[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Krimel]

[Krimel]
Thanks for this grab bag of illustrations. 

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Illustration #1: The one size fits all explanation...
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[Steve asks dmb a question
... I have a real question for you?  "What about consciousness?"  ... "the
problem of consciousness" ... RMP's approach just sweeps it under the rug.

[dmb responds:]
Not sure you've asked an actual question here. What is the problem of
consciousness, exactly? What's being swept under the rug by RMP's approach? 

But let me remind you that James' Essays in Radical Empiricism...

[Krimel]
There it is. The answer to every question. The wielding of the only tool in
Dave's tool box.

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Illustration #2: The steel trap mind slamming shut...
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[dmb]
As you're reading Chalmers ask yourself if he's operating with the
subject-object metaphysical assumptions. Do you think you could spot such a
thing? It'll probably mean reading between the lines just because
assumptions are like that. They tend to go without saying. If anyone is
likely to be explicit about such a thing, it'll be a philosopher. But still.


[Krimel]
It is hard to see how anyone interested in the idea of consciousness could
ignore or dismiss Chalmers but for dmb it's not a problem. Rather than
engage the issues raise he slaps on the label: SOM and "Presto" no need to
read, no need to engage the issue, time to just sit back and feel self
righteous.

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Illustration #3: Appeal to authorities then embarrass them...
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[dmb]
By the time James was all pumped up about radical empiricism in 1904 and
1905, a period of explosive creativity for James, he was also very excited
about a philosophical wild man named Gustav Fechner. 

[Krimel]
Here we see dmb's sense of history mangled. James talks extensively about
Fechner in his Principles of Psychology because Fechner was among the first
and best at trying to quantify the senses. James got "all pumped up" to
write and introduction to Fechner's pamphlet "The Little Book of Life After
Death" originally published in 1836 under a pseudonym. I think it would be
difficult to find thinkers from the 19th century able to divorce themselves
from animistic, spiritualist thinking. Surely at a century and a half's
remove we ought to be able to forgive them. But dmb instead prefers to cite
them as justification for a continuing adherence to these quaint
misconceptions.   

Holding Fechner and James up as giving authority to animism and spiritualism
does them both a disservice. It assumes that those positions are unaffected
by a century of research and discourse. More knowledge of the physiology,
cause and effects, and abstract metaphysical thinking on and about the brain
and consciousness have take place in the past 25 years that in the whole
span of history leading up to Fechner and James' time. It insults them both
to think that their idea are unaffected by this progress.

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Illustration #4: Letting the bathwater leak in through the backdoor...
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[dmb]
This isn't too far from the MOQish notion that the laws of physics are
better conceived as patterns of preference. Even the physical is inwardly
alive and consciously animated to some extent. The "its" count as one of the
spans and wavelengths in this living universe. 

[Krimel]
Rather than altering our notions of "preference" to include a probabilistic
view of causality; dmb sees Pirsig retreating into this kind of spiritual
animism. 

It has is an ongoing mystery how one can make a claim for a universe that is
"...inwardly alive and consciously animated" and yet deny that one's
position is not supernatural, even theistic. I'm not even sure that stuff
qualities as bathwater. After you stuff a towel under the back drop why
don't you try shaking the handle?

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Illustration #5: The bumper sticker grab bag...
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[dmb]
You see what these guys are saying?

If you're a scientific materialist and you hear James explain that
consciousness as an entity, as a Cartesian self, does not exists, you're
likely to take James as being somewhere in the brain-mind identity camp. 

[Krimel]
No need to engage a different point of view when you can cover your lack of
breadth and depth with slogans and strawmen. Since dmb engagement with
intellectual activity is stunted in the 19th century, the materialist
strawman is a Newtonian projection. Although it went up in flames at least
by the middle of the 20th century it lives for dmb as a kind of fantasy
whipping boy.

Note also the second example of the bumper sticker approach: "brain-mind
identity camp" as though in this label we find a clearly defined group of
the slack jawed, oblivious to dmb's keen and exhaustive insights. 

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Illustation #6: Spinning to blur distinctions...
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[dmb]
You'd think there is no such thing as consciousness per se because the mind
is just what the brain does, more or less. Most people in this camp will
back off just a bit and make some qualification, but that's the basic idea.
But when you read this Fechner-inspired stuff you realize that James had a
whole different deal in mind. Instead of thinking that the mental is a
product of the physiological, which is a product of the physical, you see
that it's more like the physical and the mental have grown up and evolved
together as two aspects of the One. In fact, James's biographer, Robert
Richardson, says the quote above is the best statement about the many and
the One that James ever produced (page 447). 

[Krimel]
Here again we see the strawmen but some are willing to "back off" if "just a
bit" no doubt intimidated by the imagined power of dmb's keen observations.
Unfortunately dmb offers no actual attack on this position just a
perfunctory dismissal and retreat into the 19th century. After all, if one
were to venture into the 21st century it would be really hard to muster
enough strawmen on this subject to matter. 

"The mind is what the brain does..." of course it is and mostly"more" rather
than "less". The "mind," whatever that is supposed to be, is the outcome of
the process of the nervous system's engagement with the environment. It
takes the sensory input Fechner so painstaking detailed and converts it into
thought and action. If "consciousness" is a process then the brain is the
processor. It is the dismissal of this notion that demands some kind of
sustained defense in the 21st century. 

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Illustration # 1 redeux: The short form...
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[dmb]
Now think about that pithy little radically empirical slogan. Experience and
reality amount to the same thing. 

[Krimel]
Bullshit lite: Less tedium but still impossible to swallow.

It might actually be meaningful to say "Experience and one's conception of
reality amount to the same thing." 

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Illustration #7: The clever signoff or "The Illusion of Cool..."
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[dmb]
Hmmmm. Consciousness. Maybe I'll give it some thought.

What was the question? Can you state it very specifically?

[Krimel]
I picture him saying this while polishing his Foster Grant wraparounds
simultaneously grinding a Marlboro filter beneath his Chuck Taylors;
Bohemian ironic affections trapping him in the amber of the 50s. Refusing
the new millennium and feeling really good about it after all color TV is
just a fad.

Thanks Dave, a truly enlightening post.