Things so horrible you never want to be in the situation to find them out #167

[andrewducker]

Collecting your own stool sample is _exactly_ as unpleasant as you'd imagine.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I, of course, disagree.

There's the Zen Escape, by which we escape from language into the realm of pure experience.

The problem with pure experience, of course, is that you can't talk about it, think about it, or otherwise process it. It merely 'is' - any attempt to do more than that with it stops it being pure experience and brings it into the realm of abstractions, patterns, models and other things that are mere shadows and metaphors for reality.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

oooh, the boys are being clever kittens today :-)

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

actually, after concentrating enough to read this properly, I think the only pre linguistic experience I've ever had was that first time on magic mushrooms. I've always assumed my I was what I said or thought now what I was. Did I even exist before i learnt to read? i have precious little subjective evidence of it. I think cos if I don't I am nothing.

[andrewducker]

Well, consciousness seems to rely on the same abstraction level as language, so if you can't talk about something you almost certainly can't think about it - we need to find the edges on things to be able to comprehend them (cf the way that religious experiences/alien abductions/etc are interpreted in varying different ways).

But you have non-linguistic experiences all the time, you just aren't conscious of them. When you're driving along, in a flow state, and arrive at work with no real idea of what happened between leaving home and arriving at the office - that's you so wrapped up in non-linguistic experience that you have no conscious experience of the situation. It's possible to do this with almost any task that's become so internalised that you no longer have to think about it to do it - which is why buddhist monasteries set monks to simple tasks (well, one of the reasons) - keeping the body occupied and the mind free can act as a kind of meditation.

I zone out at work fairly frequently, and 'come to' to find that I have an understanding of how to make something work, with no real idea of where the answer came from. It's a terribly handy knack to have, letting your unconscious do all the work :->

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

hear hear.

I'm all for pure experience, a very big fan of it in fact...

... but I can't help analysing or at least trying to distill down and record (mentally or otherwise) *something* that might remind at least me of at least a little bit of how it was.

not very Zen then, really :-)

But abstractions can, of course, be useful - in the right place for the right purpose. Witness that some people in this thread can effectively shortcut explanations to each other because they have read the same things, can put names to the philosophies/theories etc. which serve as pointers to a whole ream of background.

Whereas brute-force, ill-read boors like me just crash in without regard for the proper jargon, hammering general-purpose language to try to express the same concepts, and gleaning the overall sense :-)

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

now who's going in for pre-lapsarian fantasy? Pure experience indeed! You can no more have a pre-lingusitic pure experience than you can see with your eyeballs removed. The very opening of the world as experience is predicated on a subjectivity that is predicated on language. For sure you can clear your mind of extraneous clutter, but you can't (except a bullet to your skull) unpick the conditions that give rise to experience in the first place.

Experience is always mediated. I'm sorry but thats just philosophy/psychology 101. The notion of direct access to experience without the mediation of representation went out with Kant.

[andrewducker]

Experience is always mediated

Agreed.

But it goes like this:
Actual Event -> sensory organs -> unconscious experience -> language/abstraction processing -> conscious experience

I was talking about unconscious experience, the first level of what hits you, before the conscious mind breaks it apart.

Otherwise you're arguing that (non-primate) animals can't experience things, which is obviously complete nonsense.

But yes, coffee is good - I believe I'm seeing you on Saturday for V.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

the "so it goes like this" was going to be my ripost to your flow diagram, and i didn't do it. if i had i was going to put language first, (in)forming the unconscious, then the sensory organs being informed by the unconscious, then the event and then the experience of the event (as mediated by unconscious and sense organs) and then finally the consciousness of the experience.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

well like the man said, the unconscious is structured like a language. sensory organs don't just passively encode (but even if they did, you have even there a rudimentary language) but they are actively informed by inherited and acquired schemas that inform and structure experience so that even in your flow state bliss your experience is still mediated and enabled by language. The conscious mind actually does very little. It processes a vanishingly small amount of our actual ongoing experience. Most experience is unconscious. That doesnt mean that language, the symbolic order, is therefor unimportant. Call it the Lacanian unconscious (structured like a language) or the cognitive unconscious (like the psychologists now do)but it's pretty clear that it is symbolic, representational all the way down. I think you are conflating conscious mental activity with language. Language is much bigger than that.

so it goes like this

and non primates don't "have" experience of the world like us. In fact even primates clearly don't. Heidegger calls the kind of being that is unique to humans Dasein ("being there"); what distinguishes Dasein from any other kind of being-in-the-world is that Dasein is the only being for which Being is an issue. Only Dasein can pose the question of its being, only for dasein is existence a question, only dasein has the notion of being as the horizon of it's experience. To put it more technically, human beings are where ontology happens. With Dasein goes worldhood

[andrewducker]

and non primates don't "have" experience of the world like us.

And at this point we part company. I think that we do have experience like them _and_ we have Dasein. And the flow state is something akin to the experience they have.

It can't possibly be language all the way down - language is an abstraction built out of lower-level things - a way of dividing the world into this/that. It has to be built out of experience. Language is deduction, built on (and informing) induction, learning through exposure to experience.

I do agree that the conscious mind does very little though. Nor do I think that language is unimportant (or I would have said so). Or that you can _actually_ divide the world up into conscious/unconscious, inductive/deductive or any other duality. All of these are language constructs, formed from, and informing our understanding of the experiences we have. Saying that, for instance, my eyeballs have language seems to be using the word 'language' in a different way than anything it's usually used for.

[thishardenedarm.livejournal.com]

plus see Dennett quote in response to chanelpenguin below. We really should do this over coffee. Having a debate over text is like trying to arrange a meeting by SMS, it takes 10 times as long as just speaking...

[andrewducker]

Oh, and see response just above to the liminal one.