Me and Mark Part I Marks originals between >First, regarding your comment above about the features of Latour that escape an “inclusive synthetic node that subsumes the activity beneath it”, I do not see the rant doing this. < Neither do I. I see the rant as both ranting against too much one-ness, but not against the inclusive synthetic node that would subsume the multiplicity beneath it. I am suggesting that whenever we have this notion of one-ness, we necessarily are kept being drawn back to it, because of the s-d mind. I am suggesting that wahtever reality is, without the architecture of mind, it is not one nor two nor one without a second nor non-dual, etc… and that because this one-ness is overlaid by a hidden architecture of mind, we fall into the endless commitment to clarifying duality/non-duality/the non-dual nondual, etc… Prior to the axial age, you wont find any discussion around these terms. Mythic consciousness just didnt separate reality into dualistic categories. Then around 2000 years ago, exemplified by Plato and Plotinus, you see the dualistic mind emerge. At the time of its emergence, it represented a great attribute to human possibility, since the mythic structure constrained everything to endless cyclic recurrence. Plato actually called this new way of reasoning diaresis which means separation. He illustrated this with his tale of the cave, of relative reality in the cave and absolute reality outside, in the realm of the Ideas. Reading Plotinus, I can say that nothing really has changed in the architecture of the Ideas since then. Using dualistic categories, or Ideals to tease out conceptions of reality, and using the synthetic dialectical move to put in something new has had enormous advantages to the modern project. But this same approach to reasoning, I believe, has become obsolete, is in its deficient phase, to use Gebsers term. And I see that people, like Latour are experimenting with different architectures of reasoning, that are not mythic, nor synthetic-dialectic, but something again new. New like when Plato et al discovered diaresis. >The rant partly escapes this critique insofar as it’s poetic (that is, it is not an exercise in analytical or explanatory reasoning). T. Mortons (OOO) work in aesthetics as causality belabors the subtlety of this point for getting at things in themselves, i.e. objects and their irreducibility to our reasoning through rhetoric or aesthetics more broadly. I also think Michael’s suggestion to articulate the different domains in which we are situated is important. In this regard, your participation in this thread strikes me as impressive in its multivariate reasoning, but still is within the domain of analytic reasoning proper despite the post dialectical heights or omni-directionality of it..< Well, thats unfortunate since I attempted at first to tell about some of my experiences, which did not come to me rationally, but just as embodied transformations of self-states. And I also tried to tease you out of conceptual heights into a more obvious look at what I saw as a performative contradition in your opening rant. Only now do I feel that I am being rather analytic about all of this. Secondly I dont consider myself standing on some post-dialectical heights. Maybe on a soapbox, but certainly not on a mountaintop. From this soapbox I am saying: Can you imagine what the world might look like, or thought might be like, without the synthetic dialectical mind? Can you imagine what new possibilities might emerge? > There are other kinds of modes - dialectical or not - that do not deal primarily with reasoning nor address the multiplex referents entailed in that (i.e., the brain, its generative reasoning process and how that behaviorally unfolds a la F. Varela et al.) and then from that cognitive pragmatic processual space proceed to address more concrete issues or create experimental learning spaces from such premises (all good and wonderful, but by no means exhaustive as far as whats needed in a radically pluralistic process).< I agree, there are other modes that would not be what we call reasoning. But I am also suggesting that unless you are fully aware of the enormous contribution that cognitive architecture makes to even experiential modalities -- you cannot separate the ingredients from the taste of the soup. This is a really difficult point to communicate. I dont expect to be able to communicate it here. Ive been spending years trying to communicate it elsewhere. We all know what role that beliefs have in priming how we experience reality at certain levels. We know that different worldviews, stereotypes, conditioned experiences, assumptions about how reality works -- these all give us different interpretations of what is even if the same sensory data is available to each of us. I see a worker in an Apple factory in China, and see a slave, someone else sees opportunity, for example. This is one level of examination of the role of mind (beliefs, values, narratives, etc…) in *interpreting* experience. In this example, we can say that the sensory data comes in and the beliefs elaborate to make different interpretations. However, there is a deeper level in which mind actually organizes sensory data to elaborate on the actual perceptual phenomena itself. Some enactive people are making sense of this, detailing the processes of perceptogenesis. What this implies, then, is that s-d mind can actually prime non-rational ways of being in the world to predispose these modalities to dualistic attitudes. >For instance, I think of Zack Stein’s work and Fischer’s “second order principles” as theoretically pointing in certain ways to something of similar profound caliber as your PDS model. I dont deny its brilliance. But the relation between the sophisticated processual reasoning you enact and other spheres or domains call for different orientations and emphases.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 16:49:10 +0000
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