From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Gien Wong
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2021 5:08 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Goff and Carroll on Consciousness

Oh yeah, nondual hike was fun! Kicked a few stones along the way but did not refute subjective idealism by doing so! :D

Gien,

  This is brilliantly said. Just to sync up some, where you say “different cultural backgrounds and language”, I translate that into “justification systems”.

 

I hope the nondual hike was fulfilling.

 

G

 

 

 

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of James Gien Wong
Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2021 10:25 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: TOK Goff and Carroll on Consciousness

 

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.

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Thanks Gregg,

 

I’ve been following Goff’s work, who references views held by philosopher Betrand Russell and phycicist Arthur Eddington, but extending Russell and Eddington’s panpsychism views to a cosmo panpsychism. But he is moving towards another view in his new book.

 

At 8 min. of this interview, Goff spells out the difference between the qualitative vs quantitative view. 

 

https://youtu.be/_nd9dqFXHRU

 

This review:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/27/galileos-error-by-philip-goff-review

 

supports his book Galileo’s Error while at the same time pointing out some historical oversights in western scientists and thinkers who advocated panpsychism.

 

https://www.philipgoffphilosophy.com/books.html

 

At the core of his claim of the difference between the qualitative, first person experience/observation and the quantitative, 3rd person experience/measured observations. The power of science lay in measuring, but at the end of the day, all the sophisticated instruments that extend the human umwelt into other realms all have to be reduced to data that is sensed by some permutation of our inborn 5 senses ( our innate umwelt) combined with perception and interpretation with our learned conceptual models of reality.

 

The 1st person perspective directly experiences the patterns of nature, while the 3rd person perspective, via scientific methodology often experiences a cognitive proxy of it. If you put a lay person in any advanced scientific laboratory, they will not make heads or tails of the scientific instrumentation nor sophisticated conceptual machinery required to interpret the output of the instrumentation. There is a huge cultural layer of many years, even decades of symbolic, linguistic and specific scientific education separating the two perspectives. 

 

So when different people, with significantly different cultural backgrounds interact with each other and mediate a social exchange, even though they / we use the same words in the linguistic transaction, it’s like two different “inner” worlds coming together. For a domain expert, each technical term has an exceedingly rich meaning, interconnected to countless strands of other ideas. That rich network is missing in someone not an expert in the same domain. The result of every moment of the knowledge exchange is quite different and unique for each individual.

 

Language plays a huge role, perhaps larger than many people realize. It’s the one thing all domain experts take for granted, no matter which side of the argument they / we are on. We’ve all traveled the arduous journey to master language to the incredible degree that we can speak and listen, read and write in real time. Language is entangled in every aspect of the deep questions we ask, yet we rarely look at its role in the great mystery. The automation of symbolism which allows all of us to communicate in real time also hides the machination.

 

In my experience, a lot of advanced spiritual meditation practices in Zen and Tibetan Buddhist tradition that I have partaken in is about gaining insight to the machinery of the mind that makes our effortless symbolic world possible. In that sense, it is an experiential journey into that primitive reality that underlies our symbolic construction of reality. Talking about ideas is important, but exploring our deeper non-linguistic self is equally important. Life is larger than our symbolic, cultural reality, even though our symbolic cultural reality plays an outsized and dominant role in it. The word often used in these psychologically, deconstructive spiritual practices is “penetrating”.

 

When we rely on our symbolic nature to submit everything to its analysis, we miss out on using non-symbolic methods to explore ourselves. And these can yield insights which symbolic methods cannot.

 

We all learned language, were unilaterally culturally conditioned to it at our earliest age. Yet, culture is something externally imposed upon us without choice. A neonate cannot exercise choice due to the authoritarian and dictatorial power of its parents. It has no choice but to subject itself to the cultural conditioning of its parents. This is how each of us came to be conditioned the way we were.

 

I was going to say more, but must go do my nondual hike!

 

On Tue, 13 Apr 2021 at 14:32, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi TOK List,

 

  Given the dialogue about consciousness recently, I thought some might find this discussion between Phillip Goff and Sean Carroll of interest.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfAhup-fDYs

 

Goff recounts Galileo’s work in developing modern science. He frames it as a shift from qualities to quantities. This is what I call the shift from first person empiricism to third person empiricism. It relates to the epistemological hard problem of consciousness, which, as this blog makes clear, is different from the ontological hard problem. The epistemological problem refers to the brute fact that subjective conscious experience (i.e., the domain of Mind 2 on the Map of Mind) cannot be observed from the outside. Brent Allsop pointed out that there might be one known quasi-exception to this rule, which is the case of conjoined Hogan twins who share aspects of their brains. However, even here, they have distinct and separable “epistemological portals” and only “see each others’ thoughts” through their own Mind2.   

 

Anyway, the discussion is interesting for those who want to grapple with the way modern (physical) science sets up a particular epistemology and how that relates to what we know about the world.

 

The UTOK argument is that the descriptive metaphysical system afforded by the ToK sorts out the conceptual issues, and then the rest of the UTOK key ideas affords a metatheoretical and pragmatic synthesis.

Best,

Gregg

 

 

___________________________________________

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)

Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.

Check out the Unified Theory Of Knowledge homepage at:

https://www.unifiedtheoryofknowledge.org/

 

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Wishing you WELLth

Gien

Future Ancestor

 

Pull a thread here and you’ll find it’s attached to the rest of the world. - Nadeem Aslam

     

www.stopresetgo.org

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