[MD] Metaphysics and the mystic.

[david buchanan]

Ron said:
.., they see concrete direct aquaintance as equally based on preconceptions and prejudical expectations. They dispute the accuracy of calling the concrete "preconceptual". I go round and round without being able to make any progress in my explanation because to these brain scientists ALL experience is based in conception which they intimately link to understanding , in other words conception IS understanding period. Conception literally IS cognition to these guys. They understand the contrast and why it is made but they dont see it as very special, new or accurate at all in the way they understand those terms to mean.  ...Sorry Dave but I'm having a hell of a time with it. It's difficult to explain. I do appreciate your efforts. How would you explain it , without quoting Pirsig, because what they are expecting from me is  a reasonable first hand explanation.


dmb says:
Well, it sounds like you have to fight fire with fire. Tell them there is a brain scientist who can explain this in brain-scientist language. Antonio Damasio is a contemporary researcher who also happens to be a big fan of William James. His work on "emotions" is meant to show how our immediate feelings effect decision-making and rational thought processes. This is not given in Pirsig's terms of course, but it corresponds to DQ and sq very roughly. Here's a little bit from the Wikipedia article on him...

As a researcher, Damasio's main interest is the neurobiology of the mind, especially neural systems which subserve memory, language, emotion, decision-making and consciousness. Damasio's most influential contribution to date is the demonstration that emotions play a critical role in high level cognition, an idea that ran counter to dominant 20th c. views in psychology[citation needed], neuroscience[citation needed] and philosophy[citation needed]. He showed that emotions and their biological underpinnings are involved in decision-making (both positively and negatively, and often non-consciously); provide the scaffolding for the construction of social cognition; and are required for the self processes which undergird consciousness. "Damasio provides a contemporary scientific validation of the linkage between feelings and the body by highlighting the connection between mind and nerve cells...this personalized embodiment of mind."[2]This idea has inspired many systems-neuroscience experiments carried out in laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, and has had a major impact in contemporary science[citation needed] and philosophy[citation needed]. It is often discussed in peer-review experimental and theoretical work (an index of its relevance can be gleaned from the fact that Damasio has been named by the Institute of Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in the past decade). Damasio has formulated the somatic markers hypothesis, which captures the essence of these ideas. Current work on the biology of moral decisions, neuro-economics, social communication, and drug-addiction, has been strongly influenced by Damasio's hypothesis.Damasio also proposed that emotions are part of homeostatic regulation and are rooted in reward/punishment mechanisms. He recovered James' perspective on feelings as a read-out of body states, but expanded it with.... 

Damasio's books deal with the relationship between emotions and feelings, and what their bases may be within the brain. His 1994 book, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, won the Science et Vie prize, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and is translated in over 30 languages. It is regarded as one of the most influential books of the past two decades. His second book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, was named as one of the ten best books of 2001 by the New York Times Book Review, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, and has over 30 foreign editions. Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, was published in 2003. In it, Damasio suggested that Spinoza's thinking foreshadowed discoveries in biology and neuroscience views on the mind-body problem. Spinoza was a protobiologist. His latest book is Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. In it Damasio suggests that the self is the key to conscious minds and that feelings, from the kind he designates as primordial to the well-known feelings of emotion, are the basic elements in the construction of the protoself and core self.