Archive for January 13, 2021
INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND SENSORY EXPERIENCE (“carnal knowledge”) WHICH INFORMS WHICH?
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Marie Antoinette was “born with a silver spoon in her mouth”. She did not know what it felt like to be ‘starving’ and could not be coming from sensory experience when she heard complaints from starving people’ (This is a caricature but the archetype is relevant’).
There is CONFUSION in our society arising from how different people’s behaviours respond differently to the mix of intellectual knowledge and sensory experience.
WE WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS have an evident predisposition to putting rational intellection into precedence over sensory experience, in contrast to the EAST, indigenous aboriginal cultures, Taoism/Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta.
Consider the different concepts of JUSTICE in the EAST versus the WEST. In the EAST, the emergence of dissonance is understood as NONLOCAL and IMPLICIT (relational) while in the WEST, the emergence of dissonance is understood as LOCAL and EXPLICIT (causal). Should we expect to be able to solve for a LOCAL source of a disturbing experience? In WESTERN JUSTICE, YES, … In EASTERN JUSTICE, NO! The difference between INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE and SENSORY EXPERIENCE (CARNAL) KNOWLEDGE comes into play here since our sensory experience informs us that life’s interactions can be like the circus game of Bumper Cars where a local Perpetrator-Victim duo can be LOCALIZED by making those two intellectual designations though the real source of the dissonance is NONLOCAL and UNKNOWABLE, as David Bohm affirms is the message of Modern physics
This note explores the peculiar option of WESTERN CULTURE ADHERENTS which elevates the explicitness and certainty of INTELLECTUAL KNOWLEDGE into an UNNATURAL PRIMACY over the innate uncertainty of SENSORY EXPERIENCE.
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