From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Aug 08 2005 - 22:30:02 BST
Hi Ham,
Your vacation trip to Danbury, Lenox and Sturbridge covered familiar
territory. In my youth I spent several summers in Lee, MA which is the
next town south of Lenox, and Sturbridge is not too far from where I used
to live in Connecticut. I love the Berkshire Hills, one of the loveliest
areas of the country.
Back to issues of existence, reality, experience, awareness, and
consciousness. It seems whenever this general subject comes up everyone
has a different idea of what those terms mean. As you've reported, Kaufman
says, "Consciousness is what exists absolutely everywhere and awareness is
consciousness localized to a relative somewhere." Physicalists say
consciousness refers to physical and chemical processes in the brain. The
panexperientialist says "Consciousness, like the universe, began with the
Big Bang. Our friend Pirsig says awareness comes first and consciousness
is that which selects from awareness things of value to us, just the
opposite of Kaufman.
Throw into the mix various understandings of mind, sentience, cognizance,
prehension, sensations, perceptions and conceptions and -- "Well," as
Ollie says to Stan, "here's another nice mess you got me into."
So I don't know where to go from here except to say that I think you'll
find a paper on the new www.robertpirsig.org website by Dean Summers
entitled "Pirsig and Pragmatism" to possibly be of interest since it
relates Pirsig to Dewey, Pierce and James and their ideas of
consciousness, experience and reality. Another paper I found especially
valuable on the site was by Richard Loggins who took pains to help his
readers understand his ideas by providing concrete illustrations and
examples, the mark of great communicator and thinker whose feet are firmly
planted on solid ground.
Anyway, at this point I don't have anything more to offer to move our
conversation forward. I think we know each other's positions fairly well,
and neither of us is inclined to budge..
Best regards,
Platt
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