[MD] now it comes

[david buchanan]

Krimel said to dmb:
You seem to be missing my point. SOM is a concept. Non-duality is a concept. What makes one "better" than the other? 


dmb says:

I wish you were asking that question sincerely because answering that question would be a very good way to open an introduction to the MOQ.


Krimel said:
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. 


dmb says:
Your objection is predicated on the assumption that mystical experiences are the opposite of bodily states. But I have never pitted one against the other and see no reason to do so. You really ought to respond to the claims I actually make rather than adding your assumptions and making inferences from there. 

Krimel said:
...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.

dmb says:

As with the last objection, it's hard to see how this can be applied to any of my actual claims. And basically, you're saying that you just don't see how the MOQ is any better than SOM. Again, I wish the question of their difference was being asked sincerely. I wish you were asking a serious philosophical question and that you genuinely wanted an answer. I'll tell you what, Mister. You obviously love to mock the idea with snide comments. I think this would be much more fun for you AND you'd be a lot better at it if you actually understood what you were dumping on. Maybe you should fake some sincere curiosity just long enough to get the intellectual ammo you so desperately need. Sorry, just fighting snide with snide there.

But more seriously, the radical empiricist has a greater affinity with traditional empiricism than it does with rationalism, but the problem he's trying to solve applies to both of them. This is important to understand because his solution is to attack SOM. In "A World of Pure Experience" James explains that, "ordinary empiricism,.. has always shown a tendency to do away with the connections of things, and to insist most on the disjunctions. ... John Mill's account of both physical things and selves as composed of discontinuous possibilities, and the general pulverization of all Experience by association and the mind-dust theory, are examples of what I mean". John Mill's account is pretty conspicuously SOM, no?

In any case, James continues, saying, "the natural result of such a world-picture has been the efforts of rationalism to correct its incoherencies by the addition of transexperiential agents of unification, substances, intellectual categories and powers, or Selves; whereas, if empiricism had only been radical and taken everything that comes without disfavor, conjunction as well as separation, each at its face value, the results would have called for no such artificial correction. Radical empiricism, as I understand it, does full justice to conjunctive relations, without, however, treating them as rationalism always tends to treat them, as being true in some supernal way, as if the unity of things and their variety belonged to different orders of truth and vitality altogether."

He's saying that ordinary empiricism has created "an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known", as he puts it elsewhere. Physical things and subjective selves are seen as "discontinuous possibilities" by ordinary empiricists and then the rationalists have to come in and supply their "trans-experiential agents of unification", which is a nice way to say they gotta make shit up to solve a fake problem that's been generated by that artificial conception. SOM is that artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. If the empiricists had been more empirical, radically empirical, they would have seen that subjects and objects are not discontinuous entities but rather functional concepts that are already unified within the process of experience. Those experiences that connect them are the conjunctive relations that he's referring to here. Those are the connection that ordinary empiricism tends to do away with, see, and so noticing these conjunctive relations re-connect what has been disconnected artificially. Conjunction junction, what's your function? In the same way that grammatical conjunctions join the parts of a sentence together, there are conjunctive experiences that join subject and object together. Both kinds of conjunctions are easy to overlook or take for granted too. And in fact it was this kind of careful observation of experience that prompts people to say that James could have been the father of American phenomenology. 

Later in the same essay James gives us a reasonably succinct summary of the problem that he's trying to solve:

"The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension' by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental 'representation,' 'image,' or 'content' into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full. "


Krimel said:

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


dmb says:

I wish that were a real question too. Answering that would be another good way to begin.

I was just talking about radical empiricism, by the way, and I was quoting from one of James's key essays on radical empiricism. The point was to show how radical empiricism differs from ordinary empiricism and to show how SOM was a problem for both the rationalist and the traditional empiricists. And just in case you're wondering WHY I'm talking about that, let me remind you what you recently claimed. You said James "is concerned with how to decide, rationally versus empirically. After all that is the version of SOM he is arguing about." So I'm saying there aren't good and bad versions of SOM. Subject and objects "have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities", he says, "throughout the history of philosophy" and "all sorts of theories had to be invented" to get them back together. That's the nature of basic metaphysical assumptions. They're very broadly assumed. And that's usually what I'm talking about one way or another, those assumptions.