[FRIAM] flattening -isms

[Prof David West]

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 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.

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 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

On Sun, Nov 17, 2019, at 8:27 PM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Thanks, Glen, and Dave,

> 

> Well, I should have conceded this point long ago: of course I am a è*methodological **ç *pluralist. There are many ways to skin a cat. 

> 

> Years ago I participated in a longrunning forum on Research Gate on Philosophy of Science run by an Iranian intellectual who was putting some of the great texts of western science into Persian so they would be more widely read in Iran. My colleagues in this forum were mostly an odd lot of physicists. 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.

> 

> I am serious about your forcing me to become an “of” monist. Everything is relations; it’s relations all the way down. So the turtles are themselves relations. <https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/189399.Clifford_Geertz> To the inevitable “what about the first relation: what was that a relation of?” I will only say, “The limiting case is never a particularly interesting one; I will worry about it when I have explained all the others.” (I do not understand the complexity theorists’ passion for explaining “first life”, for instance, or psychologists who tie themselves in knots over the “dawn” of consciousness.” To worry so intensely over origins when there is so much other work to be done is an implicit caving to Christian theology. We pragmatists, we begin in the middle.

> 

> So you force me to admit that even if I declare my allegiance to “of” monism, I have immediately to admit that there are different kinds of “of’s”. So EVERY monist is a pluralist at the next level up. So why am I suddenly stuck on the monist origin story? Ach. Hoist by my own petard. 

> 

> By the way, speaking of etymology, to be hoist by one’s own petard is to be ejected from one’s own saddle by the force of one’s own fart. Look it up.

> 

> By the way, speaking of Clifford Geertz, here is the original quote:

> 


> “There is an Indian story -- at least I heard it as an Indian story -- about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer; it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. And that turtle? 'Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down” 
> ― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1166845>.

> 

> By the way, Geertz is probably the *locus classicus* of the relativism I deplore. 

> 

> Nick

> Nicholas S. Thompson

> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

> Clark University

> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

> 

> 


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com] On Behalf Of glen?C
> Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2019 10:25 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] flattening -isms

> 

> My guess is you're a methodological pluralist just like the rest of us.

> 

> The trick is that monism is moot. Even *if* all things are somehow organizations of experience, to be pragmatic, you have to be able to *generate* 2 seemingly different things (like your experience vs. my experience) by different organizations (or timelines, or historical ephemerides, or iterations, or embeddings, or whatever). And so even if there is only 1 stuff, there must be different ways of organizing the stuff. So, there's, literally, no point in making a big stink about the 1 stuff. Multiplicities will *always* creep in. So, monism is one of: tautological, false, or useless, perhaps all three!

> 

> Worst case, if we can't *show* (i.e. actually *do* it) how the 1 stuff is differently organized into different things and are only left with the different things, then reality may as well *be* pluralist because saying it's not is pure fideism/imputation/speculation and does no explanatory or predictive work.

> 

> String theory and loop quantum gravity are *trying* to show how to construct multiple stuff from singular stuff. So, they're setting the bar pretty high. If you want to be a monist, why not work on those?

> 

> On 11/17/19 8:42 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:> Gosh. So Stuff of Stuff and plain old stuff are different stuffs? So Nick

> > Thompson is a dualist?

> >

> > Damn!

> >

> > Perhaps to maintain my monism I have to become an "of" monist. It's "of's"

> > all the way down.

> 

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