[MD] TiTs and the Illusion of SOM

[John Carl]

I wanna hear the story.  Who's with me?

[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 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.
>
>

Hey!  I made that point recently.  didya notice Krimel?  About the
congruence between dmb's interpertation of the Moq and phenomenology - the
most radical of the empiricists?

Tha's ok.  Nobody pays much attention to my words, and I don't blame them a
bit.





> 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.
>
>
You nailed it right there buddy.  Too bad nobody pays much attention to
anything anybody else says around here, or you'd get all kinds of kudos just
for this alone.

But we both know THAT ain't gonna happen, ever.  eh?



> 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.



OOOH...  careful there buddy.  treading dangerous ground here.




> 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.
>
>
Yeah?  And where would we all be, without a little necessary madness?
 Without that "pedestrian sense of mirage, fantasy and hallucination" we'd
be some kind of logical robots.  I say, hear, hear.