[MD] TiTs and the Illusion of SOM

[Krimel]

[dmb]
Also, you are trying to refute the notion of undivided experience by
pointing out that the sense organs use separate pathways and this, you
think, means that experience is not a unity or a whole. I wish you could see
these moves from my perspective because it seems that no matter how many
times I try to explain it, you don't see how irrelevant that it. You think
you've addressed the issue or refuted my claims and I'm trying to tell you
that your refutation of my claim is simply not related to my claim. The
undivided experience is undivided only in the sense that it is not yet
conceptualized, in the sense that concepts have not divided it. This has
nothing to do with weather or not the sense organs work independently or in
concert. That's just not part of the dispute and the claim does not depend
on those facts. 

[Krimel]
Your notion of undivided experience as an illusion. It is nothing more that
your own particular conceptualization of experience. I am saying that
experience is the a synthesis of an enormous number of infinitely complex
processes that as far as we can tell now begin in subatomic physics and end
in "Inception" and "Avatar". From brute facts to speculative fantasy.

Everything that we can become "conscious" of is the chatter of our neurons
cycling through feedback loops. 

Making sense of that chatter is conceptualization. 
We create concepts through reflection on that chatter. 
We bring things into the focus of awareness. 
Sharpened fidelity against a background of static. 
An idea solos against a chorus of pasts and futures. 
There is figure
There is ground 
They oscillate


Michael Polanyi talks about the small focus of awareness against a
background of tacit knowledge. 

Past and present slip randomly in and out of focus. Feelings and remembered
textures as much as the glint of sun on the sharp edge of the present. They
clash and merge in the strobe light of focused awareness. 

Each flash, 
Each cycle of:
   Brightness, 
     Twilight 
         Gloom 
Reveals a new illusion, 

A new configuration of: 
   Things present
     Things remembered 
         Things imagined 
Flickering iterations of maybes.

What was, 
Informs what is and 
What will come

Cause become effects 
Reflected into causes 
Feedback!

An infinite network of interrelated processes. 
Not discrete but often distinct.
Knowable if not definable.

Concepts are the stable synthesis of these feedback systems. Not buckets of
water removed from the stream of consciousness but eddies in the shallows,
patches of white water, pools and chains of lakes tied by slow moving
streams, cascading waterfalls of glacial melt, and the ebb and flow of tides
where fresh water becomes brackish before merging into the unconscious sea.

Experience that is not conceptualized, which is to say almost all of it, is
unconscious. Almost nothing that we do outside of writing philosophy
requires conceptualization at all; far less the rigid division of self and
other. 

I am my car 
I am my pancreas
I am my first kiss
I am nothing at all
I am all that is

I is you, when you use it. 


As James said, "But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he
simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw." 

I can contract me down to the point of the hypnagogic semi-consciousness 
I can expand what's mine to encompass the globe. 
I can direct the inner eye at the murmur of my heart 
I can take a spin on Google earth, 
Get for a God's Eye view of me and mine.

Illusions: configurations of: specific impulses, the shadows of the past and
vision of what might be. Independent? Discrete? Not at all. Rather a
continuous flow of co-presence and relations. Circumstantial juxtapositions
that demand response. 

Input output feedback
Output feedback input
Feedback input output
Iteration Rulz!
Rulz of iteration!

A matrix of cycles preserved in a network of neurons, flows of biochemical
electrical currents through tissues of impossible complexity, tied by
nothing but chance collisions of dust and solar wind that are marvelous to
behold.

I find the idea of abandoning conceptualization bizarre in the extreme.
Conceptualizing is a break in my day. A respite from the unrelenting ongoing
boredom of uninterrupted biopsychosocial automatativity. 

I want more concepts. 
I want new ways to carve that sucker up. 
I want connections that connect more thises to more thats. 
I want them to dance. 

But first I want to know where they come from.

[dmb]
I'm saying that you need to understand the difference between philosophy and
science. 

[Krimel]
I am saying there is no difference.

[dmb]
You've basically dished up a slightly softened version of the brain-mind
identity theory, which would explain why you got so nasty at my refutation
of that the other day in a post to DT. 

[Krimel]
I don't think I subscribe to a softened version. In fact it is pretty firm,
downright hard much of the time. The stream of thought in the neurosciences
has overflowed its bank and flooded much of the terrain in western thinking
today. This is not a "theory" that needs my defense. My ire is over your
failure to articulate a coherent attack on this position. It is a position
that impacts the mind body problem and produces tangible results both
philosophically and therapeutically. 

Mental states are brains states and those states can be altered and
influenced in a host of ways from the stern look in a mother's eye, to the
swell of a symphony, to a tablet packed with ecstasy. 

>From this fertile neuropsychoscientificated flood plain sprout a number of
mind/body solutions: 

Mind as epiphenomenon, or epiphenomena... 
the mind is what the brain does... 
mind is what the brain secretes or excretes... 
mind is property of brain processes 
     as solidity is a property of mass or 
       color is to light
           or heat and light are to flame
Fan it. 
Feed it back... 

There are many variations and incarnations but none of them involve the
disconnection of substances characterized by Cartesian dualism.

[dmb]
This theory is the epitome of reductionistic scientific materialism, which
is essentially THEE SOM disease and the central target of the MOQ. Since you
embrace the MOQ's central enemy and refute the MOQ's claims from that
perspective, I think it's only reasonable to conclude that you really don't
understand what the problem is. 

[Krimel]
I see it as metaphysics rooted in skepticism. A product of bottom-up up
investigations, ever yielding to new observations, new illusions, fresh
questions. 

A process of synthesis in revision. 
Conceptualization rooted in perception. 
Ideas that grow, in need of pruning
Spawning young and dying of old age.

Logos morphing into Mythos
Emotional contingencies emerging
>From the failure of perceptual consistency

Feedback loops of trial and error.
Nine out of 10 doctors prescribe it!
Endorsed by Mother Nature!
Obvious to every child over the age of three months!

My most virulent ravings are aimed at the idea that this is somehow "the
MoQ's central enemy."

[dmb]
You got as close as you ever get when you said, "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". But all you've
said is that subjects and objects are two kinds of substances. 

[Krimel]
You hear what you want to hear but that's not what I said.

[dmb]
But that's not what I'm asking you to think about or to understand. Why is
that a problem? What's wrong with thinking that way? And how does the
re-conceptualization of these categories solve that problem. That's what
you're NOT talking about. That's what you're not addressing and that's what
I keep bringing up. If we're ever going to have a fruitful conversation
about radical empiricism, you cannot avoid this. 

[Krimel]
If by radical empiricism you mean that the acquisition of knowledge requires
more than stimulation of the five senses, of course. 

If you want to include our emotional responses, 
That heritage of our ancient line; 
Fine.  

If you want to throw in the unconscious processing of sense data into
conjunctive relations; that's cool too. 

But our use of these in the stream of events privileges them contingently
not absolutely or in any particular order. Sense data, emotion, conjunction
are synthesized evaluated and prioritized, unconsciously in the process of
processing.  

In the depths of the pre-intellectual, pre-conceptual unconscious, memories
dreams and reflections collide in a tableaux of fantasy, wish fulfillment,
of depression and anxiety, over and under, joy and lust spun together in
narratives of plot and prejudice.

Familiar highways of habit take us to the footpaths that lead to the high
country of the mind where the air is thin and the light deceptive. Where
habituation yields to the orienting response. Freeways and toll roads; wide
and lengthy. Streaming corpuscles of rubber and steal and filaments of glass
on arteries of asphalt. If we arrive in the high country unable to survey
the terrain; to make sense from on high. If we cannot use the sense we make
in the low, as well as the high country. If it traveling the high road
doesn't take us back to a better place or a place made better by the
journey; If it leaves you thinking to path you took is the only way up; why
bother?

All the distinctions and interactions, the fractal self similarity of
consilience, the schema we have built and interwoven into concept and
illusion are not fixed but fluid. Not false but tentative.

As ifs

[dmb]
The "representative theories" he refers to are the theories of traditional
empiricism, sensory empiricism. You are basically refuting James's attack on
SOM with an SOM defense, even while you deny that there is such a thing.
This is another instance where I can only conclude that you don't understand
what the problem is. This so eludes you that you get angry at my objections
and take them as some kind of unfair dirty trick. But even when you're being
careful and trying to demonstrate your understanding, I still see no
evidence of comprehension. 

[Krimel]
This continuous flow of energy. Sunlight warming pools of nutrient; frothing
with cells, roots sinking deep into loam, branches fracturing into solar
collectors, feeding caterpillar and moth, food for birds nesting in boughs
and shaking out nuts for rodents to cache for winter. 

>From the slime to the stratosphere, nature rises in a continuous flow of
continuous process. Verbs become nouns for a season. then back again.
Distinctions that sometimes matter, shatter, then meld. 

The appearance of discontinuity is illusion. 
The appearance of continuity is illusion.
All appearance is illusion. But...
Illusion is not false;
It is particular
It is contingent
Illusion arise from perception.
Illusion is sustained by feedback.
Illusions stabilize in the static latch
Of the Gestalt Shift.

[dmb]
But then Paul Turner helped me out and then I went back to school. It took
work and time but I did change my mind about what this stuff meant and now
there is a whole range of material that I can read with almost total
comprehension, stuff that would have made no sense to me otherwise. I mean,
I know what you're doing because I did it too. Been there, done that, you
know?

[Joni Mitchell]
All good dreamers pass this way some day
Hidin' behind bottles in dark cafes
Dark cafes
Only a dark cocoon before I get my gorgeous wings
And I fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days

[Krimel]
Ah, Dave
Ah, Joni
Life is full of phases...

You, dmb, seem to me to be in the phase of the blind monk grabbing the ass
end of an elephant and describing the texture of he what he smells in term
of color.