[MD] The Word is Not the Thing

[John Carl]

Ok Ham,

I came across something that seemed relevant to the discussion, so I typed
it out.  Royce's letter verbatim, but the poetic spacing is my own.

-----------------

To William James, Sept. 19, 1880

Now here again I think that people are pursuing this study in too
superficial a way.  Everywhere one meets the question thus put:  What
relation in the structure of knowledge, does thought-work bear to the
contributions of experience?

This is a great problem, but not the deepest one.  The deepest question was
Kant's, how is experience possible?

Only this question can now be understood better than Kant ever understood
it.  What is experience?  A series of states of consciousness, known as a
series.  The definition has two parts.  Experience is a series: that
everyone admits.  Experience is known as a series: that most writers regard
as too simple a thing to mention.  Yet just here is the kernel.  How is a
series of states to be known as a series?  Tell us this and you have a
philosophy.  Leave this untold and you stop half way.

How is experience possible as a series of states known to be a series?

So I put the case to myself, and here I make a beginning of all
investigation.--My solution in general is something like this:  For the
series to be known as a series, each one of its states must know the others.
 But in each state only itself is given.  Hence each state can know the
others only by actively constructing or postulating them.  Hence the series
of states can be known as a series only through the conscious activity  of
each of its states or moments.  Hence time as a series of states is never a
datum, only a postulate or construction.  Simple reception gives us no
knowledge of anything beyond the present. Only spontaneity constructs the
world in time. -- Now this looks very simple, but has in fact very
far-reaching consequences.

If experience is possible only through this constructive process, then what
is the ultimate datum?

Not matter.

Not mind.

Not a series of experiences, not the distinction of

object

and subject,

but just this:

a moment

of reception of some content,

joined with a constructive act that postulates

a world

of other consciousness

beyond the present data.

Reception means a passive state of consciousness,

construction an active state.

An Union of passion and action

in one moment only,

Herein is contained all we can think about the universe.

--------------------

>
> "Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem
> of
> consciousness.  When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we
> realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the
> information is inside a computer.  Our thoughts have an order, not of
> themselves, but because the mind generates the spatio-temporal
> relationships
> involved in every experience.  We can never have any experience that does
> not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of animal logic
> that mold sensations into objects.  It would be erroneous, therefore, to
> conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process, as
> existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in
> it
> a spatio-temporal order.  The situation, as we have seen, is like playing a
> CD-the information leaps into three-dimensional sound, and in that way, and
> in that way only, does the music indeed exist."
>                                            -- R, Lanza: A New Theory of the
> Universe
>
> Note that the terms he uses to identify the "creator" are "consciousness"
> and "mind", neither of which is Life.  This may be a minor matter to the
> biologist, but I think it's a significant point for the philosopher.


a significant indeed!  I agree with you completely there.

as a biologists and a philosopher both admit, the only place we really find
or experience mind is in biological creatures.    I think that why the
emphasis is upon *animal* perception rather than intellectual perception.

A key difference metaphysically!  And what saves it, in my view from
aspersions of anthropocentricism.


appreciatively,

John