[MD] [Bulk] Re: empathy

[david buchanan]

Mary quoted something:
For centuries, philosophers from Plato forward have used the term noetic to refer to experiences that pioneering psychologist William James (1902) described as: …states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.


Mary said:
Discounting the flowery, post-Victorian prose, you could go to any Christian church tomorrow and hear this kind of sentiment used to describe what it feels like to experience God.

dmb says:
The date tells me that was James in his Varieties of Religious Experience and he is talking about one of the features of a mystical experience. It has a noetic quality, meaning the experiencer has a sense of having learned something important from the experience. It is a description based on many reports, which make up the bulk of Varieties. In that context, the term is used to describe a particular kind of alteration in a person's consciousness. But I was using the term in reference to everything, as a description of reality in general. Context matters, of course, and so you're just hopping topics and making a mess here. And bringing Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell into the picture really makes me wonder how your mind works. 

Yes, of course I realize that insults will never sway another person to my point of view. That's why it's a good idea to wait until you're convinced that the other guy is incapable of being swayed, then you insult him. Then you can say insulting things, usually things about how he or she is unreasonable or incompetent and that it is therefore a waste of my time to even try to sway them. And it hurts the one targeted of course and so it seems quite unkind but when those insulting assertions are true and conversation with them really is a waste of time, then the insulter is acting with great kindness toward all those posters whose time is being wasted and the "insults" are more like an accurate description of the quality of the contributor in question. 

Come on. How much nonsense are we supposed to tolerate? Should we have no standards at all? Does civility mean we have to pretend that everyone is sane and wise and there's no such thing as nonsense? No, of course not, and there is something truly wrong and bad about tolerating too much nonsense in a place like this. It's seriously undermines the point and purpose of this forum, of its reason for being in the first place. 

Mary, Pirsig talks about William James over the course of several chapters and any reasonable person can see that I'm only following up on a connection he made with pragmatism and radical empiricism. He does this in the context of shedding the "cult book" reputation and taking the whole philosophological thing more seriously. Your objections to James only tells me that you don't really care what Pirsig thinks and you don't care if the MOQ latches in the world of academic philosophy or not either. And there is never an actual reason for this. It seems to be nothing but a vague wish to undermine the whole idea and otherwise erase the comparisons made in those chapters on James.

Sorry Mary, but you have given me no reason to take you seriously.