From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!daffy!uwvax!meteor!tobis Fri Oct 30 15:18:00 EST 1992
Article 7427 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!daffy!uwvax!meteor!tobis
>From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Subject: Your victory is your defeat
Message-ID: <1992Oct28.221356.9095@meteor.wisc.edu>
Summary: Objective methods cannot account for subjective experience
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science
Date: Wed, 28 Oct 92 22:13:56 GMT
Lines: 88

"But our spurned senses reply 'Wretched intellect. You get your evidence
from us, and you try to overthrow us? Your victory is your defeat.'"
				--Democritus

I got this nice quote, as well as much of my position on science of mind, 
from _The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry_ by
R.D.Laing, 1982. Herewith some more relevant quotes from that same source:

"Experience is not an objective fact. A scientific fact need not be experienced.
The differences or correlations, similarities and dissimilarities that
we experience as events only sometimes correspond to those differences
or correlations we regard as objectively real. Every schoolboy and schoolgirl
knows that appearances are deceptive.

"It is not easy to say, even, what experience is. All experiences are
instances of experience, but experience is not itself an experience.
The experience of an objective fact or abstract idea is not the impression
or idea. The effect on us of an objective fact may not be an objective fact.
Facts do not dream. I want a clear space to consider these effects of facts
and their effects on facts.

"We have to clear a space for the discussion of experience as such because the
methods used to investigate the objective world, applied to us, are blind
to our experience, necessarily so, and cannot relate to our experience. Such
blind method, applied blindly to us, is liable to destroy us in practice, as
it has already done in theory."
...
"No experiences, ordinary, everyday, usual or unusual, whether impressions,
ideas, dreams, visions or memories, strange, bizarre, familiar, wierd,
psychotic or sane, are objective facts."
...
"Experience takes on dramatic forms more akin to music unfolding diachronically
through time than a pictorial depiction synchronously present, unchanging
through time."
...
"There is a resonance between the singer, the song, sung and heard, and the
listener. A melody reverberates and regenerates mood, atmosphere, nuances of
pathos, that no scientific discourse can convey, let alone scientific method
begin to study, across widely different people, cultures, times and places."
...
"Total objectivity precludes itself from any possible explanation of experience.
The most sophisticated neuroscientists are the most baffled at its very 
existence, and its inexplicable and capricious relation to the brain. Looking
at exactly the same objective data, they may, and do, construe its relation
to experience in every way that has been imagined, from monism to dualism,
parallelism, interactionism, without, each contradictory position maintains,
contradicting the same agreed set of objective facts. The most sophisticated
objective data on the correlation of reportable human psychic actiovity
and objective physical events leaves us essentially as much in the dark or
in the light as ever."
...
"When we turn to experience and learn what it may have to teach us, we cannot
do so by a method constructed to exclude it. Equally, our experience cannot
dictate to objective science on matters of objective fact.

"We cannot measure a mood or count qualities. We live by comparisons,
similarities and dissimilarities, equivalences and differences, which are
forever devoid of objective content. We can never repeat an experience
in the way we can an objective experiment.

"The modes, modulations, forms and transformations of the soul have not only
no objective existence but many are beyond the reach of the imagination. There
is hardly anyone, I presume, who does not know what it is like to be tired.
But there are many people to testify that they do not know, and cannot
imagine, what it is like to feel joy. There is no way to know it except to
experience it. If the relations between the notes are not heard as a melody,
there is no melody. Nevertheless those who hear melodies do not have to
prove that melodies exist because some people who do not hear them say they
do not. However, they may be intimidated into believeing that it does not
really matter. In other words, that quality, which can only be known through
experience in music or any other domain, has no relevance to science except as
another possible object of study, never as a source of knowledge."
...
"All natural science can say about values is that they do not come within
its domain of investigative competence.

"A few of the other modes of existence outside the investigative competence
of natural science are love and hate, joy and sorrow, misery and happiness,
pleasure and pain, right and wrong, purpose, meaning, hope, courage, despair,
God, heaven and hell, grace, sin, salvation, damnation, enlightenment, wisdom,
compassion, evil, envy, malice, generosity, camaraderie and everything, in
fact, that makes life worth living. The natural scientist finds none of
these things. Of course not! You cannot buy a camel in a donkey market!"

---

mt



