[MD] The dirty doors of perception?

[david buchanan]

Dan said to dmb:
I thought this quote from the article was interesting as well: "Most pertinent ... is William James with his notion of sciousness which comes in contrast to consciousness. The former consists of pure experience only, the latter involves knowledge of experience. ..."  This is where RMP seems to expand on James by saying that Dynamic Quality is both undefined and infinitely definable. Rather than isolating pure experience from the knowledge of experience, he is marrying them... pure experience comes before the moment of intellectualization... it is the cutting edge of reality, always new, always a surprise. The knowledge of that pure experience grows from that moment in a continuous stream of consciousness.


dmb says:
The most recent neurological studies are lending support to the observations James was making back in 1890, in his psychology book, and it increasingly makes guys like Plato, Kant, Freud look pretty bad. Researchers like Antonio Damasio have shown that we literally can't think right without emotion, affect, instinct and the like. Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow" seems to be making a big splash for saying what James said a long time ago. 
>From Jonah Lehrer's pop-science book, "How We Decide":
"One of the first scientists to defend this view of decision-making was William James, the great American psychologist. In his seminal 1890 textbook The Principles of Psychology, James launched into a critique of the standard 'rationalist' account of the human mind. ...the Platonic view of decision-making, which idealized man as a purely rational animal defined 'by the almost total absence of instincts,' was utterly mistaken. ...According to James, the mind contained two distinct thinking systems, one that was rational and deliberate and another that was quick, effortless, and emotional. The key to making decisions, James said, was knowing when to rely on which system." 

"It's been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature's order which was as yet unknown. Now it's time to further an understanding of nature's order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man's consciousness, are a part of nature's order too. The central part. ...We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly." (Robert Pirsig in ZAMM)