[MD] Tit's

[Ham Priday]

Krimel, Peter, Ron. DMB, Platt. et al --

[Krimel]:
> This recent set of exchanges has been very helpful to me in
> understanding what this SOM brouhaha is all about.
> I have long been a subscriber to the strawman school,
> thinking that it was Pirsig's way of bitching about a whole
> cluster of things but that no one really subscribes to SOM
> as he framed it.  I do agree with Peter that this is the way
> we all see things. There is a set of private experiences that
> each of us has that can only be known to and by us individually
> and there is a public set of experiences that we communicate
> about through mutual consensus.
>
> But SOM is also Pirsig's version of the long standing mind/body
> dualism debate wherein mental substance and physical substance
> are two irreducible forms of "stuff" which mysteriously interact
> but are not dependant on each other. Pirsig is ultimately always
> talking about how each of us has and makes sense of our
> individual experience. Even from a purely SOM perspective
> half of the equation is subjective private experience. I have
> always been puzzled that hardly anyone here spends much time
> pondering how it is that each of us has any kind of experience
> at all.  Sure Ham drones on about it but he is mostly just making
> things up and ignores or misrepresents what medicine and science
> have to say on the subject.

If science and medicine are the philosopher's information source, then all 
philosophy can offer is an SOM-based ontology.  I happen to think 
metaphysics is capable of something more, but of course by not following 
science as my authority, I'm seen by some as "making things up."

Actually, you have described the Cartesian concept of mind/matter quite 
well, and have drawn proper attention to the MoQ's inadequate epistemology 
for experience (the "subjective half of the equation).  While your essay is 
comprehensive and illuminating, for what it's worth as a "droner", I should 
like to comment briefly on some of the points you raise.

> There seems to be an underlying idea in much of what goes on in
> these discussions that experience is a unitary phenomena. Not just
> the idea of mystical oneness but that we can have "an" experience.
> From my point of view this is definitely and demonstrably an illusion
> in the "Kulpian" sense, as Ron has outlined. We do not have singular
> experiences. ...We have multiple experiences through multiple
> pathways and we synthesize those into the singularity of experience
> and of self.

Neither experience nor the cognizance that comes from it is "singular".  All 
sensory impressions are related to previous experience (in memory) and 
intellectually intgrated into a cogent "whole" that represents our current 
reality.

> Experience begins as sensory input.  Sensory input arrives through
> the various pathways of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature,
> balance, pressure, proprioception and perhaps a few more.

"Arrival" and "departure" are transitional terms that imply cause and 
effect.  When you say "sensory input arrives through the pathways", the 
implication is that sensory information is the substantive source or cause 
of experience.  That's the neurophysical model to which you and Pirsig are 
beholden.  At the risk of contradicting science, my epistemology reverses 
this model.  I maintain that value-sensibility (what Pirsig calls 
"pre-intellectual experience") is primary to objective experience, which 
means that the "stuff" of reality is not matter but value.  In other words, 
the intellect constructs (delineates, differentiates) its experiential 
objects from value.

[snip]

> This most recently evolved frontal cortex performs the active synthesis
> of our fragmented experience. This function is sometimes referred to as
> "executive function". I like to think of it as the "sense of senses". In a
> set of studies done in cooperation with the Dali Lama it was found that
> monks who meditated on a regular basis have measurably different kinds of
> activity going on in their frontal lobe and that the longer they had 
> engaged
> in meditative practices the more different this activity was.

Cerebro-neural development occurs throughout life, and cognitive activities, 
such as creating art or music, conceptualizing, problem solving, prayer and 
meditation, affect the nerve network and formation of the brain itself.

> Pirsig is right to say that that the sense of self or the sense of values
> can not be located in any one place. It emerges from a host of
> isolated inputs and pathways that are integrated into a whole.
> It can also be shown that disruption of these inputs and pathways
> has profound affects on individual's ability to perceive the world,
> on their sense of self and on their ability to make sense of the
> world and to relate to others.
>
> I would suggest that this "illusion" of the self and the illusion of an
> external world is exactly what we have been designed to create.

I agree with all of the above, which is why we cannot escape the self/other 
dichotomy as long as we are active participants in this world.  Neither the 
MoQ nor Essentialism can change experiential reality.  What changes it is 
our choice of values, how we respond to them, and what we make of them.  I 
submit that a philosophy which offers a metaphysical foundation can help us 
in that choice by broadening our reality perspective and giving a sense of 
meaning and purpose to the life experience.

Thanks for this thorough analysis of human perception and experience from 
the MoQ viewpoint.

Regards,
Ham