[MD] The dirty doors of perception?

[Dan Glover]

Hello everyone

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 4:36 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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)

Hi Dave

Your response reminded me of this recent Edge article --
[http://edge.org/conversation/adventures_behavioral_neurology ] --
here is a snippet:

"It turns out there are two kinds of pain. We think of pain as one
thing subjectively, but evolutionarily there are two kinds: there is
acute pain and there's chronic pain. Acute pain occurs when you touch
a flame or a hot kettle and you say, "Ouch," and you withdraw your
hand. Chronic pain is when there's gangrene or a fracture, typically a
fracture and there's excruciating pain caused by the fracture and your
hand becomes immobilized – you don’t withdraw it. What's the
evolution? Even though they feel the same perceptually, evolutionarily
they're very, very different.

"The function of acute pain is to mobilize the hand and remove it from
the source of tissue injury to protect the hand. Chronic pain is the
exact opposite. When there's an injury to a metacarpal bone, your hand
freezes up and gets "paralyzed" temporarily. It's excruciatingly
painful. Any attempt to move it is painful so you don't move the arm.
In the case of acute pain you mobilize the arm rapidly. In the case of
chronic pain you immobilize it. Why? Because moving it would cause
further tissue injury. So it's a protective reflex—immobilization. And
then, of course, as the injury heals you start moving your hand again
and the pain goes away. That's a normal cause of events."

Dan comments:
This might seem an odd question to ask... but how do we know to jump
off a hot stove? I mean, do we just know? Or is it as you say the
result of two distinct thinking systems and knowing which one to use?
The quick, effortless, and emotional response of jumping from the hot
stove seems directly counter to the rational and deliberate care one
takes with a fractured arm or leg. The thing is, in the hot stove
example there isn't time to 'think' about it... we act. The thinking
comes later. In the case of chronic pain though, there is time to
think... oh that hurts... and to immobilize the appendage so as not to
aggravate the injury.

It seems we could say that both mobilization and immobilization are
biological protective reflexes... the former we don't think about
while the latter we do. Our passions and our emotions are like sitting
on that hot stove... we feel an overwhelming sense of urgency to
move... to do something that has no rational basis as of yet. That
comes later. Many people never jump off that hot stove... they stay
locked into a mindset that has been programmed into them since birth.
They go to work every day at a job which they might not hate but which
they do not love. They never reach for something just beyond their
grasp for fear of... what? Being irrational?

Anyway...

Dan

http://www.danglover.com


Crazy has places to hide in that are deeper than any goodbye. (Leonard Cohen)