Thanks for two brilliant quotes!
couple of things:
This Behaviourism is not necessarily regarded as the best model of
perception for a wide variety of tasks. It is indeed rooted in Cartesian
Dualism, via Newton (and Gallileo before!), it does presuppose that the
universe is 'machine', powered by cause and effect 'push causality', and
that in that context you can think about perceiving organisms as 'signal
processors' - an extension of the machine view. But experimental
psychologists out of JJ Gibson (and the Gestalt psychologists before him)
who, incidentally was a philosopher before he was a psychologist - don't
really subscribe to this model at all. Admittedly they do refer to
"perceiver - actors" as a way of distinguishing what they mean by perception
from the older view of 'perception-as-sensation', and to the casual reader
this could be actually taken as an endorsement of the viablity of the older
view. Nevertheless, for many workers in fields related to
perception, -cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, perceptual psychologists
and developmental psychologists -, the simple model espoused by behaviorist
theories is simply inadequate to describe what it is they're actually
enquiring into. So perhaps Wright has polarised the arguments somewhat in
order to make a point? (incidentally, this is a tactic employed at a
physical neorological level to facilitate fast recognition of certain key
features [described as "object-sharpening"] of the environment).
I would certainly go along with the idea that certain fields may still
employ descendants of that world-view (wrongly, in my personal view) but
that has more to do with the principles surrounding the generalisability of
particular findings in particular situations, which in turn depends on quite
clear 'subjective / objective' definitions. I've had a gentle wrist-slapping
before about employing these distinctions, but in fact am of the opinion
that it is actually too simple to say that these are merely social
constructs, and so if we choose to ignore them, they'll simply vanish. I
think that, at our present stage of development, we have an inherent
propensity toward this type of classification; this is not quite the same
thing as saying that it is 'wholly innate', so we don't have to get into
that sterile argument (the innate / acquired thing). I think we're all in
agreeement that the subject / object definition-tool is too simple and too
heavy handed for some of the tasks we wish to undertake, but that's not the
same as saying that it's wholly wrong, either. I tend to bear in mind that
Newton's 'force' of gravity was actually a last gasp of ancient animistic
worldviews, but it worked well enough in order to get us on to the next
level of description. So whilst I agree with Pirsig that the S/O viewer is
often hiding much from us, I don't necessarily agree that we should simply
throw it away, we just need to know when to put it down. And to do that, we
need to know more about it, not less .Thus, simply ignoring subject / object
distinctions is tantamount to turning our back on potentially valuable
information.
Apologies to those who find this particular area sterile!
cheers,
ppl
(p.s. - in reply to a posting about two months ago, I personally find a
hammer is still a brilliantly versatile tool, in a way that more modern,
specialised nail-guns are not. I often wonder if this is pertinent to the
general 'person-in-the-street' view of philosophy?)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Platt Holden" <pholden5@earthlink.net>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: 26 March 2000 19:41
Subject: MD The Hot Stove Encounter
Greetings Philosphers:
Never have I come across a more startling and accurate comparison-in-a-
nutshell between Pirisg and the current popular worldview than in the
following quote from a new book by Robert Wright (author of "The Moral
Annimal') entitled "NonZero."
>From Robert Wright's, "NonZero"
"According to the mainstream scientific view, consciousness -subjective
experience, sentience-has zero behavioral manifestations; it doesn't do
anything. Sure, you may feel as if your feelings do things. Isn't it the
sensation of heat, after all, that causes you to withdraw your hand from the
surprisingly hot stove? The answer presupposed by modern behavioral
science is: no. Corresponding to the subjective sensation of heat is an
objective, physical flow of biological information. Physical impulses
signifying
heat travel up your arm and are processed by your equally physical brain.
The output is a physical signal that coerces your muscles into withdrawing
your hand. Here, at the sheerly physical level, is where the real action is.
Your sensation of pain bears roughly the relation to real action that your
shadow bears to you. In technical terms: consciousness, subjective
experience, is "epiphenomenal" -it is always an effect, never a cause."
>From Robert Pirsig"s "Lila"
"Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will
verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an
undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is
negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed,
crypto-religious,
metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience: It is not a judgment about an
experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an
experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone
who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least
ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some
oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the
oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will
not follow.
"The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally
inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot
stove
that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a
property
of the person uttering the oaths.
"Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the
subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more
directly sensed than any "self' or any "object" to which it might be later
assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of
the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet
absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is
the
primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and
oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.
"Once this primary relationship is cleared up an awful lot of mysteries get
solved. The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that
empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can't do
it. You get all mixed up because values don't belong to either group. They
are a separate category all their own."
Next time somebody asks me what's so great about the MoQ, I'm going to
say, "Here, read this," and present them a copy of the above. If that
doesn't
capture their interest, nothing will.
Platt
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