| Dedication | Introduction | Note |
|
II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | Appendix | Index |
 |
says, "You are here!")|
|
(Most quotes verbatim William James, some paraphrased.) |
(Relevant to Pirsig, William James Sidis, and Quantonics Thinking Modes.) |
|
|
75 |
In spite of this obvious need of holding our percepts fast if our conceptual powers are to mean anything distinct, there has always been a tendency among philosophers to treat conception as the more essential thing in knowledge. The Platonizing persuasion has ever been that the intelligible order ought to supersede the senses rather than interpret them. The senses, according to this opinion, are organs of wavering illusion that stand in the way of 'knowledge,' in the unalterable sense of that term. They are an unfortunate complication on which philosophers may safely turn their backs. |
(Our bold emphasis.) Here we see Plato's, et al., order over
sense, vis-à-vis James', et al., sense over order. |
|
| 76 |
|
James quotes Nicholas Malebranche. James' brackets. Observe, reader, we have a new SOMite to add to our list of Famous SOMites! |
|
| 77 |
"This is the traditional intellectualist creed. When Plato, its originator, first thought of concepts as forming an entirely separate world and treated this as the only object fit for the study of immortal minds, he lit up an entirely new sort of enthusiasm in the human breast. These objects were precious objects, concrete things were dross. Introduced by Dion, who had studied at Athens, to the corrupt and worldly court of the tyrant of Syracuse, Plato, as Plutarch tells us,
"in the sand. Some
|
|
|
| 78 | "Having now set forth the merits of the conceptual translation, I must proceed to show its shortcomings. We extend our view when we insert our percepts into our conceptual map. We learn about them, and of some of them we transfigure the value; but the map remains superficial through the abstractness, and false through the discreteness of its elements; and the whole operation, so far from making things appear more rational, becomes the source of quite gratuitous unintelligibilities. Conceptual knowledge is forever inadequate to the fulness of the reality to be known. Reality consists of existential particulars as well as of essences and universals and class-names, and of existential particulars we become aware only in the perceptual flux. The flux can never be superseded." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 79 |
"We must carry it with us to the bitter end of our cognitive business, keeping it in the midst of the translation even when the latter proves illuminating, and falling back on it alone when the translation gives out. 'The insuperability of sensation' would be a short expression of my thesis. "To prove it, I must show: 1. That concepts are secondary formations, inadequate, and only ministerial; and 2. That they falsify as well as omit, and make the flux impossible to understand. "1. Conception is a secondary process, not indispensable to life. It presupposes perception, which is self-sufficing, as all lower creatures, in whom conscious life goes on by reflex adaptations, show. "To understand a concept you must know what it means. It means always some this, or some abstract portion of a this, with which we first made acquaintance in the perceptual world, or else some grouping of such abstract portions. All conceptual content is borrowed: to know what the concept 'color' means you must have seen red or blue, or green." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 80 | "To know what 'resistance' means, you must have made some effort; to know what 'motion' means, you must have had some experience, active or passive, thereof. This applies as much to concepts of the most rarified order as to qualities like 'bright' and 'loud.' To know what the word 'illation' means one must once have sweated through some particular argument. To know what a 'proportion' means one must have compared ratios in some sensible case. You can create new concepts out of old elements, but the elements must have been perceptually given; and the famous world of universals would disappear like a soap-bubble if the definite contents of feeling, the thises and thats, which its terms severally denote, could be at once withdrawn. Whether our concepts live by returning to the perceptual world or not, they live by having come from it. It is the nourishing ground from which their sap is drawn." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 81 |
"2. Conceptual treatment of perceptual reality makes it seem paradoxical and incomprehensible; and when radically and consistently carried out, it leads to the opinion that perceptual experience is not reality at all, but an appearance or illusion. "Briefly, this is a consequence of two facts: First, that when we substitute concepts for percepts, we substitute their relations also. But since the relations of concepts are of static comparison only, it is impossible to substitute them for the dynamic relations with which the perceptual flux is filled [Quantons 'fix' this problem.]. Secondly, the conceptual scheme, consisting as it does of discontinuous terms, can only cover the perceptual flux in spots and incompletely. The one is no full measure of the other, essential features of the flux escaping whenever we put concepts in its place. "This needs considerable explanation, for we have concepts not only of qualities and relations, but of happenings and actions; and it might seem as if these could make the conceptual order active. (See Prof. Hibben, in an article in the Philosophic Review, vol. xix, pp.125 ff (1910))" |
(Our bold emphasis. Our brackets.) In Quantonics, we say SOM
is the source of paradice. |
|
| 82 | "But this would be a false interpretation. The concepts themselves are fixed, even though they designate parts that move in the flux; they do not act, even though they designate activities; and when we substitute them and their order, we substitute a scheme the intrinsically stationary nature of which is not altered by the fact that some of its terms symbolize changing originals. The concept of 'change,' for example, is always that fixed concept." |
We need care here. James speaks of concepts as though they
are SOM lisr objects.
As such, they are ESQ (Exclusive Static Quality). However, if
we represent concepts as quantons, we cannot agree with what
James says here. |
|
| 83 | "If it changed, its original self would have to stay to mark what it had changed from; and even then the change, would be a perceived continuous process, of which the translation into concepts could only consist in the judgment that later and earlier parts of it differed — such 'differences' being conceived as absolutely static relations. Whenever we conceive a thing we define it; and if we still don't understand, we define our definition. Thus I define a certain percept by saying 'this is motion,' or 'I am moving'; and then I define motion by calling it the 'being in new positions at new moments of time.' This habit of telling what everything is becomes inveterate. The farther we push it, the more we learn about our subject of discourse, and we end by thinking that knowing the latter always consists in getting farther and farther away from the perceptual type of experience. This uncriticized habit, added to the intrinsic charm of the conceptual form, is the source of 'intellectualism' in philosophy." |
(Our bold red emphasis.) |
|
| 84 | "But intellectualism quickly breaks down. When we try to exhaust motion by conceiving it as a summation of parts, ad infinitum, we find only insufficiency. Although, when you have a continuum given, you can make cuts and dots in it, ad libitum, enumerating the dots and cuts will not give you your continuum back. The rationalist mind admits this; but instead of seeing that the fault is with the concepts, it blames the perceptual flux. This, Kant contends, has no reality in itself, being a mere apparitional birth-place for concepts, to be substituted indefinitely. When these themselves are seen never to attain to a completed sum, reality is sought by such thinkers outside both of the perceptual flow and of the conceptual scheme. Kant lodges it before the flow, in the shape of so-called 'things in themselves;' others place it beyond perception, as an Absolute (Bradley), or represent it as a Mind whose ways of thinking transcend ours (Green, the Cairds, Royce)." |
James blasts Kant. James' "....rationalist mind admits this; but...blames the perceptual flux.." shows us what Doug means when he says "...rational mind goes to unlimited effort and self delusion in attempts and excuses to classically 'zero' h-bar. Zeroing h-bar uncloaks itself in science's phrases like "zero momentum." Classicists' dialectic only works when they can impose their presupposition that reality is stoppable! Quantum reality is unstoppable! James' flux is unstoppable! Doug - 12Jan2007. |
|
| 85 |
"In either case, both our percepts and our concepts are held by such philosophers to falsify reality; but the concepts less than the percepts, for they are static, and by all rationalist authors the ultimate reality is supposed to be static also, while perceptual life fairly boils over with activity and change. "If we take a few examples, we can see how many of the troubles of philosophy come from assuming that to be understood (or 'known' in the only worthy sense of the word) our flowing life must be cut into discrete bits and pinned upon a fixed relational scheme. |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 86 | "Example 1. Activity and causation are incomprehensible, for the conceptual scheme yields nothing like them. Nothing happens therein: concepts are 'timeless,' and can only be juxtaposed and compared. The concept 'dog' does not bite; the concept 'cock' does not crow. So Hume and Kant translate the fact of causation into the crude juxtaposition of two phenomena. Later authors, wishing to mitigate the crudeness, resolve the adjacency, whenever they can, into identity: cause and effect must be the same reality in disguise, and our perception of difference in these successions thus becomes an illusion. Lotze elaborately establishes that the 'influencing' of one thing by another is inconceivable. 'Influence' is a concept, and, as such, a distinct third thing, to be identified neither with the agent nor the patient. What becomes of it on its way from the former to the latter? And when it finds the latter, how does it act upon it? By a second influence which it puts forth in turn? — But then again how? and so forth, and so forth till our whole intuition of activity gets branded as illusory because you cannot possibly reproduce its flowing substance by juxtaposing the discrete. Intellectualism draws the dynamic continuity out of nature as you draw the thread out of a string of beads." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 87 |
"Example 2. Knowledge is impossible; for knower is one concept, and known is another. Discrete, separated by a chasm, they are mutually 'transcendent' things, so that how an object can ever get into a subject, or a subject ever get at an object, has become the most unanswerable of philosophic riddles. An insincere riddle, too, for the most hardened 'epistemologist' never really doubts that knowledge somehow does come off. "Example 3. Personal identity is conceptually impossible. 'Ideas' and 'states of mind' are discrete concepts, and a series of them in time means a plurality of disconnected terms. To such an atomistic plurality the associationists reduce our mental life. Shocked at the discontinuous character of their scheme, the spiritualists assume a 'soul' or 'ego' to melt the separate ideas into one collective consciousness. But this ego itself is but another discrete concept; and the only way not to pile up more puzzles is to endow it with an incomprehensible power of producing that very character of manyness-in-oneness of which rationalists refuse the gift when offered in its immediate perceptual form." |
(Our bold emphasis.) For James' example
2, see our Stairs
as Perceptual Quantum Stages, which,
using a new Quantonic heuristic, vividly answers James' "...most
unanswerable philosophic riddle." See our quantum included~middle. See our How
SOMites view reality. See our coined
dichon(dyad_A | SOM's_Sidis
| dyad_B): EEMD(dyad_A | dyad_B), EOOO(dyad_A | dyad_B). |
|
| 88 |
"Example 4. Motion and change are impossible. Perception changes pulsewise, but the pulses continue each other and melt their bounds. In conceptual translation, however, a continuum can only stand for elements with other elements between them ad infinitum, all separately conceived; and such an infinite series can never be exhausted by successive addition. From the time of Zeno the Eleatic, this intrinsic contradictoriness of continuous change has been one of the worst skulls at intellectualism's banquet. "Example 5. Resemblance, in the way in which we naïvely perceive it, is an illusion. Resemblance must be defined; and when defined it reduces to a mixture of identity with otherness. To know a likeness understandingly we must be able to abstract the identical point distinctly. If we fail of this, we remain in our perceptual limbo of 'confusion.' "Example 6. Our immediate life is full of the sense of direction, but no concept of the direction of a process is possible until the process is completed. Defined as it is by a beginning and an ending, a direction can never be prospectively but only retrospectively known. Our perceptual discernment beforehand of the way we are going, and all our dim foretastes of the future, have therefore to be treated as inexplicable or illusory features of experience." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 89 |
"Example 7. No real thing can be in two relations at once; the same moon, for example, cannot be seen both by you and by me. For the concept 'seen by you' is not the concept 'seen by me'; and if, taking the moon as a grammatical subject and, predicating one of these concepts of it, you then predicate the other also, you become guilty of the logical sin of saying that a thing can both be A and not-A at once. Learned trifling again; for clear though the conceptual contradictions be, nobody sincerely disbelieves that two men see the same thing. "Example 8. No relation can be comprehended or held to be real in the form in which we innocently assume it. A relation is a distinct concept; and when you try to make two other concepts continuous by putting a relation between them, you only increase the discontinuity. You have now conceived three things instead of two, and have two gaps instead of one to bridge over. Continuity is impossible in the conceptual world." |
This is classical philosophy and science's most ludicrous
of all axioms. From it spawns dyadic formal notation like this:
a = b + c.
SOM's great substantial schism and Aristotle's classically deduced
syllogisms spawned a dyadic classical reality! But reality
is not dyadic! Reality is omniadic.
All real 'things,' what we call quantons, are potentially in
unlimited interrelationships with other, both local and nonlocal
quantons! Only an ego center as great as a Greek male's
400 to 500 years before Christ could commit such an error of
observation. From whence? Thinking like, "Earth is flat.
Earth is center of Universe. Humans are only sentients in Universe.
Etc." We call these Classical Thinking Modes/Methods.
|
|
| 90 | "Example 9. The very relation of subject to predicate in our judgments, the backbone of conceptual thinking itself, is unintelligible and self-contradictory. Predicates are ready-made universal ideas by which we qualify perceptual singulars or other ideas. Sugar, for example, we say 'is' sweet. But if the sugar was already sweet, you have made no step in knowledge; whilst if not so already, you are identifying it with a concept, with which, in its universality, the particular sugar cannot be identical. Thus neither the sugar as described, nor your description, is comprehensible.'" |
We anticipated these words. Irving Stein calls these, "...classical ontology's incoherencies..." (paraphrased). Also see our own: Also see our recent 'issi.'
A new memetic linguistic cure for example 9's problems. Now we
know what issi issi! |
|
| 91 |
"These profundities of inconceivability, and many others like them, arise from the vain attempt to reconvert the manifold into which our conception has resolved things, back into the continuum out of which it came. The concept 'many' is not the concept 'one;' therefore the manyness-in-oneness which perception offers is impossible to construe intellectually. Youthful readers will find such difficulties too whimsical to be taken seriously but since the days of the Greek sophists these dialectic puzzles have lain beneath the surface of all our thinking like the shoals and snags in. the Mississippi river; and the more intellectually conscientious the thinkers have been, the less they have allowed themselves to disregard them. But most philosophers have noticed this or that puzzle only, and ignored. the others. The pyrrhonian Sceptics first, then Hegel, then in our day Bradley and Bergson, are the only writers I know who have faced them collectively, and proposed a solution applicable to them all." [In a note, James also acknowledges: Duhem, Milhaud, LeRoy, Wilbois, H. Poincaré as those who diligently sought solutions applicable to all.] |
(Our bold, color emphasis and bracketed note.) |
|
| 92 |
"The sceptics gave up the whole notion of truth light-heartedly, and advised their pupils not to care about it. Hegel wrote so abominably that I cannot understand him, and will say nothing about him here. Bradley and Bergson write with beautiful clearness and their arguments continue all that I have said. "Mr. Bradley agrees that immediate feeling possesses a native wholeness which conceptual treatment analyzes into a many, but cannot unite again. In every 'this' as merely felt, Bradley says, we 'encounter' reality, but we encounter it only as a fragment, see it, as it were, only 'through a hole.'" |
Quantum reality offers islands of local truth in uncertainty
interrelationships with other local and nonlocal islands of truth.
Quantum truth adheres Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems on
absoluteness of truth. Essentially, they say absolute truth is
locally impossible because local truths would have to, a.
state all truths, and b. always state the truth.
Local islands of truth may manage local truth axiomatically to
achieve a local apparition of truth as long as statements do
not coinside
other islands of truth. Still, all practitioners must anticipate
some "undecidable
propositions." (Large page!) |
|
| 93 |
Our sole practicable way of extending and completing this fragment is by using our intellect with its universal ideas. But with ideas, that harmonious compenetration of manyness-in-oneness which feeling originally gave is no longer possible. Concepts indeed extend our this, but lose the inner secret of its wholeness; when ideal 'truth' is substituted for 'reality' the very nature of 'reality' disappears. The fault being due entirely to the conceptual form in which we have to think things, one might naturally expect that one who recognizes its inferiority to the perceptual form as clearly as Mr. Bradley does, would try to save both forms for philosophy, delimiting their scopes, and showing how, as our experience works, they supplement each other. This is M. Bergson's procedure; but Bradley, though a traitor to orthodox intellectualism in holding fast to feeling as a revealer of the inner oneness of reality, has yet remained orthodox enough to refuse to admit immediate feeling into 'philosophy' at all. 'For worse or for better,' he writes, 'the man who stays on particular feeling must remain outside philosophy.' [We assume M. Bergson above and other 'Bergson' mentions all refer Henri Louis Bergson. Either M is a mistyped H, or 'r' is left from Mr. as he uses with Bradley.] |
Quantum reality says we can retain a modicum of local truth if we admit truth's quantum uncertainty due to its islandic, nondistributive, omniorthomodularity, Galois-groupiness, etc. We can trade global truth completeness for local truth consistency. But we already knew that, because quantum science already showed us that quantum 'truth' is stochastic based on event ensembles. In addition to our trade of completeness in favor of consistency, we must also trade classical, quantitative, homogeneous single-event, absolute determinism (i.e., classical analyticity) for quantum, qualitative, heterogeneous ensemble-event, stochastic determinism. |
|
| 94 |
"The philosopher's business, according to Mr. Bradley, is to qualify the real 'ideally' (i.e. by concepts), and never to look back. The 'ideas' meanwhile yield nothing but a patchwork, and show no unity like that which the living perception gave. What shall one do in these perplexing circumstances? Unwilling to go back, Bradley only goes more desperately forward. He makes a flying leap ahead, and assumes, beyond the vanishing point of the whole conceptual perspective, an 'absolute' reality, in which the coherency of feeling and the completeness of the intellectual ideal shall unite in some indescribable way. Such an absolute totality-in unity can be, it must be, it shall be, it is he says. Upon this incomprehensible metaphysical object the Bradleyan metaphysic establishes its domain.' "The sincerity of Bradley's criticisms has cleared the air of metaphysics and made havoc with old party lines." |
We looked at Bradley, briefly, some years back. He appeared
much like other SOMites we know, and very much unlike any candidate
MoQites we wish to know. |
|
| 95 |
"But, critical as he is, Mr. Bradley preserves one prejudice uncriticized. Perception 'untransmuted,' he believes, must not, cannot, shall not, enter into final 'truth.' "Such loyalty to a blank direction in thought, no matter where it leads you, is pathetic: concepts disintegrate — no matter, their way must be pursued; percepts are integral — no matter, they must be left behind. When antisensationalism has become an obstinacy like this, one feels that it draws near its end. "Since it is only the conceptual form which forces the dialectic contradictions upon the innocent sensible reality, the remedy would seem to be simple. Use concepts when they help, and drop them when they hinder understanding; and take reality bodily and integrally up into philosophy in exactly the perceptual shape in which it comes. The aboriginal flow of feeling sins only by a quantitative defect. There is always much-at-once of it, but there is never enough, and we desiderate the rest." |
Finally, James blasts Bradley, too. (Our bold emphasis.) |
|
| 96 |
"The only way to get the rest without wading through all future time in the person of numberless perceivers, is to substitute our various conceptual systems which, monstrous abridgments though they be, are nevertheless each an equivalent, for some partial aspect of the full perceptual reality which we can never grasp. "This, essentially, is Bergson's view of the matter, and with it I think that we should rest content. Summary "I will now sum up compendiously the result of what precedes. If the aim of philosophy were the taking full possession of all reality by the mind, then nothing short of the whole of immediate perceptual experience could be the subject-matter of philosophy, for only in such experience is reality intimately and concretely found. But the philosopher, although he is unable as a finite being to compass more than a few passing moments of such experience, is yet able to extend his knowledge beyond such moments by the ideal symbol of the other moments." |
(Our bold emphasis.) See our quanton(unsaid,said). Doug - 12Jan2007. |
|
| 97 | "He thus commands vicariously innumerable perceptions that are out of range. But the concepts by which he does this, being thin extracts from perception, are always insufficient representatives thereof; and, although they yield wider information, must never be treated after the rationalistic fashion, as if they gave a deeper quality of truth. The deeper features of reality are found only in perceptual experience. Here alone do we acquaint ourselves with continuity, or the immersion of one thing in another, here alone with self, with substance, with qualities, with activity in its various modes, with time, with cause, with change, with novelty, with tendency, and with freedom. Against all such features of reality the method of conceptual translation, when candidly and critically followed out, can only raise its non possumus, and brand them as unreal or absurd." |
(Our bold emphasis.) |
10Sep2000 Doug.