Hi, Dave,
I had seen your post below before, but because you computer woke-folk won’t use
HTML, I can never tell who’s talking to whom about what. And also, this
business of having two computers, neither of which work, is driving me ever
crazier than I usually am. I find myself typing a response on my new computer
while moving the mouse connected to my old computer and wondering why nothing
is happening. So I stipulate that I have contributed more than my share to the
disjointedness of the conversation. Sorry for that.
I will try and straighten things out a bit below.
In the meantime allow me to cop to my puritanism with respect to anything that
smacks of “experience enhancement”. I can hear you all putting on your
Trump-sincere-voice, shedding one crocodile tear each, and saying, in a chorus,
“Sad!” But there it is. I am not one to be tempted by the giant
roller-coaster at the fair, or by the vampire movie at the mall. To me, life
is enough of a roller-coaster without introducing gratuitous bumps. Nor do I
have a much of an interest in science fiction. I come from the Silent
Generation (Remember, I am THAT old!) The sixties is the chasm across which
you and I (and many of the other participants in this discussion) view one
another. In my Peircean moments, I view life as a stream of experiences that I
am at pains to manage. I grew up hearing about Hitler, killing camps, death
and starvation of millions. I didn’t have to imagine goblins; they were on
the news every day. To me, a quiet life is a miraculous achievement.
Anything that makes that stream of experience more difficult to manage is… well
… annoying. Drug experiences, extreme experiences of any kind, do not fill me
with wonder. If you take a large chunk of flint stone and bash it on an anvil
it shatters into … well … flints. Hitting the human mind with a drug-hammer,
or a starvation hammer, a near-death hammer, or even a sleep-hammer is like
that. Yes, I suppose, it tells you something about the structure of the thing
you are hitting, but I don’t suppose, with my Puritan mindset, that it tells me
ANYTHING about the Universe. Good LORD. Why would it?
I know that Prufrock was Ironic, but I still take some odd perverse pleasure in
…
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers
rolled. …
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing for me.
Sometimes I feel like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. Even though I was a
little kid during WWII, I still feel like I fought for your sanity. And now
you find joy and wisdom in madness?! I am a 50’s Apollonian in a nest of 70’s
Dionysians.
Yes. I know. Sad!
Nick
PS: OK. It’s time I read some Geertz first-hand. Assign me something. Not
too much, please. N.
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
-----Original Message-----
From: Prof David West [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, November 19, 2019 8:14 AM
To: nick thompson <[email protected]>
Subject: post you seem to have missed from FRIAM
Nick said:
"What struck me about them was how many of them held the view that reality was
beyond experience: i.e., that our experience provided clues to reality, but the
thing itself was beyond experience. I never could convince them that that
their belief in a reality beyond experience had to be based on … experience.
So, why not be monists, and talk about organizations of experience.
Ultimately, it was their dualism that confirmed me in my monism."
How about an assertion that there is A Reality beyond "ordinary" experience;
with "ordinary experience" being the half-dozen or so overt
[NST==>what is a covert sensory experience? <==nst]
sensory inputs (sight, sound, balance, touch, taste, smell) we typically
associate with experience.
Given a different set of inputs — e.g. emotions, hallucinations, visions,
dreams — must we assume that we are still experiencing the same Reality as that
experienced with overt sensory inputs; or, is the door open to an alternative
Reality even if Reality-A and Reality-B have significant but not total
congruence? We are still experiencing, so your experiential monism is intact,
but Reality is dualist/pluralist.
[NST==>Well, to a monist there is, in your sense, no reality at all! Reality
is an aspiration. Reality is what arises from the management of experience.
Given our generational difference, I sometimes wonder if you don’t take for
granted the reality that I am fighting for. <==nst]
Or, suppose there are a set of inputs, of the same Reality, that are not
included in the overt set (sight, taste, et. al.). Previously it was noted that
the eye can detect a single photon (and we can "sense" other quantum level
phenomena). You asserted that such sensory inputs would be "lost in the noise"
of the functioning organism and hence are not "experienced." Is this not a case
of a detectable/sensible Reality beyond experience?
A corollary: can there be "experiences" — a set of stimulus-response pairs —
not included in the overt senses, and not describable in ordinary
[NST==>What is extra-ordinary language? <==nst]
language? Obviously, I am talking about "mystical" experiences such as "being
in the zone" or lower-case s, satori, or even upper-case s, Satori (aka
enlightenment). It is important to note that these are stimulus-response
events, not necessarily "experiences;" as experience, in ordinary language,
necessarily implies an experience-r, and in the examples I am thinking about,
there is no "I" and hence no experience-r.
AND,
"By the way, Geertz is probably the locus classicus of the relativism I
deplore."
Sir! Them's fightin words!!!
But I forgive you, as you clearly misunderstand Geertz (one of my personal
heroes). Nothing he says is "relativist." His observations and conclusions are,
however, hermeneutic. Geertz merely points out a fact — there are no cross
cultural universals (except one, that I will get to in just a moment), nor are
there any "objective" criteria for asserting primacy or privilege of one
culture over another. From this comes an indictment of ethnocentrism as one
culture stating that "obviously" our values, our ways of doing things, our
worldview, our customs ... are superior to yours, correct while yours are
erroneous, etc.
Hermeneuticism is NOT relativism.
The one cultural universal: every culture (obviously not every individual in
every culture) incorporates a belief in the "supernatural." In all but, maybe,
2-3, cultures the "supernatural" includes an alternative realm of existence
(pre- and/or after-life or "other planes." The, interpretations of this
universal are multiple - pretty much one per culture/subculture.
davew
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