I'm Interviewing Peter Ralston - Gathering Questions

[bazera]

1 hour ago, Joseph Maynor said:

I had a long discussion of this on the other forum.  What I concluded is that account of direct experience is an assumed philosophy.  In other words, when we reduce experience to "direct experience", we're leaving something out.  It's very sneaky because we assume that we can think of inputs to our consciousnesses like sound, smell, taste, touch, sight, thought, emotion, and those form the "atoms of direct experience."  Without offending anyone, I don't buy that theory of direct experience, I think it's a reductionism.  It's useful, but often the conclusions drawn from it I think leave something out.  Morality is not just about feeling, it's a perception or a knowing: an experience, but not a direct experience in that reductionism sense.  When we say morality is just or just is a feeling or emotion (not saying anyone here is saying this), that attempt to get at the phenomenological essence chops off part of it.  This is why philosophers like Hume developed the is-ought dichotomy thus relegating morality to something different from what is.  You're not going to find an ought in an is or from an is.  I disagree with that!  But you can see how that Empiricist account of direct experience tends to exclude morality from what is.  Therefore, Hume had a boo! hooray! account of morality.  No booing or hooraying (and thus morality in general) has anything to do with what is for Hume in his Empiricist account of direct experience.

Do you mean something akin to what Ken Wilber would call structures (egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, integral)?

You do not perceive structures as objects. They appear as patterns in how experience is organized: what you notice, what you ignore, what feels meaningful, what explanations your mind generates. But it isn't found in senses. They show up as automatic interpretations, conceptual frameworks, sense of identity, how complex your understanding of situations is.

Do you percieve morality the same way?

They have certain reality but are those ultimately true? Like, in all circumstances?