[MD] now it comes

[Krimel]

dmb says:
Why should I care if Taylor's work fails to support the notion that James
abandoned psychology? I don't think he abandoned psychology and I never said
that he did. I'm saying that his work in psychology raised questions about
the basic metaphysical assumptions, namely SOM, and that his empiricism
addresses those philosophical concerns. Also, I certainly don't think we out
to "omit James' psychology in reading his philosophy". I'm just trying to
get you to see the difference between psychology and philosophy, between the
empirical science known as psychology and radical empiricism as a
philosophical position. 

[Krimel]
I think the mistake is in seeing James as either a psychologist or a
philosopher. He was both. He saw himself as both and I fear you are trying
to make distinctions where there are none. Especially in the period James
was writing the difference between the two was clear to no one. Even today
the distinction is muddy. Psychology for a great many people then and now is
a way to apply empirical analysis to philosophical questions.
 
Krimel said:
... Taylor and Wozniak seem to agree that with you that James claimed that
there is "no world of objects". So I was wrong about that and apologize.

dmb says:
Well, that's the main thing right there. That little phrase "no world of
objects" gets at the metaphysical assumptions that radical empiricism
overturns. Pirsig and James are saying that "objects"(and subjects) are
secondary concepts rather than the starting points of reality. They both say
that these secondary concepts are derived from a more primary experience.
James calls it pure experience and Pirsig calls it Quality. This is also
what James was developing as a psychologist, which the Wiki article on
"Sciousness" shows. 

[Krimel]
Look here is the problem I have with what I take to be your point of view. I
hear you saying that there is nothing outside of my personal experience.
There is no world except the one I am making up as I go along. I get that. I
agree that it is true from a first person ontological perspective. When I am
snuffed out, the hall of mirrors I have build will be snuffed as well. The
world I see in those mirrors is mine. It is me. We are one. When I go, it
does.

What I hear you saying is that when you go everything does. There is no
third person ontology.

But then later in this post you say, "We are not opposed to physical
reality, we are within it, part of it, a feature of it." This seems very
different from what I have always take as your denial of "physical" reality.
I should point out that nothing I have ever said in the forum about the
"physical reality" should be read as claiming that we are somehow divorced
from it.

Your repeated derision of "scientific materialism" for example. BTW, the
whole idea of materialism and the nature of "matter" was so transformed
during the last century I don't even know what matter is any more or how it
ought to be conceived. I currently lean toward something like information or
data, which sounds a lot like idealism only not.

Krimel said:
... as you rightly point out he claims that subject and object are
conceptual distinctions drawn from an aconceptual "pure experience" or
"siousness". The problem here is that anything we say or any conclusions we
draw from experience are rooted in the same aconceptual realm. It  is
perfectly possible for organisms to thrive on this planet without concepts
of any kind. Humans however are not among them.

dmb says:
Whoever said humans can thrive without concepts? Why is it a problem that we
all draw from the same pre-conceptual experience? 

[Krimel]
The problem is that I don't see how it is even remotely possible for us to
draw from the same pre-conceptual experience. Like James I don't think it is
possible for one person to have the same pre-conceptual experience twice
much less for everyone to share in the same experience of any kind.

dmb says:
Saying that subjects and objects are concepts does not support the notion of
non-dualism. It's just what the notion means. Not being divided into those
two ontological categories is the sense in which it is non-dual. 

And yes, of course we are now dealing in words and concepts. But in this
case the concept to grasp is "non-duality". The central terms in radical
empiricism and in the MOQ refer to this non-dual awareness, the
pre-intellectual experience, because that's the non-dual awareness we're
talking about. 

[Krimel]
You seem to be missing my point. SOM is a concept. Non-duality is a concept.
What makes one "better" than the other? What makes one the high road to
truth and the other a stumbling block on the path to the high country of the
mind?

You claim this in all rooted in some special form of experience which is
higher or mystical and I claim it is completely the opposite of that. Take
James own description of "siousness." He grounds it in physical bodily
sensations mostly in the head and throat. I laid out a series of his quotes
on this earlier. Those quotes are reference by him in the very works you
cite to boost your position. They are not abandoned by the various
incarnations of James. They are part of both his psychological and
philosophical writings.

Or take the whole idea of meditation practices that focus on breathing.
Breathing is for the most part an autonomic process. It require no conscious
effort. Our nervous systems are bifurcated into parts that are under
conscious control and parts that are under unconscious control. Breathing
obviously fall in between somehow. I can control my breathing and be aware
of it or not. This particle meditative practice seems to me to be aimed at
bringing unconscious processes into conscious awareness and conscious
control.

It seems to me that this is what much of meditative practice is all about.
It seeks to bring our unconscious processes into conscious awareness and
control. Yogis controlling their heart rates, Wilber's phony stopping of his
brainwaves, relaxation and stress control... etc. etc. I get it. This all
has positive health benefits, physically and mentally.

My point is that a "feeling" of unity or purity of experience is no better
guide than a feeling of self versus other. Both are conceptualizations of
experience. Furthermore I see James as less concerned with one versus two
versus many, than he is concerned with how to decide, rationally versus
empirically. After all that is the version of SOM he is arguing about. That
is the problem his radical empiricism sets out to solve.

James is arguing in favor of a bottom-up inductive style as opposed to a top
down deductive style. When he is arguing that concepts emerge from and are
secondary to percepts he is pointing to the intersection of biology and
intellect. He says:

"Instead of percept I shall often speak of sensation, feeling, intuition,
and sometimes of sensible experience or of the immediate flow of conscious
life."

Although intuition seems a bit out of place here, he is pointing to
perception resulting from biological functions: sensation and feeling.
Intellectuals had been seeking and to some extent still seek to remove
feelings as unreliable guides to reason. James at least as I see it was
trying to include them as critical parts of our experience.

Part of the problem is that James was writing in the pre-Freudian era were
Freud's vocabulary of the unconscious was not widely accepted. Like Freud he
was struggling to account for the fact that consciousness, however it is
conceived, does not play the front seat driver role that many think it does.
Freud thought conscious rationality was the tip on an iceberg and below the
surface lay a seething mass of irrational animal instincts.

In the modern post-Freudian era we see that these issues are alive and well
but from my own point of view Freud overestimates the power of consciousness
and misconstrues the nature of the unconscious almost completely.

Consciousness, conceptualization, language, are evolutionary strategies
employed by our species. Sensations and emotions are also evolutionary
strategies employed by a variety of species. Conceptualization, as a
strategy, rests on the complexity of our nervous systems. That complexity
frees us from the immediate present of sensation and feeling and allows us
to compare the present to the past and use both as guides to the future. I
see no advantage whatever in your insistance that the road to Nirvana lies
backwards on this evolutionary trajectory.

I have gone on and on about Libet's work on this in the past but it all
boils down to consciousness gives us "free won't" rather than "free will".
(As a side note the only thing that stops me from throwing Bricklin out as a
new age crank is that Libet includes an article by Bricklin in a volume he
edited.) Conscious awareness allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of our
emotionally driven unconscious inclinations. But I think it is also wrong to
see those unconscious inclinations as irrational or as essentially evil or
amoral as Freud does. In fact we have emotions that are specifically social
and moral, shame and pride. Our emotional responses are biologically encoded
to promote our survival. 

The problem is biologically encoded responses are often not adequate to
serve this end. In part this is because when we react based on them we do so
from the single point of view of the immediate present. Our superpower is
our ability to access the past and project into the future. Our brains allow
us to make four dimensional temporal models in three dimensional space. It
gives us the ability to randomly access past and future and relate them to
the present. 

It is worth noting here that every sensory experience we have (with the
exception of smell) follows a set of neural pathways that highlight the
points I have been making here. Sensory data enters the midbrain regions and
it routed in two "directions" the most primitive it toward emotion or
feeling and the more advance is in the direction of memory both in toward
the formation of a new memory an in terms of comparing current to past
experience. 

Now I can here you revving up to whine about reductionism here. But spare
me. We are well past that. What we are talking about here is ways to
conceptualize experience. Our nervous systems are complex enough to allow us
to move past the first person ontology of phenomenology and immediate
experience towards a third person description of shared understanding. I am
not talking about "the way things are" but about a powerful way of
conceiving the details and process of experience. I am talking about the
common aspects of our individual experiences rather than some imagined unity
emanating from "spirit".

But then my question to you remains what are you talking about?