[MD] TiTs and the Illusion of SOM

[Krimel]

[dmb]
The notion that SOM is just some label I slap on stuff to avoid the issue,
for example, is completely ridiculous. Rejecting SOM is central to the MOQ
and to radical empiricism and yet you think you can offer critiques of this
stuff without understanding that part of it. It's just not so, and we both
know that you still have yet to grasp this issue. That's why it comes up so
much. You are going to continue to misread me and Pirsig and James and just
about everything else in philosophy that been written in the last century or
so until you understand how and why SOM is a problem.

[Krimel]
You are quite right in that I am intentionally very nasty to you. I can tell
your feelings are hurt. I think I am especially brutal to you for lots of
reasons but that's a whole 'nother story but one of those reasons is you
keep raising the same issues, like this one, over and over and when I
address them you just re-raise them again later and I re-address them and...
rinse and repeat. 

So here is my response from a previous incarnation of this discussion on
8/22/2008 under the Subject TiTs. I have edited it a bit here but not much.
While is not completely about SOM it touches on some other areas of our
ongoing dispute about the nature of sensation, perception and conception.
Conception is not mentioned by name. In this post it was called by the name
I really prefer: illusion. 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have long been a subscriber to the strawman school, thinking that it was
Pirsig's way of bitching about a whole cluster of things but that no one
ever really subscribes to SOM as he frames it.

There is a set of private experiences that each of us has that can only be
known to and by us individually and there is a public set of experiences
that we communicate about through mutual consensus. "Reality" is rather like
William Gibson's description of cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination."

But SOM is also Pirsig's version of the long standing mind/body dualism
debate wherein mental substance and physical substance are two irreducible
forms of "stuff" which mysteriously interact but are not dependant on each
other. Pirsig is ultimately always talking about how each of us has and
makes sense of our individual experience. It is pure phenomenology. 

Even from a purely SOM perspective half of the equation is subjective,
private experience. I have always been puzzled that hardly anyone here
spends much time pondering how it is that each of us has any kind of
experience at all. 

I would like to raise a few points here that relate not only to the
mind/body problem but also to the notion of a self and to mysticism. There
seems to be an underlying idea in much of what goes on in these discussions
that experience is a unitary phenomena. Not just the idea of mystical
oneness but that we can have "an" experience. From my point of view this is
definitely and demonstrably an illusion in the "Kulpian" sense, as Ron has
outlined. We do not have singular experiences. We can not have singular
experiences. We have multiple experiences through multiple pathways and we
synthesize those into the singularity of experience and of self.

Experience begins as sensory input. Sensory input arrives through the
various pathways of sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature, balance,
pressure, proprioception and perhaps a few more. But vision is our primary
sense so let me start with that. 

Pretty much everything we see and the way we see it is a Kulpian illusion.
The way that the receptor cells are arranged on the retinas of our eyes
guarantees that only a tiny fraction of what we are looking at in any
instant is actually in focus. Our lenses focus light onto a very small spot
in the center of the retina. This area is packed with nerve cells which are
able to pass along this focused information to the vision centers of the
brain. Every thing we see "appears" to be in focus because we glance around
a lot and construct from our multiple glancings a picture of a world in
focus. As Pirsig notes the world that is in fact focused onto our retinas is
also upside down so the illusion that we create is not only in focus but
right side up. In addition there is a hole in our retinas were the optic
nerve enters the eye and this blind
spot is also covered over and masked as part of the illusion.

If what we "see" were just the raw sense data not only would it be out of
focus, upside down and have a hole in it, it would be entirely two
dimensional. While we can abstract three dimensional models from monocular
input through our experience with visual textures, relative size of near and
distant objects and so forth, binocular vision facilitates the process.

My point here is that even with the single sense of vision it requires
multiple exposures to abstract our visual experience into a whole. Add to
this the fact that at the same time we are constructing our visual worlds we
are hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling it at the same time. The feeling
of oneness or the unitary nature of experiences is a massive illusion. Each
of the various senses arrives in the brain through isolated neural pathways
which are eventually unified in the frontal cortex. I should add that
usually these pathways wind their way through the midbrain were emotional
valance is added.

This most recently evolved frontal cortex performs the active synthesis of
our fragmented experience. This function is sometimes referred to as
"executive function". I like to think of it as the "sense of senses". In a
set of studies done in cooperation with the Dali Lama it was found that
monks who meditated on a regular basis have measurably different kinds of
activity going on in their frontal lobe and that the longer they had engaged
in meditative practices the more different this activity was. The brain of
the meditator is changed by the practice of meditation. The brain as a
biological organ, like the consciousness that arises from it is a process.
It responds, reacts and changes through its relationship to the world around
it. It isn't separate from that world. It processes that world. It creates
meaning from that world. It isn't separate and distinct from the world that
floods into it; after all that flood of the world includes the brain itself
and the output of its processing. There is no isolation of self and other as
separate things or entity. There are all these processes and interaction
with varying degree of close relation. They are not separate and isolated
but they are not unified and identical either.

Pirsig is right to say that the sense of self or the sense of values cannot
be located in any one place. It emerges from a host of isolated inputs and
pathways that are integrated into a whole. It can also be shown that
disruption of these inputs and pathways has profound effects on the
individual's ability to perceive the world, on their sense of self and on
their ability to make sense of the world and to relate to others.

I would suggest that this "illusion" of the self and the illusion of an
external world is exactly what we have been designed to create. We can watch
the phases that children go through in their cognitive development to see
how these processes change and mature over time. Mystics may claim that a
sense of oneness has some metaphysical significance or tells us something
about the true nature of things. But I would say that this is just a
furtherance and deepening of the Kulpian illusion of unity that we create
every minute of every day. Practitioners can rightly argue that this is a
very healthy thing to do. It produces a sense of calmness and compassion. As
Pirsig notes it helps with the analysis and synthesis of new information. 

But extrapolating that into a blueprint of how the world works in a cosmic
metaphysical sense as many in the new age schools of eastern philosophy are
want to do; strikes me as creating illusions in the pedestrian sense of
mirage, fantasy and hallucination.