dmb says: I don't suppose you'd be interested in talking about reductionism, would you? If it's not clear to you what I mean by reductionism, please review the statements above. Your comments depict it exactly. Obviously you do not see this as a problem. Quite the opposite. You take my complaints about it to be the problem. Apparently, you think anti-reductionism is a kind of romanticism, as a kind of anti-scientific stance. This is simply not the case. The anti-reductionist does not oppose science. He simply opposes reductionism. There is a huge difference. The anti-reductionist wants to improve science and knowledge by removing the reductionism.
[Krimel] Whatever the relative arguments over reductionism might be, what you have presents is sheer chicanery. You simple define "reductionism" as whatever Krimel says and then run and hide under your security blanket. I do define that as romanticism and it is typical of your style. I would add that there have certainly been calls to change our understanding of reductionism since the 1930s and I embrace that. I am as against your strawman as you are. The fact remains that emotions are biological sources of value. We are attracted and repelled as a result of our emotional responses to experience. There are several reasons for coming to this conclusion. First as you your self have noted we share emotional responses with other species in fact most mammals. This can not be the result of learning. It is either inherited are derives from some supernatural agency. Second, emotional reactions are common to people everywhere on earth. It is a form of universal communication within our species. We can recognize the emotional states of people from nearly every other culture on earth and they can recognize ours. This is not learned; this is built in and hardwired. Third, these emotional responses are physiologically based and outside of conscious control. We do not decide to feel sad or happy. We can not consciously control blushing or smiling, we can not consciously suppress a startle response or unless we are a bit psychotic, we can not choose to leave our asses burning on a hot stove. Fourth, like it or not there are regions of the brain that when stimulated produce emotional responses. Likewise when emotions are produced these regions light up under various kinds of brain imaging scans. These same regions are activated in other mammals as well. Any account, reductionist or not should be prepared to explain why this is so. Fifth, even in cases where brain damage disrupts the conscious experience of emotion, the physiological responses remain. To dismiss all of this on the basis of some imagined philosophical technicality it simply disingenuous. The real point is, all of this interferes with your romantic conceptions of pure experience. You seek to glorify the pre-intellectual and what I have been saying threatens your romantic conceptions. Let me repeat: Emotions ARE pre-intellectual. They ARE pre-verbal. They ARE "the immediately felt quality of the situation". They occur prior to conscious evaluation. That is not reductionism that is based on the everyday experiences of everyman. James actually took this a bit further in his paper "What is an Emotion." [dmb] Take, for example, the scientific paper you recently asked me to read and comment upon. You probably recall that it was about the brain states of meditators. And hopefully you remember that I said that was all fine and good because data are data but I also criticized your reductionistic interpretation of that study and suggested that their findings need to be supplemented by the perspective from within the meditative state. [Krimel] What exactly would have asked the meditaters? In the course of the studies they were told to exercise their usual practices. They were asked what their practices were and control subjects received instructions on how to do the same kind of thing. The reports of subjects were included in the conclusion of the study. The point of the study was to measure the brain activity of experienced versus non-experienced meditaters. It found that the more experienced meditaters have significantly different brain activity than less experienced meditaters. To me this suggests learning. As meditaters practice they get better at it. I can see where this interpretation threatens your world view but so be it. You seem to think that the verbal reports of the subjects would somehow alter the conclusion but the best that one could say about the subjects' description of these states is that they have an opinion about the meaning of those states. Nothing in these studies could confirm or deny the validity of the subjects' reports other than to say that the states are accompanied by this or that subjective report. [dmb] ...the experience as it was had by the meditators themselves rather than JUST what the researchers observed from the outside. See, I was not saying that their findings are invalid or that they should be dismissed but that they are partial. And I mean they are "partial" in both senses of the word, which is to say they are biased and incomplete. That's why they need to be supplemented by other perspectives. And that's what perspectivalism is all about. It says we need to take on board all the various perspectives and sort of add them up. Otherwise you get.... you guessed it; reductionism. [Krimel] As noted above the subjects WERE asked about what they were experiencing and how they produced the experiences. The results of all such studies are partial; in this case because more research is needed. But if we look at partial in sense of biased then I suspect any bias was on your touchy feely side. The research was promoted by the Dalai Lama and the researchers conducting the study were selected by him. I have omitted the book report from your latest class. It is certainly nice have to support one's personal biases with the opinion of someone else. But you know as well as I do that such debates as reductionism/antireductionism or the various theories of truth are by no means settled. I am sure that you take great comfort in the fact that there are arguments that support your romantic notions but blanket labeling and strawman arguments are cheap tricks and fail utterly to address the issue I have been raising. The argument I presented about Pirsig's failure to understand the role of emotion in science comes from Antonio Damasio's book "Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain". From this perspective science could not proceed if scientists had no emotions. They would have no basis of deciding what to ask, how to proceed or how to evaluate their answers. Rather than challenging Pirsig's position it points straight to the source of Value: pre-intellectual-emotional experience. [dmb] I don't expect you to give up on your reductionism because of this explanation. But I do hope you'll at least start to see what reductionism is and why so many people might be against it. [Krimel] What I see is you hiding under your blanket. You have an emotional commitment to these notions you cherish. You want the pre-intellectual to be something lofty and lovely but you know not what. You want mystical experiences to be some guide to Truth, with a big T and meaning whatever feels good to you. I think this is the road to a warm fuzzy delusion. The function of conscious intellectual processing is not to eliminate emotions but to augment them. Higher consciousness serves as a check and balance against unbridled and uncontrolled emotional responses. You should try it sometime. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
