KARL JASPERS FORUM
TAs 102-104 (Vimal)
Response R8 (to C7)
( MIR
VERSUS WORKING-MIR )
by Ram Lakhan
Pandey Vimal
5 March 2008, posted 15 March
2008
Re [1]
I don’t know the terms ‘MDR’ and
‘EMR’.
I have not been in nirvana
either, but from descriptions I understand that it means emptying one’s mind,
and that would mean disappearance of mental structures, which agrees with the
idea that mental structures are formed (and dissolved) in the mind. Kant said that we cannot know MIR but that it
is needed for thinking, which agrees with the notion that it is a mental tool.
RLPV:
MDR = Mind-dependent reality =
subject-inclusive reality;
EMR = electromagnetic radiation.
I agree with you.
Re [2]
What do you mean by ‘experiences
that are not SE’ ?
Who experiences them ? This is rather unclear to me. If they are supposed to be mind-independent
(you seem to say they are SE-independent) they imply naive MIR-belief. You say they are similar to ‘strings’ which
would mean that they are ‘physicalist’ mind-independent
matter – but you also claim not to be a materialist, which would imply the
opposite.
RLPV:
the term ‘subjective experiences
(SEs)’ are those experiences that satisfy essential ingredients of reportable
awareness, such as wakefulness, attention, re-entry, working memory and so on
in neural nets. The tern
‘proto-experiences (PEs)’ are those experiences that are not SEs. [I have ignored dream, drowsiness, and other
states of mind/brain for future discussion.]
For example, we have SE of redness.
For example, consider the red light falling on the skin of primitive
amoeba-like animal (floating in the ancient sea) (Humphrey, 2000); this animal
detects the red light and makes a characteristic wriggle of activity; this behavior may be considered as its PE. Neural-nets experience SEs. The term
materialism implies simply non-experimental matter, which is MIR-belief. The term physicalist
includes dual-aspect entities: non-experiential matter as material aspect and
PEs as mental aspect. Strings, fermions,
bosons, and all inert matter are simply carriers of SEs/PEs.
Re [3]
‘Matter is already there’ : that means
materialism. There is an important
difference between structuring and inventing reality-experience. (From my paper ‘Brain in mind’, 2007 :)
RLPV: agreed
“ There is a difference between
“structuring” and “inventing or creating or causing”. This is decisive for questions such as: do we
only structure the world, or do we also create it ? The conflation of the two is not compatible
with the 0-D-structuring view.
RLPV: ok.
(i) We
do not create the acoustic nerve or the planet Jupiter; there is no place for
invention, since there are reliable earlier spontaneous (non-deliberate and
non-verbal) subject-inclusive structures, such as visual-gestalt forms. Deliberate verbal structures are, or can be,
added to them in order to include them in deliberate world-and-self-and-all
structures.
RLPV: ok. But the acoustic nerve
or the planet Jupiter can be described as MIR and MIR-belief. Although we do not know MIR, we can imagine,
such as objects in the ‘sea’ of EMR.
(ii) But we have to invent
structures where working-structures are needed or desired, but no earlier
spontaneous structures are available: to create a song, to structure our
identity or self (to a degree), a political constitution, or a religion, etc.
RLPV: ok.
This does not imply that the
former, (i), are pre-structured (ontic
MIR-) objects: they require our structuring – mainly non-deliberate, but also
deliberate – and can then be treated as as-if- or working-MIR (the latter,
(ii), can too).
RLPV: ok.
All of reality is our
subject-inclusive structure, within the limits of operational possibilities:
the structures do not arise by themselves. But only some of it is our creation in
the sense that we make it. The
traditional way to distinguish between these two kinds of structure is to
assume that the non-invented ones are mind-independently pre-structured. But, as just discussed, there is no need for
MIR-ontology-realism; it is replaced by von Glasersfeld’s
criterion of the “viability” of the structured items, as per feedback during
use of the structures.
To repeat: all of reality is our
structure and must be able to pass the feedback test, but we invent only some
of it. ”
RLPV: ok.
Re [4]
From where does the ongoing
experience come ?
It is what we have, our start point.
It is ‘given’, as some people put is, but given in an unstructured
state, all structures include the subject’s activity, either automatic or
deliberate. If you say they come from
somewhere else then you are in MIR-belief, for instance materialism,
subject-exclusive objectivity. But one
can say that, in a working-objectivist view, they are dependent on biological
processes (i.e., as-if-MIR).
RLPV: How can we have them? Given by whom?
Re [5]
MIR-belief is human construction
but erroneously believed to refer to something outside SE. The corrected version is as-if-MIR (or
working-MIR, where the tool-nature of this MIR notion is clear).
RLPV: ok.
Re [6]
Crystallization of matter within mind : see [3] above.
RLPV: ok. But we need to unpack
it.
Re [7]
‘Most neuroscientists will say
that the ‘neural net’ is a materialist entity’.
That is quite true : they do because most neuroscientists are
materialists, i.e., subject-exclusive objectivists. And the consequence is that they cannot deal
with the mind-brain problem.
RLPV: ok.
-------------------------------------------
Ram Lakhan
Pandey Vimal
Professor (Research)
Vision Research Institute,
428 Great Road, Suite 11, Acton,
MA 01720, USA
Ph: +1 978 263 5028; eFAX: +1 440 388 7907
Emails: <rlpvimal@yahoo.co.in>, <rvimal@mclean.harvard.edu>
URLs: <http://www.geocities.com/rlpvimal/>,
<http://www.geocities.com/vri98/>,
<http://www.geocities.com/das00m/>