On genuflecting, rhetorically

Rick Prescott

R.Prescott:

But shouldn't the PCE, like other altered states, be viewed with just a little suspicion... & Maybe we should view the PCE as similar to a shaman's experience of becoming a jaguar, or a dreamer's soaring above the clouds.

and J. Shear replied:

There seems to me to be a basic conflation here. For there is a world of difference between *an experience* which isn't real, and an experience *the objects of which* aren't real. & we have here the same conflation between "real" as applied to an experience and as applied to its purported content. A shaman (presumably) can have a very real experience of something (whether a magical jaguar, or a soaring above the clouds) that doesn't exist and is therefore unreal.

I agree with this, although I think the *truth* of the observation that experiences are always real unless the narrator is lying about them is one that holds trivially. So, yes, our experiences (occurrences of thought, memory, imagination, etc.) are real but the somethings of which they're about may not be.

JS's computer/tape recorder thought experiment was offered as a model of how PC might come to be as well as a refutation of the assertion that PC implies substance dualism. His discussion of PC deals with it in the *small sense*, i.e., another type of human experience to be accounted for. He says

On this model, there would be "memories" of "experiences" (tapings) which were objectless (soundless) as well as memories which were objectful (with sounds recorded) It might even be programmed to attempt to generate a style of functioning in which soundless tapes (instead of background hiss, etc.) would be the normal response to taping in a soundless environment as a method to increase its recording fidelity. None of this purely physicalistic model, of course, implies any substance dualism. Furthermore, it may well be that such a model reflects the ontology underlying subjective experiences of "pure" objectless consciousness-...

But, to me, this assumes the existence of PC without explaining it. JS asks us to imagine a tape machine recording soundlessness and then builds this into his model. He says "See, the machine recorded nothing and now it's playing back nothing". The assumption is that this represents PC. But the quoted phrase is not the same as saying "See, you've experienced (a) nothing and now you're remembering (this) nothing". It strikes me his model presupposes an experiencer separate from the device. To take it all the way through you really need to posit that the computer/tape machine is experiencing an objectless state while it is recording but when you do this you're still left with the conundrum of what one experiences when they experience an objectless state. So I can't yet accept his model as doing away with the logical difficulties of PC.

My original point lumped together consciousness w/o an object and altered states that have experiential objects. With respect to the latter, I wanted to express skepticism about the validity of these objects of experience. (Note however that this validity could be tested for, in principle. For instance, it should be possible to test a shaman's claims to be able to find, while in a trance state, lost personal articles.) Now, should we be skeptical about the PC experience as well? With respect to consc. w/o an object there is no content to validate or invalidate. There is only the experience and, given the discussion above, this is real by definition. But again, isn't expressing it in this way a trivialization? I had thought the phenomenon of PC was interesting because it implied something about the ontology of consc. (as well as the outer envelope of human potential).

With respect to my use of the word substance dualism, I may have used this in a nontraditional way so let me try to explain:

First, consider experiences I will loosely refer to as satori or samadhi. Allow me to lump these experience types with the experience of PC. (I apologize if I have conflated PC with other types of mystical experiences but I don't see how we can admit the former with its potential implications and not the latter.) Now view these types of experiences as experiments that tell us about human consc. As discussed above, the experiences are real as experiences of something, but shall we accept their content as real or a just a fancy?

Second, let's assume the content is *real*. Assume mystic states are not virtual reality experiences, they are an experience of the ways things are. The traditional description of these states is that of a universal Self or consciousness that one's personal consciousness is part of and, for various hypothesized reasons, habitually separate from. Doesn't this elevate the *mind* to something more than an emergent property of biological systems? It seems to make mind separate from any given body and hence implies a type of dualism. (You could assume that universal consc. only comes into being with humans and thus try to narrow the dualism but I don't think that's what the mystic tradition says.) Would it be a dualism of substance or property, though? I would argue that if something like a universal consc. exists it implies something more substantial then a sensory property like wetness or a cognitive property like intelligence.

I guess this is why I wanted to be skeptical about PC. Once you open the door for experiences like this to be valid indicators of *the way the universe is* it's time for a new paradigm. It may indeed be time for a new paradigm but, to paraphrase a song, "Let's not get fooled again."

MISC:

1) I had said:

on Greg's *pure experience* and *knowing consc.*, presumably the latter is consc. with an object and the former is consc. without an object.

For the record, Greg Nixon was not addressing the issue of consc. with and without an object. I misunderstood him; he was referring to a biological continuum of consc. spanning animals without language to humans.

2) I had said

but maybe we genuflect in front of their [PCE reports] a little too readily.

In retrospect, I regret using the verb genuflect. It was a bit over the top, rhetorically.

Rick Prescott
rprescot@email.usps.gov