For example, in the graphic included in Michael's comments above, we see the separation of experience and expression. For me, I have a hard time not identifying myself in that sense as the experience, my true self, not Nik. To me Nik is the expression if the experience, in every sense of radical empiricism I feel this is so.
On Feb 5, 2021, at 7:24 PM, Nicholas Lattanzio <[log in to unmask]> wrote:CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
It truly does fascinate me, to your point Gregg, that the epistemological frame of reference one tends to interpret through is able to generate such varied understandings of the exact same thing. We have stumbled onto The Problem of Tinnitus.
For example, in the graphic included in Michael's comments above, we see the separation of experience and expression. For me, I have a hard time not identifying myself in that sense as the experience, my true self, not Nik. To me Nik is the expression if the experience, in every sense of radical empiricism I feel this is so. To me I am the ontic, the essence of reality that is inevitably shared by everything. Whatever that is, I AM THAT, which is all that can be said about it. Nik is just one onto-epistemological expression of THAT, but it is still THAT no matter how expressed.
So if I (Nik) have tinnitus (THAT) and I grimace or if I have tinnitus and I'm able to be nonreactive, I still have tinnitus. If you ask me (Nik) about my experience (THAT) of tinnitus (THAT), I then have to sort just the tinnitus aspect of my experience out of the rest of my experience, and even if I can somehow prove with absolute certainty that you were able to KNOW my experience was valid, well then by definition you would also have tinnitus. The subjective mind is just that, subjective, if it could be proven or reproduced then it would be objective.
This seems very different when identified with THAT versus just Nik. But if I'm only identified as Nik, the subjective and intersubjective minds, I can't KNOW anything objectively, because by nature I (Nik) am subjective.
The more it changes the more it stays the same, THAT will always be THAT. I Am That I Am. The only objective truth is that everything is subjectively known by the mind's interpretation of experience, which is only known to other minds via subjective expressions which those minds then interpret in a manner which can only be conveyed subjectively. You can be objectively subjective or subjectively objective, what's the difference? Change is constant and the only constant is change. As Alan Watts would say, you can be too or prickles but in reality its all just prickly too and gooey prickles.
I wish I had more free time to really dig into the many different ways we all experience and express the same thing. It is endless and endlessly fascinating.
Oh and by the way, this entire response was beamed into my head from outer space by aliens who plan on impregnating me with the elephant sun god, or was it? You'll never know..... If that's my experience. And if it was my experience, would it be a "wrong" experience? Or just so radically outside of any frame of reference that fits into neurotypical logic that it couldn't be "true?"
Love this thread.
Regards,
Nicholas G. Lattanzio, Psy.D.
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Yes, Gregg: We must. M.############################
Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
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Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845
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On Feb 5, 2021, at 4:02 PM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
############################Mike,Let’s find a time to zoom and tape it and talk about this.As far as I can tell, your representation below corresponds directly with the Map of Mind1,2,3.<image002.png>Given how it aligned with John Vervaeke, we might be able to develop a consensual map of the domains of mental processes.Best,
GFrom: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Michael Mascolo
Sent: Friday, February 5, 2021 2:55 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Is my tinnitus "real"?CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
Dear Gregg, Lee and all:Lee: You are making me put a lot of time into thinking about issues that you raise (and offering counter-arguments). You must stop.Is my tinnitus real? Yes. Can I know your tinnitus? To a large extent, yes. Is there “Objective Tinnitus”? No.How do I know your tinnitus? How do I know my tinnitus? Could there be an objective indicator of tinnitus? Please indulge me. Check out this figure:<image001.png>
- Let us start with experience. We tend to think that experience is “private”. It is not inherently so. Although I am not in direct contact with your phenomenology, I can know your experience, and you can know mine. How? First of all, your experience is not ordinarily hidden. When you are in pain, you scream and writhe. When you have tinnitus, you make a pain face, touch your ears, put on earplugs, try to fix it, and so forth. And your experience “shines through” your expression.
- Let’s assume I don’t have tinnitus. I see you do this. I ask, “what are you feeling?” You say, “tinnitus”. I say, “what is that?” You say “ringing in my ears”. I say, like a bell. You say: “No – kind of like the sound in you hears after you’ve stopped listening to loud rock music – except its continuous”. Ah! I get it.
- I can know your experience not only because it is express through your body, but also by understanding your expression through my own experience – in this case, my experience of what it is like to have rock music reverberate through my head after I stop listening. You refer to something that we can both see and hear – the amplified rock music – to refer to and describe something that I can’t experience directly – your experience of “tinnitus”.
- How did YOU come to understand your experience as “tinnitus”. Not by looking inside yourself and labeling your experience. You do identify your experience as “tinnitus” similar to the way I identified it in you. You complain about this weird experience. You say, “it like what happens when rock music…” And some learned person, drawing on our common intersubjectively shared psychological lexicon, says, “that’s tinnitus”.
- Do I know that you have “tinnitus”? Well, nothing is certain. But “nothing is certain” doesn’t mean “everything is uncertain”. My confidence in my sense of your tinnitus is enhanced by the many ways in which your experience is corroborated by intersubjective evidence – what you do when you have it; the metaphors that you use to describe it; how those words and metaphors map onto my own experiences, and so forth.
- Is “tinnitus” objective? Let’s say that we can identify a neurobiological substrate that becomes activated whenever you say that you are experiencing “tinnitus”. Does this make “tinnitus” “objective”? Well, I know what you mean when you say this – it means, if we can use the biological substrata to predict when you are feeling tinnitus, then it’s objective – we all agree on that we see the biological substrate, and it correlates to the tinnitus, and so we have made it objective.
- Well, if you want to say that, go ahead. But that doesn’t make “tinnitus” objective. Why? Because the biological indicators gain their meaning from our intersubjective capacity to use shared word meanings to corroborate that the person is experiencing something we call “tinnitus”. The biological markers get their meaning from our intersubjective capacity to corroborate experience. The biological markers gain their meaning from the experience – not the other way around.
- The biological markers are not tinnitus. How do we know this? Do a simple thought experience. If the person had the experience but not the biological markers, we would say the person had tinnitus. If the person had the biological markers but not the experience, we would not call it tinnitus. Even though tinnitus must emerge from some sort of neurophysiogical substrate, “tinnitus” is the experience – not the substrate itself.
- We know each other’s experience through our capacity for intersubjective engagement – both symbolic and “direct”. “Objective” indicators of experience gain their meaning not by referring to some physical something, but instead because they map onto experiences that we can only come to know through intersubjective engagement. When it comes to the origins of psychological knowledge, there is no substitute to human-to-human engagement.
M.Michael F. Mascolo, Ph.D.
Academic Director, Compass Program
Professor, Department of Psychology
Merrimack College, North Andover, MA 01845
978.837.3503 (office)
978.979.8745 (cell)
Political and Interpersonal Conflict Website: Creating Common Ground
Blog: Values Matter
Journal: Pedagogy and the Human Sciences
Author and Coaching Website: www.michaelmascolo.com
Academia Home Page
Constructivist Meetup Series
Things move, persons act. -- Kenneth BurkeIf it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. -- Donald Hebb
On Feb 5, 2021, at 10:41 AM, James Lyons-Weiler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
I think we could train a dog with confirmed clinical tinnitus to reliably perform a behavior that indicates what they are experiencing.Since there are no first principles in evolutionary biology that tell use that dogs' auditory circuits work in a manner fundamentally distinct from other mammals, it would require ad-hoc assumptions to presume a fundamentally different sensation.Hope this helps?On Fri, Feb 5, 2021, 9:33 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Hi Jack,Good point AND let me elaborate to make the point I was getting at.We can tell if a dog’s eyes are closed because we can do analyses of functional awareness and responsivity. Can we tell if a dog has tinnitus? The key philosophical point is the tricky space between the Mind1 “easy problems” of functional awareness and responsivity, which can be framed from the vantage point of 3rd person empiricism, and subjective experience of being and the Mind2 “hard problems” that pertain to the subjective epistemological portal and the gap between 3rd and 1st person perspectives.Also, I don’t think it is the case that all or even most cases of tinnitus have a clear external physiological cause at the level of sensory transduction. Some do. I asked my doctor and she said that the most likely cause was “topdown” perceptual filling that is a function of the fact that I have hearing loss that causes the perceptual mechanisms to compensate for. When I asked her how would she know if someone was making it up, she thought it was a weird question, but and said “why would you be here?”. Great to have a philosophical patient 😊.Best,
GreggFrom: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Lyons-Weiler
Sent: Friday, February 5, 2021 9:24 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Is my tinnitus "real"?CAUTION: This email originated from outside of JMU. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
There are different types of tinnitus - in some people, earwax can cause debris or small hairs to lay against the eardrum.For others, the biological basis of tinnitus is that the hairs in the cochlea are damaged or lie flat.So, it's a reproducible association.You might as well ask: Can I really no longer see when my eyes are closed? How do I know?On Fri, Feb 5, 2021 at 7:35 AM Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Hi TOK Folks,I am asking because I am wrapping my chapter up on Mind2: Subjective Conscious Experience and exploring the nature of subjectivity relative to reality. I was playing around with the difference between perceptions and hallucinations and the concept of the ontically real, and then the difference between first person and third person empirical epistemology regarding assertions about the real.If science is anchored to a third person empirical epistemology, what does it mean to say my tinnitus is real? If you see me say I have tinnitus and then engage in activity that seems to be directed at me adjusting to it, does that make it more real. For example, when it started to get bad, I got frustrated and then made a shift to interpret the buzzing as “crickets in the night”. In accordance with classic cognitive therapy principles, this helped.Finally, how does someone determine if this is a lie?Thanks for any thoughts people have.
Best,
Gregg___________________________________________Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
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