[MD] From Psychology to Empiricism

[Ham Priday]

Greetings, David --



> As I understand it, Andre was re-phrasing the same idea we see in the
> Richardson quote. "If we were to speak precisely, James says, 
> consciousness
> is 'only a name for the fact that the 'content' of experiences IS KNOWN'."
> See, this is an attack on the very notion that you can have a knower 
> without
> a known, that knower and known are two different kinds of things.
> But James (and Andre) are denying a distinction between consciousness
> and content. The content IS the consciousness.
>
> He is denying the notion that the subject is a distinct entity. In fact, 
> the
> Richardson quote has been chopped off at a crucial point. After denying
> that consciousness is an entity, the Richardson quote goes on to say,
> "James argues that instead of dueling entities there is only process. 'I 
> mean
> only to deny that the word (consciousness) stands for an entity, but to 
> insist
> most emphatically that it does stand for a function'." ..."James's own
> conclusion is that 'consciousness' is fictitious while thoughts in the 
> concrete
> are fully real," he says.

Thanks for your clarification, but it makes no sense to me.  The subject is 
a "distinct entity" by virtue of
its individuated, proprietary consciousness.  To say that consciousness 
exists only as a "process" or "function" is to deny the Knower without which 
the experienced world would be impossible.  If consciousness is 
"fictitious", how can the thoughts and precepts it holds be "fully real"? 
Subject and object are the co-dependent twins of existential reality.

> The idea that subjectivity/objectivity characterizes the duality of 
> existence
> is what we call SOM.  Subjects and objects are the dueling entities that
> James and Pirsig are criticizing. The reasons for rejecting this dualism 
> are
> philosophical, not because they think Descartes was an idiot or because
> they're pushing some prior belief system.

Co-dependency of mind and matter does not necessitate a "duel" any more than 
does the co-dependency of biology and physics in creating living organisms 
or being and nothingness in constituting a relational universe. The 
empirical fact is that existence is the divided, 'processive' mode of 
Reality, not its essence.  Thoughts, feelings, experiences, and judgments 
are all differentiated, as are the objects and events that constitute 
subjective knowledge.  Neither the philosopher nor the scientist can 
construct an "absolute monism" out of what is by nature divided.  The 
attempt to do so is fallacious.  Moreover, in the absence of a relational 
system, Value could not be realized.

> In the essay titled "A World of Pure Experience", James says,
> "The first great pitfall from which such a radical standing by experience
> will save us is an artificial conception of the relations between knower
> and known. Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its
> object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and
> thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the 'apprehension'
> by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which
> all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. ...
>
> See, he's saying that SOM has created this fake problem of how to
> get our subjective ideas to correspond with the objective reality that 
> they
> supposedly represent. The various schools of philosophy have invented
> all kinds of solutions, but they're all just as fake as the problem.
> In other words, everybody has been operating with the assumptions of SOM
> for a long time. 17th century philosophy has become our common sense
> and so it's only natural that this duality of existence would seem so 
> clear to you.
> This is what we're handed when we put on those cultural eye-glasses.
> But philosophers have generally come to the conclusion that SOM is simply
> incoherent. It's so futile that the neo-pragmatists have given up on truth 
> theories
> and epistemology altogether. In any case, radical empiricism says that SOM
> is NOT the duality of existence. It says that "subjects" and "objects" are 
> not
> two different kinds of substances that make experience possible, that they 
> are
> not the starting points of experience.  Instead, they are secondary 
> concepts
> derived from experience.  We believe in these concepts because they work,
> because they function in experience.  And that's what James and Pirsig are
> looking at, the ongoing process of experience.  They both want to alter 
> the
> attitudes of objectivity that results from SOM and instead "admit feelings 
> to
> full standing ..as aspects of rationality".
>
> As Richardson puts it, "The result of James's radical empiricism is to 
> move
> the modern mind away from seventeenth-century Cartesian dualism and
> toward what we might call process philosophy; to wean us away from falling
> back on conceptions and to encourage us to trust our perceptions; to admit
> feelings to full standing, along with ideas, as aspects of rationality."

So long as we are cognizant creatures, we will rationalize precepts from 
what we experience.  THIS is why relational experience "works", why Science 
is an effective approach to problem-solving, and why we are free to 
discriminate between the value of excellence and mediocrity.  But all these 
principles disappear when Reality is viewed from the absolute, 
non-differentiated perspective.  And only metaphysics can offer a solution 
to the so-called "duality problem".

Best regards,
Ham