[MD] Royce's Absolute, conclusion

[plattholden at gmail.com]

On 16 Mar 2010 at 12:37, david buchanan wrote:

Pirsig's Quality is called the primary empirical reality and the cutting
edge of experience. I don't see how this kind of immediate experience
can reasonably be characterized as transcendent or independent of
us in any way. Pirsig is talking about the experience of actual people.
Royce is talking about something "not ourselves". The incompatibility
of these two ideas is obvious, don't you think? 

Platt
Not if you consider the view of David Darling in his book, "Soul Search," 
Chapter 9:

"If we accept that everything in the universe has a subjective aspect to 
it, then the brain appears in an extraordinary new light. The brain begins 
to look more like a regulator or an editor of consciousness - a "reducing 
valve," as Huxley called it. At first sight, this may seem utterly bizarre, 
so familiar is the idea of the brain as a maker of thought. And yet most, 
if not all, the major organs of the body are regulators. The lungs don´t 
manufacture the air our bodies need; the stomach and intestines are not 
food-producers. So, if we manufacture neither the air we breathe nor the 
food we eat, why assume that we make, rather than regulate, what we 
think?

"Among those who speculated along these lines is William James. He 
picked up the notion from Oxford philosopher Ferdinand Schiller, who in 
his book Riddles of the Sphinx wrote:

 "   Matter is an admirably calculated machinery for regulating, limiting 
and restraining consciousness, which it encases. Matter is not that which 
produces consciousness, but that which limits it. It is an explanation 
which no evidence in favor of materialism can possibly affect. For if a 
man loses consciousness as soon as his brain is injured, it is clearly as 
good an explanation to say the injury to the brain destroyed the 
mechanism by which the manifestation of the consciousness was 
rendered possible, as to say that it destroyed the seat of consciousness. 

"The French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson was also drawn to the 
idea that consciousness is all around us. For him, it was a force that 
applies intelligence to evolution. In a similar vein, controversial 
biologist-writer Rupert Sheldrake has argued that consciousness exists 
in the form of a field spread throughout space. Individual minds, he 
suggests, can tune in to this field and so "resonate" with one another.

"Sheldrake likens the human brain to a TV set. An extraterrestrial who 
had never seen television before could drive itself slowly mad trying to 
figure out where the picture on the screen came from solely in terms of 
the set´s hardware. We, who know how the trick is done, recognize that 
the TV simply picks up and selects from the complete range of 
broadcast signals. And we know, too, that even if the set is turned off or 
destroyed, the signals carry on."

Interesting? I think so.

Platt