Participatory Spirituality for the 21st Century
Here, I'm not so much interested in Dennett's ideas on consciousness as I am in his ideas concerning privileged access.
I like the opening idea that there is the folk-belief among people that everyone is an expert on their own consciousness. After all, they have a direct relationship with their own consciousness, and this, thereby, makes them an expert on consciousness.
I'm not all that impressed with this talk -- not that it's not good -- but he really only presents one piece of evidence, and we are lead to the inference that we don't know our own minds only indirectly through that evidence. I was hoping for something a bit stronger.
I like though how he incorporates real time thought experiments into his work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjbWr3ODbAo&feature=player_embedded
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Yes, this is the same type of "body wisdom" I saw Gendlin peddling at his site referenced in the Levin thread. And because Genlin's overall body-based philosophy is in general agreement with Johnson I don't see the latter questioning this type of snake oil sales.
Alleluiah brother kela, you're singing to this choir. I will testify with with a couple of my favorite quotes from L&J's PF:
"The phenomenological person, who through introspection alone can discover everything there is to know about the nature of mind and experience, is a fiction. Although we can have a theory of a vast, rapidly and automatically operating cognitive unconscious, we have no direct conscious access to its operation and therefore to most of our thought" (5).
"Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. Rather the formation and use of categories are the stuff on experience.... We cannot, as some meditative traditions suggest, 'get beyond' our categories and have a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized experience. Neural beings cannot do that" (18).
Again I don't want to diminish certain metaphoric conceptions of "body memory," such as what I use when I teach music or what may be even more appropriate where dance is concerned.
As a dancer and former (and maybe soon to be recurrent) bodyworker*, and long-time "yoga" (not traditional) and "chi" (traditional and non) practitioner, I am keenly sensitive to my body(ies). So speaking from privileged access to my own experience, and cross-referencing from other paradigms, I am highly skeptical of ridiculous claims about this sort of "wisdom." Taking my bodywork training in southern California in the 80s I was exposed to a plethora of pablum claims for what it could do.
* I'm seriously considering retiring from the insurance industry before it kills me with its high-end stress and low-end ethics to return to a meager financial but richly qualitative living in massage therapy. Some (many) things are just not worth the money or so-called "security."
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