Sure, Jonathan, I'll follow up on that point about my anti-empiricism.
Empiricism is a lot like patriotism really, in this way: that just as people
who call themselves "patriots" get to define for everyone else what love of
one's country ought to consist in, so do those people who call themselves
"empiricists" apparently get to define for everyone else what paying
attention to experience ought to consist in.
Often those self-declared patriots have a particular axe to grind - I mean
their love for their king/queen/empress/constitution/nation/volk or whatever
isn't unconditional - it's conditional on these things behaving in accord
with their personal self-regard and power fantasys. Germany defeated is a
germany that has been "betrayed", or, more to the point, betrayed you. A
similar thing can be said about empiricists and their somewhat conditional
love of experience. We ought to pay lots of good attention to experience,
they say - so long as we ignore all the elements of that experience that go
against our pet theory that there is data out there, that nature knows, that
scientific laws are discovered, etc etc.
And just as self-declared patriots are really the element most dangerous to
a nation, because they prefer abstract concepts and projected "destinies"
over people that actually make up a country, so to are self-declared
empiricists the people with the very least appreciation of immediate
experience.
Mystics like Pirsig and Murdoch and Plato and Heraclitus spend their entire
philosophical careers repeatedly pointing out that attending to the real
nature of immediate experience does not consist in holding the theory that
perception contains data. It does not consist in holding the theory that
some data is be passively received like an impression onto wax. It does not
consist in holding the theory that there is some mind of nature sending it's
thoughts out to us through our eyes and ears.
For these are theories: just that. And they are false theories, theories
that can be shown to be false on purely logical grounds. Experience is
continuous. Data is not. End of story.
Shall we all write a little applescript to express this point:
tell application "Finder"
tell application "Brain"
tell file "Philosophy" of "Desktop" of "Macintosh HD"
set data to "discrete"
set experience to "continuous"
set comment to "Q.E.D."
end tell
end tell
end tell
Unfortunately, the state of computing being what it is, the message you will
most likely get on attempting to run this script is "Where is "Brain"?"
After that:
tell application "Finder"
activate
sleep
end tell
Elephant
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