LS The Self and William James

From: Robert Stillwell (Stills@Bigfoot.com)
Date: Mon Jul 05 1999 - 06:08:07 BST


Hey group! Last month I had to cut short my discussions
with Mark and Mary. I'm not going to address the specific
discussions, but start again to include the whole group. I
can't wait to see where people go with the topic! Here is
my spin...

I start by discussing William James' _Principles of
Psychology_ which was deemed by Psychology Today as "the
single greatest work in American psychology". (Thanks to
Roger. Your quotes and a webpage on the internet inspired
me to read the whole damn 1200 pages! Great stuff!)

What is meant by 'self'......

"All people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves
thinking, and that they distinguish the mental state as an
inward activity or passion from all the objects with which
they cognitively deal. I regard this belief as the most
fundamental of all the postulates of Psychology."

First note that James defined thinking in a more general
usage than commonly used. 'Thinking' is all experience,
awareness, ect -- not just the inward discourse some people
refer to as 'thought'.

Second note the SOM language. Substitute 'object' with
'pattern' and we are up-to-speed. As given below, we can
see that this substitution is compatible with James...

"Were a human thought alone in the world, there would be no
reason for any other assumption regarding it... The reason
why we all believe that the objects of our thoughts have a
duplicate existence outside, is there are *many* human
thoughts, each with the *same* objects, as we can not help
but supposing. The judgment that *my* thought has the same
object as *his* thought is what makes the psychologist call
my thought cognitive of an outer reality... Sameness in a
multiplicity of of object appearances is thus the basis of
our belief in realities outside of thought."

James continues on the 'Self'...

"When [the self] was called an abstraction, that did not
mean that, like some general notion, it could not be
presented in a particular experience. It is only meant that
in the stream of consciousness, it never was felt all
alone. But when it is found, it is *felt*; ... Now can we
tell more precisely in what the feeling of this central
active self consists, - not necessarily what the active self
*is*, as a being or principle, but what we *feel* when we
become aware of its existence?"

James then becomes to me unclear. He digresses saying that
"... the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an
effort, are felt as movements of something in the head... I
do not for a moment say that this is all it consists of, for
I fully realize how desperately hard is introspection in
this field."

But James gets closer when quoting John Mill....

" 'My self is the person who had the series of feelings, and
I know of myself, by direct knowledge, except that I had
them. But there is a bond of some sort among all the parts
of the series, that they were feelings of a person who was
the same person throughout and ... a different person from
those who had any parallel succession of feelings; and this
bond, to me, constitutes [the self] ' "

By commenting that...

"Much as one must respect the fairness of Mill's temper,
quite as much one must regret his failure of acumen at this
point. [Mill] makes the same Blunder as Hume: the sensations
per se, he thinks have no 'tie'. The tie of resemblance and
continuity which the remembering Thought finds among them is
not a 'real tie' but 'a mere product of the laws of thought;
and the fact that the present Thought 'appropriates' them is
also no real tie. But whereas Hume was contented to say
that there might after all be no 'real tie', Mill, ... is
driven, like any scholastic, to place it in a non phenomenal
world."

So here we have it! The self is the 'tie' between all our
experiences. Whether we explain it in terms matter, spirit,
or pattern the 'Self' *IS* the unity of our experiences.
The ' I ' that experiences hunger is the ' I ' which chooses
to cook a meal which is the ' I ' that eats the meal.

So where does this leave me?

As John, I also think Pirsig falls way short in impersonal
dealings of the 'Self'. The self is not a collection of
dynamic and static patterns, it is a *unification* of
patterns. For example, hunger is not a 'Self', knowing how
to cook is not a 'Self' but only together do these
constitute a 'Self'.

No one has given into me on this one but I earlier proposed
a new metaphysics.

                   Reality
                  / \
                / \
              / \
    Quality Self
(Experienced (Attention or sensitivity of quality)

value)

Quality includes all the static/dynamic *experiences* we
know about. Yet, there are a bunch of 'Selves' running in
parallel that are receivers or sensitive to quality. They
are not experiences, but they are just as real! Sensitivity
to quality includes *attention* and *inattention*. James
explains how will, volition, belief and attention are the
same. We *choose* what we notice just as we chose how we
move our body.

Mark had a great post last month about how any evil can be
regarded as good, if you limit your perspective. A shocking
example would be rape being great for someone who completely
blocked out the feelings of his victims. That is how we
concluded that a person can knowingly do wrong. He/she
chooses to limit attention or sensitivity.

William James had it right: "... I want no more than
anything else to emphasize the fact that volition is
primarily a relation, not between our Self and extra-mental
matter (as many philosphophers still maintain), but between
our Self and our States of mind [Quality]."

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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