[MD] The dirty doors of perception?

Wed Feb 22 09:22:25 PST 2012

Hi Ian,
I am surprised that you would be critical of a book just because you
already know some of it.  Is there nothing therein that you learned?
If not, that is not Kahneman's fault, and does not mean that the book
is inconsequential.  For indeed, everything that you post has already
been said as well.  Does this mean we should be disappointed in what
you are posting?

I believe you are the one being naive here.  What you "already know"
is very little as with the rest of us.  To claim that somebody else is
somehow stupid for writing a book on "what you already know" is the
height of arrogance in my opinion.  Try a little humility, you may
actually learn something.  If a book has no meaning because you
already know some of it, go read another book, but do not tell others
that it is of low value, based on your own limited knowledge.  If you
want to be somewhat useful, bring out the usefulness of such a book,
so that others can tell if they want to read it.  To dictatorially
claim it is of low Quality, is not right, in my opinion.  All this
negative criticism is of low Value.  Be a little creative will you?
Destruction is not in the spirit of MoQ.

Regards,
Mark

On 2/22/12, Ian Glendinning <ian.glendinning at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dan, reminded ?
> That Edge article was only published late yesterday ?
>
> But yes Ram is talking about the same neuroscience effects as Damasio.
>
> And DMB - yes Kahneman is only saying what we already know - did you
> ever read my review. I was disappointed in how naive his work was and
> how little new it said - ditto McGilchrist - but what it does do is
> get Pirsigian / Jamesian knowledge (knowlege we already get) into a
> wider audience.
>
> Who care who's name is attached to it if its quality ? Pirsig's not
> looking for celebrity, and James is past caring. Our purpose is
> increased quality surely.
>
> Ian
>
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 9:09 AM, Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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)
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