A World of Pure Experience (By William James)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 16 ต.ค. 2024
- William James' wonderful 1904 essay "A World of Pure Experience" read by Carl Manchester and from LibriVox. The paper comes from William James' "Essays in Radical Empiricism", which was published posthumously in 1912. Note, this is a version of an upload from the previous channel. The audio has been improved.
William James' "Does Consciousness Exist?" can be found here: • Does Consciousness Exi...
#Philosophy #Consciousness #Epistemology
OMG THIS IS SOOOO HEAVY! I CAN FEEL MY SOUL FINALLY!
I've always loved James's writing style.
you're killing me... i can only consume so much PHILOSOPHY OF MIND content before i die... give me more!!!
It’s nkt nec Phil kf mkmd
DITTO!
Great channel.
Come with me
and you'll see
it's A World of Pure Experience
James’ own argument is written via abstractions that his argued for worldview will not countenance.
It all uproots as you unpack the issue of trying to find ‘a building held in mind’ a little further.
How long should you wait for the building itself to arrive before you declare that it is not there to find? The answer will be in the form of breaking down a series of prior experiences that are expected to precede the building.
‘I will encounter this street, then this corner and then round the next corner the building’, and each element of this series will have its expected time.
But then you have the problem inherent in all concepts of continuity, where Achilles will lose to a tortoise; you will have to establish the time needed before writing off the existence of each element in the sequence by establishing further intervening elements.
It’s like arguing that you’ll know you’re headed for 2 when, setting out from 1, you meet 1.5.
You need to confirm that you’re headed for 1.5 by looking out for 1.25, but of more importance will be the encountering of 1.125, but of immeasurably greater importance will be the encountering of 1.000000001 etc etc.
You are reduced by sheer force of practicality to an arbitrary timeframe for judging continuity to be in effect.
This ‘jumping of lightning’, be it between 1 and 1.5 or between 1 and 1.00000001, is vital for truth to be accepted at any time and for direction to be assented to.
‘How do we know we are heading north?’
‘Well because north draws closer, as assented to by the movements of our feet and the largely unwavering forward pointing of this compass needle.’
This form of argument for navigation is eminently practical yet entirely based on abstractly appreciated relations (of foot to walking, needle to north etc).
A worldview that does NOT permit us to ever assent to the existence of north or the number 2 without first proving the traversal of every piece of ground north of your starting point, or every one of the infinite real number between 1 and 2, respectively, is a worldview that leaves us as lost between 1 and 2 as between the Self and the Absolute.
Far from resolving the subject object distinction, it compounds it infinitely and merely entreats us to drift in ignorance with supremely lenient expectations of any of our ideas proving accurate in the slightest.
We are told to walk toward the building in mind, but, should we wish to actually arrive at the building with any conviction, to do so only after we have scrutinised the more familiar cracks in our bedroom ceiling to verify that we are in fact starting from our bedroom.
This surely defeats the purpose of reflection, and traps us in Hume’s world of mere facts with no escape to any kind of reasonable purpose available even at the most basic points of decision.
WELL OBSERVED MY BROTHER. GREAT JUST GREAT!
What you're saying sounds exactly like Zeno's paradox, which can easily be resolved taking into account the scales at which internal states manifest and how their scale of magnification dictates their temporal qualities, the internal state of an atom has a fundamentally different experience of time than us due to how its motion through space stand in relation to other objects.