses and that we organize that sensory data into a picture of the
world," is exactly what James says radical empiricism is about; Pirsig as
well.

So yes I am saying this but I don't think this is at all what Pirsig is
railing against as the evil SOM. There is no duality. There is no
disconnection between me and my experience or me and the world external.
There are no fixed rigid objects existing in and of themselves. There is
only experience guiding my own particular understanding of the world around
me. 

What you seem to be advocating is some extreme form of phenomenology that is
indistinguishable from solipsism.