[MD] Krimel's evolution

[John Carl]

Trying to find a thread I'd posted that Matt asked, poking in the archives,
I found some damn fine writing from Krimel, that explained a lot.  Thought
it was worth re-posting, considering his recent explanation of goals:
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dmb,
What a wiggling load a weasel wording you dumped in your last post! A
stunning display of priggish romanticism. I really don't have time waste
with such rubbish. You think I don't understand the metaphysical issues you
chirp on about? You insult me. I too took a course from the chairman of my
philosophy dept. The text book was John Lilly's Center of the Cyclone. I got
'A's on my papers and a tip to cover the chapstick. I used to camp out at
bookstores the night before Castaneda's books were published, like they were
Harry Potter. I reviewed ZMM in a magazine just a few months after it was
published. I read Robert Monroe and Charles Tart. I have a letter signed by
J.B. Rhine advising me on the best path to take into parapsychology. I was a
staff volunteer for a conference where Fritjo Capra spoke.

I was a psychonaught, motherfucker. The "real world" was just an EVA
(NASAese for Extra Vehicular Activity for the techo-tards in the audience).
Don't tell me my conceptual continuity is locked in place. I've had three
Gestalt shifts every morning before breakfast since Pink Floyd's Meddle
tour.

I have bona fide romantic esthetic street cred too, biatch. I am a bad poet,
and a worse musician. I have been a painter and potter. I have won awards
for photography and writing and I started using computer graphics as an art
form when everything was monochrome.

Your attacks are not aimed at me. You don't know shit about me. You are
attacking a bunch of labels you have plastered on me while talking about how
expansive and fluid your metaphysics are. You say, "If I were to make a case
that such things have been marginalized by scientific materialism, you would
be exhibit "A". You're a living stereotype, a classic example, a real live
case of the strawman you deny."

You decry rigid thinking and yet are bound and chained to your own. All I
have asked you to do is apply your understanding of the MoQ and you can't do
anything more that shout in romantic generalities.

Let me see if I can state my position in slightly more romantic terms. We
are as Bolte-Taylor says "energy beings" exchanging energy with our
environment. This is not some ephemeral romantic jibber jabber. We have
expanded human consciousness through machines that allow us to watch this
energy flow and transform. Respiration, digestion, sensation and
contemplation all reveal distinctive patterns. Those patterns in every
instance can be understood in terms of their static and dynamic properties.

Reductionists like the Maharishi and Dalai Lama seem to think that by
studying these patterns we might find ways to more easily induce them. Or
that looking at their effects on people's lives we might be able to show
more readily why they are desirable.

But let's take a look at dreams since you are so concerned with their
neglect. Freud thought the dreams were the window to the unconscious.
Through recording his own dream and the dreams of his patients he tried to
unravel the static code of dream symbolism by assessing the intellectual and
emotion patterns they produced. To the extent that a symbol like a flag pole
evoked static patterns of association with male sexuality it was a phallic
symbol. For Freud sex was the dynamic force that produced static patterns of
cognition and behavior.

Jung said that some of these static patterns of responses occurred across
time and across culture. Jung was not as impressed with the primary
importance of sex as a motivator. He thought that the universal commonality
of these symbols he called archetypes was somehow inherited, or statically
encoded in our biology. He correctly noted that people at every where and
every when, dream of flying, being chased, being embarrassed, of the old man
and of mother. He thought that culture and the environment interacted
dynamically with these static propensities to help the individual understand
their place in the world.

A more modern approach to dreaming suggests that as the brain's dynamic
electrical activity slows down in sleep. Neurons fire more or less randomly
as fleeting thoughts and reflections of the day's activities. The brain
naturally attempts to actively synthesize these dynamic images into a
narrative. This follows from the brains natural propensity to seek static
patterns from the dynamic environment.

This was just a set of sketches of how the MoQ might be read into a series
of approaches to dreaming. Earlier I was attempting to do something similar
with sensation and perception.

I think Gav is mistaken when he says, "...pre-intellectual awareness is
already unified and it is the differentiations come later. The mistaken
assumptions, in this case, has led you to get things exactly backwards right
from the start."

As I said the senses are dynamic and fragmented input that we unify into
static patterns. We create static patterns of meaning out of dynamic input
from the environment. We evolve static patterns of response (habit) in
response to the dynamic events of our day to day lives.

Again this is just a brief sketch of how the MoQ might be used to understand
how the intellectual emerges from the pre-intellectual. It might be extend
to show how our intellectual patterns coalesce into static patterns of
thought and behavior. It has the advantage of fitting with both the MoQ and
the results of neuroscientific studies.

What Gav, like Ham offers is a dogmatic statement, bolstered only by
intuition. The defense of this dogma is basically, "look inside yourself and
you too will believe." It is faith in some kind of universal spiritual
instinct.

If, as you claim, the data are not in dispute then it behooves Gav to
account for where these patterns of interaction originate from and how the
notion of pre-intellectual unity make more sense of the data. Or perhaps why
the neuroscience data is irrelevant.

If you are saying only that Gav's view require no such justification; that
the evidence for it is a primary perception not accessible by others and
accountable to no one. Then I say that's not mysticism that's masturbation.

The MoQ claims to be a flexible tool that can be applied to understand a
host of perceptual construction. It transcends point of view. It is a tool
that can be applied to any point of view. A point of view, a conceptual
illusion can first of all be understood in terms of its static and dynamic
qualities.

But not for, Dave. The MoQ is a narrow mean thing. It is a defense against
rigor. It is an excuse to cling to romantic notions of the supernatural. You
have turned the MoQ into a resurrection of the romanticism criticized in
ZMM. You aren't arguing about monism and dualism or mind and body or
subjects and objects versus static and dynamic. You are arguing about the
virtue of vagueness. You condemn science as stagnant while clutching wishing
thinking close to your breast.

At the same time science has showed us how to transform ideas into reality
from the Euclidian geometries of our homes to the virtual World of Warcraft.


Well, Dave. I've looked at life from both sides now. From win and lose and
still somehow it's life's illusions I recall. I really don't know life at
all.

The truth is I really don't have time for this. I will be in Boston for the
next couple of weeks. Among other things I will be marching straight into
the belly of the beast at the annual APA meeting where Malcolm Gladwell will
be delivering the keynote address. If anybody in the North East wants to
hook up in the acme of academic snobbery somewhere near Harvard Square let
me know. I will be the one wearing the "MoQ or Die" T-shirt.