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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span class="gmail-hb">to </span><span class="gmail-g2">friam</span><span class="gmail-hb"> </span><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:107%"><span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Dear David and other helpful persons, <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Thanks again for your help here.<span> </span>Man! Do I look forward to your definitive
work on experience!<span> </span>All this
cogitation is exhausting me.<span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Your comment that I might dismiss your questions has an
edge that I didn’t see when you first made it.<span> </span>There is, perhaps, a sense in which I<b><i>
should</i></b> dismiss them.<span> </span><span> </span>The questions you ask have the feel of
metaphysics.<span> </span>You know, How many angels
can dance on the head of a pin?<span>
</span>Pragmatists try to dissolve metaphysical questions either into
non-questions or empirical questions. “After all, if the answer to the
question isn’t to find some angels and measure their feet, then what <b><i>are</i></b>
we talking about, eh?”<span> </span>Perhaps we might
devote our time to a more productive discussion?<span> </span>Notice that the whole notion of a
“productive” discussion itself reeks of pragmatism with its convergentist
aspirations.<span> </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">The only thing that can be positively asserted about
metaphysics – by which I mean that vast spongy fetid cloud of supposition that
surrounds and infects everything we explicitly believe -- is that it is
inevitable.<span> </span>Thus, though debating
metaphysics is useless, failing to own up to it is dishonest.<span> </span>Metaphysics is not something we propose;
it’s something we confess to. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">So, I feel obligated to go on and answer these questions,
even though their answers may indeed be unrelated to the proper thrust of “experience
monism”.<span> </span>Whatever metaphysics might be
offered to support my experience monism, <span> </span>it’s value will always be in its capacity to
root important concepts such as truth and reality, not in relations between
our experiences and some notional world-beyond-experience, but in relations
among experiences, themselves.<span> </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span> </span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span class="gmail-hb"><span> </span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">The eloquence and perspicacity of Professor Thompson has convinced me to
become an Experience monist. In my naive sophomoric enthusiasm, I have set
about writing THE definitive work on Experience. But I have a few questions:</span></i></b><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:107%;font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span> </span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""> 1A) If an Experience is is a composite- there must be
'atomic' Experience from which it is composed. Is it possible
to Experience and "atomic Experience" in isolation?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt 0.25in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Any whole with different
properties can be analyzed into parts.<span>
</span>If your first experience of<span> </span>apple
pie your gramma took from her oven and sliced, then all of that is apple pie in
the first instance. As cinnamon is experienced in other contexts and apple pie
is eaten in other contexts, the experience of apple pie can be analyzed into
parts, meaning that one can begin to experience cinnamon as something apart
from the experience of apple pie. The analysis of any experience into component
experiences is as much a cognitive achievement as its unification.<span> </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span> </span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">2) Does an Experience have duration, or is each Experience akin to
a frame of a film and continuity simply an artifact of being presented at some
rate; e.g., 30 frames per nanosecond?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt 0.25in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">I like, for the moment, to think
of experiences as successive lightning-like illuminations of a landscape of
associations.<span> </span>I would call these
associations “signs” if my grasp of semeiotics were not so protean. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt 0.25in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">You did not quite ask me, but I
must answer the question of time, or order of experiences.<span> </span>Peirce at one offers the quasi-neural notion
of the fading of nodes in the network of associations since each was last
illuminated.<span> </span>So parts of this landscape
of associations gets harder to illuminate as they are illuminated less
often.<span> </span><span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt 0.25in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">But these questions seem like
candidates for empirical investigation using tachistiscopes, and that sort of
thing. <span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">3) Can Experiences be differentiated as "potential" and
"actual?" To illustrate: I turn on the camera on my phone and images
pass through the lens and appear on the screen, but a photograph does not come
into existence until I press the shutter button. Does something similar happen
with experience? They are potential until I "press the conscious awareness
button" at which point they become actual?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Potentiality and actuality are themselves cognitive
achievements and experiences in their own right.<b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">4) Can Experiences be categorized? To borrow vocabulary (somewhat
tortured( from Peter Sjostedt-Hughes' pentad of perception;<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt 0.25in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif">Peters’s pentad doesn’t make a
whole lot of sense to me, laced as it is with apriorist dualist appeals to
physiology and an external world.<span> </span>I
think a disrupted experience is one that doesn’t fit well with existing
networks of association.<span> </span><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span></span></span></i></b></p>
<ul style="margin-bottom:0in" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">Experience
grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal environment (Sensed
Experience)<span></span></span></i></b></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">Experience
of an atemporal quality, e.g., color or scent (Perceived Experience)<span></span></span></i></b></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">An
Experience partly caused by an external physicality—e.g., motion of
molecules partly causative of the Experience of heat (Ecto-Physical
Experience)<span></span></span></i></b></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">An Experience
that is partly caused by an internal physicality—e.g., synapses firing in
the brain (Endo-Physical Experience)<span></span></span></i></b></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">Experiences
not grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal environment, e.g.,
imaginations (Demeteption Experience)<span></span></span></i></b></li><li class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal;margin:0in 0in 8pt;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">A sixth, of
my own, a variation of Endo-Physical, where the internal physicality is
"disrupted," e.g., by taking a drug.<span></span></span></i></b></li></ul>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">5) Does Experience 'exist' apart
from an experiencer?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""> </span></i></b><span>Sure, as mediated from speaker to speaker via signs.<span> </span>One experienced hunter says to another
experienced hunter, “I saw a deer down by the crick this afternoon” the second
hunter, unless he doesn’t speak the language, has a deer-by-crick experience.<span> </span>The second of those two people receives that
experience with a “George-told-me-that” qualifier attached to it. <span> </span>If you are raising the question, can there
ever be “generals,” I agree that that’s a heluva difficult question.<span> </span>But I think we monists have to answer the
question in the following way:<span> </span>As speakers
of a language we aspire, whenever we use a noun in a conversation with another speaker
of our language, to use that noun in the same way.<span> </span>We aspire to a time when the overlap of
associations that occur whenever the word is used will be 100 percent.<span> </span>Because of that aspiration, the asyntote of
usage is that 100 percent overlap, in the same way that the asyntote of inquiry
is the truth. <span> </span><span> </span><span> </span><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span> </span><span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">5A) if not, how can we have "common experiences"<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""> 5B) if yes, do we not have a faux monism, with two
metaphysical things: experience and experiencer?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span> </span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">6) Do Experiences persist? Perhaps as memories?<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""> 6A) If yes, what exactly is the difference between an
Experience-in-"memory" and one "being experienced?" Analogy
to a computer program executing and the same program stored on disk.<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span>I hope I answered
these questions above.<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span> </span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">I would have asked Professor Thompson these questions, but I fear he
would have dismissed them as "tending not to edification."<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span>I feel thoroughly
edified.<span> </span></span><span style="font-family:"Comic Sans MS""><span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><b><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:107%;font-family:"Comic Sans MS"">davew<span></span></span></i></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Arial",sans-serif">Thanks, Dave.
Nick<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0in 0in 8pt;line-height:107%;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span style="font-family:"Arial",sans-serif"><span> </span></span></p>
</div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Feb 4, 2023 at 8:46 AM Prof David West <<a href="mailto:profwest@fastmail.fm">profwest@fastmail.fm</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="msg1935880766786515501"><u></u><div><div style="font-family:Arial">The eloquence and perspicacity of Professor Thompson has convinced me to become an <b>Experience</b> monist. In my naive sophomoric enthusiasm I have set about writing THE definitive work on <b>Experience</b>. But I have a few questions ...<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">1) Is an <b>Experience</b> a whole or a composite? I.e., (scent of cinnamon)—(heat of oven)—(grandmother's smile) OR (scent of cinnamon) + (heat of oven) + (grandmothers smile)? Another analogy a single photograph or a Photoshopped collage?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"> 1A) If an <b>Experience</b> is is a composite- there must be 'atomic' <b>Experience</b> from which it is composed. Is it possible to <b>Experience</b> and "atomic <b>Experience</b>" in isolation?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">2) Does an <b>Experience</b> have duration, or is each <b>Experience</b> akin to a frame of a film and continuity simply an artifact of being presented at some rate; e.g., 30 frames per nanosecond?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">3) Can <b>Experiences</b> be differentiated as "potential" and "actual?" To illustrate: I turn on the camera on my phone and images pass through the lens and appear on the screen, but a photograph does not come into existence until I press the shutter button. Does something similar happen with experience? They are potential until I "press the conscious awareness button" at which point they become actual?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">4) Can <b>Experiences</b> be categorized? To borrow vocabulary (somewhat tortured( from Peter Sjostedt-Hughes' pentad of perception;<br></div><ul><li style="font-family:Arial"><b>Experience</b> grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal environment (Sensed Experience)<br></li><li style="font-family:Arial"><b>Experience</b> of an atemporal quality, e.g., color or scent (Perceived Experience)<br></li><li style="font-family:Arial">An <b>Experience</b> partly caused by an external physicality—e.g., motion of molecules partly causative of the <b>Experience</b> of heat (Ecto-Physical Experience)<br></li><li style="font-family:Arial">An <b>Experience</b> that is partly caused by an internal physicality—e.g., synapses firing in the brain (Endo-Physical Experience)<br></li><li style="font-family:Arial"><b>Experiences</b> not grounded in/originating from the spatio-temporal environment, e.g., imaginations (Demeteption Experience)<br></li><li style="font-family:Arial">A sixth, of my own, a variation of Endo-Physical, where the internal physicality is "disrupted," e.g., by taking a drug.<br></li></ul><div style="font-family:Arial">5) Does <b>Experience</b> 'exist' apart from an experiencer?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"> 5A) if not, how can we have "common experiences"<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"> 5B) if yes, do we not have a faux monism, with two metaphysical things: experience and experiencer?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">6) Do <b>Experiences</b> persist? Perhaps as memories?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"> 6A) If yes, what exactly is the difference between an <b>Experience</b>-in-"memory" and one "being experienced?" Analogy to a computer program executing and the same program stored on disk.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">I would have asked Professor Thompson these questions, but I fear he would have dismissed them as "tending not to edification."<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial"><br></div></div>-. --- - / ...- .- .-.. .. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .<br>
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