[MD] Three Hot Stoves

[david buchanan]

John said to Dan:
All experience is dependent upon prior experience and a cognition that frames the experience meaningfully.  Without this meaning, there is no experience. ... Without conceptualization, there can be no experience.  The very essence of experience is a realization of a something which requires a concept of some kind.


dmb says:
The infant is used as an example of non-conceputal experience or pure experience used by both Pirsig and James. You know, because babies don't have a concept of their mother's breast even though they experience it directly. They're not motivated by the idea of hunger and they don't plan meals but they experience hunger all the same. There are perceptions and feelings and reactions going on of course. Infants are far from inert. But concepts come with the acquisition of language. Some researches push this absence of thinking pretty far, chronologically speaking. I heard one psychologist recently who claimed that we don't really doing any "thinking", properly speaking, until we can talk. It seems to me that this very much supports the thesis of psychological nominalism, which says thinking is just inward talking.

If memory serves, John replied to that example by claiming that infants DO have ideas. As far as I know, there isn't a psychologist in the world who believes that.

I'm tempted to say that it depends on how you define "concepts" and "experience". But I think those words, and words like them, are referring to actual phenomena. Terms like "pure experience" are abstractions or generalizations that can refer to a wide range of actual situations with actual babies or actual Zen monks. He's talking about something athletes and artists talk about all the time. Brain scientists have been documenting this stuff too. Go check out some reviews of Jonah Lehrer's "How We Decide". It opens with a fairly ordinary example of somebody who uses this pre-conceptual awareness to make millions of dollars a year as an NFL quarterback. You know, just in case you wanna know the cash value.