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Spring Cheng's avatar

Thank you Joe for articulating these challenges. I feel what you have laid out is contributing to the deep divide in the political conversations, and in intimate and family relationships. Power and sex/familial bonds are deeply entangled with our basic instincts, our internal hormonal environment, influencing our subjective experience in ways far beyond language can specify and control.

My experience of growing up in Chinese culture in pre-industrialized time taught me something very important in that regard. In ancient cultures, languages and communications are more oriented towards creating conditions for a group (family/clan/tribe) to experience an entrainment, not such as explicating, specifying and articulating as modern technical English. Therefore, poetry, stories, folklores, myth, spells, .... these forms of language are all "instruments" to direct the myriads of subjective experience to entrain into a resonance... Kind like a choir director.

As a child, due to the influence of the west and dominance of English, I was forced to learn using language in that cold, mechanical way, I was traumatized and my poetic heart was hurt. As an adult, for a long time I resisted using language in an ultra technical way. It was through Fieldwork and our relationship, my heart re-opened. As I continue on the journey of healing and growth, I discovered that when I accessed the deeper feeling (thanks to the hundreds of hours of fieldwork!), I was no longer afraid of the technical language. In fact, I can enfold the more specific and precise language to serve my poetic, artistic expression! What a gift and incredible healing medicine!

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Joshua Bond's avatar

I am not sure why you would want to situate Subjective Experience (SE) in the framework of 'Science'. Science is reductive materialism, examining parts divorced from wholes, claiming the impossibility of 'objectivity' and 'repeatability', (except at the most crass and crude level). And it relies on only the five 'physical' senses (missing out 'higher' senses) for generating information that is then interpreted (somewhat vicariously) to make 'valid knowledge', {see the Sociology of Science (eg, see: "Science: The Very Idea", Steve Woolgar, 1988)}.

If you want to build a better mouse-trap, or put some people on the moon, science is great. But for the 'wholeness' of Subjective Experience, Science, for me, is the wrong 'vehicle' (if I can put it that way). The comment by Spring Cheng, that "poetry, stories, folklores, myth, spells," are more conducive to understanding SE is an interesting tack.

And if the desire to objectify the world gave us traditional Science, why can not the desire to 'subjectify' the world give us a different frame - of Subjectivity (equivalent in stature to Science) but in/on Subjectivity's own terms?

Subjective Experience could be said to include Inspiration, Intuition, Imagination, Instinct, as well as Intellect, and also Will, Soul, and BodyMind (see Veronika Bond's Synchronosphy on Substack). These Faculties of Consciousness are of a worthy stature in themselves. An attempt to reduce them to 5-lower-senses-Science seems to me to not give the higher senses their due. Indeed, attempts to fit 'higher' into 'lower' usually results in some form of tyranny.

I have not read any of your previous postings, so I might have misunderstood what is your aim. Which is my essential question: what exactly do you want to achieve with your examination of Subjective Experience? And depending on your answer, why would the great effort required to fit it into The Scientific Paradigm be worthwhile?

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