Phenomenology sounds like quite a fellow. What assures him, if anything, that he's not just writing poetry? Is it interaction? Confirmation?

Community is experienced differently by each participant in it — Joshs

Perhaps. And perhaps babies are made of applesauce. What grounds the intelligibility of this sign 'experience' in the first place?

taking community as primary is incoherent. — Joshs

I don't think so. Recall that we're talking about Language, Consciousness, and Human Culture. It's only 'consciousness', a largely incoherent hideout (given its function), that isn't explicitly social.

To be clear, I'm not denying that people have different experiences, but that kind of statement is hopelessly fuzzy. If we aren't just writing poetry in our journals, we have to ask how we could know that our experience varies and how 'experience varying' can gather utility as a sign. If you spin a top, it'll go be itself for awhile. And if you spin up a culture in a child, that child can surprise you with a poem you wouldn't have wrote yourself. Granted. But we're all (the interesting bits) mostly inherited patterns, both DNA and culture. The 'time-binding animal' is made of second-hand information, second-hand habit.

If you do assume that my private experience (assuming such a thing makes senes) is like yours....enough that they deserve to be collected together under the same concept...then what inspires this confidence?

Are language and other kinds of action synchronized because our hidden 'experiences' are? Or do we have it backwards ?

What governs which objects are granted this 'what-it-is-like' to be them, and why?

And yet, for Wittgenstein the personalistic perspective doesn’t simply disappear into the communal whole. His approach is person relative, occasion sensitive and context dependent. — Joshs

I will agree that personhood is significant. What needs to be corrected is the tendency to take personhood as fundamental rather than emergent. How can 'consciousness' have a meaning? (Well, a family of meanings.) (I think it does have such a meaning, that it plays a role or family of roles as a token within a community.)

So, it may come down to the authenticity of meaning and about whether materialism captures the truth. What is really real and how much is about fabrications as fantasy? Perhaps, those who can live with their fantasy constructs are those who are valued in society, because this may be about validation and going beyond some kind of illusion. — Jack Cummins

I like all of these themes. Can self-deception be advantageous? Is there some truth of the matter in the first place that makes self-deception possible? If there is such a truth of the matter, does it depend on or exist as a mediated substrate? (Is the truth of the matter the truth of some obscure Matter?) Is the game of philosophy a kind of veil-penetration contest? Who can strip the goddess nakedest? Is calling the goddess an onion with no center one more move in the game?

Philosophy may lead more to the rejection of a popular set of pseudo-answers than to an answer.

The idea of consciousness as ' a last hideout for the sacred' is an interesting idea, because it may be that many would prefer a perspective in which the individual human being has little value, the person being a mere number and of insignificance. — Jack Cummins

:up:

I agree that bias can point in many directions (including against the sacred in any of its traditional forms.)

Is it so obvious that a consciousness and value are connected? Do consciousness-eschewing behaviorists think that individuals have less value?

As I see it, a Wittgenstein-adjacent view (and he was by no means the only thinker one could mention here) does dissolve the individual into the community, making language prior to sensation, making the community prior to the Cartesian ghost that dreams itself. (I think participate in language therefore I'm not an 'I' but (primarily) a 'we.')

The chemical directly interacts with the brain, as can be observed by neuroscientists, and they all report extreme changes in their experience. These reports are pretty convincing to me that the brain generates experience. — Paul Michael

Since we can't measure experience (which is largely taken as that-which-cannot-be-measured), perhaps it's better to say that the brain generates these reports. The leap from these reports to some hazy entity known as 'experience' is what should be problematized.

The dependent variable has to be an uncontroversial entity. We can survey a group that gets LSD and another group that doesn't. We can infer a causal relationship between LSD and such reports. But moving from the reports to 'experience' seems unjustified. If it wasn't so common, the fishiness of this leap would be more obvious.

One simple reason for that is if two beings wish to meet up, they have to be at around the same time (contemporary/coeval). — Agent Smith

I think this is on the right track. We are beings who care about things, tend to the things. We survive by working together, by synchronizing our activity (you do this part, while I do that part). Most of us get up in the morning and not at midnight because the sun makes it easier to see. So the sunrise comes to symbolize the time to get up and work. Even if I'm the exception who works the graveyard shift, I do that against a background of 'one [usually] gets up in the morning,' (and perhaps I enjoy myself as an exception.) In this sense time is 'there' in the world as a being, as the sun as a triggering signification.

he is seeking to demystify the nature of consciousness — Jack Cummins

:up:

Perhaps that's why some find him offensive, because 'consciousness' tends to be perceived as a last hideout for the sacred from something like critical rationality.

I would elaborate on the meaning of the term ‘qualia’ by saying that they are individual instances of what it is like to have sensations, perceptions, and thoughts. — Paul Michael

:up:

That's what I understood you to mean.

I can see why you have doubts about the meaning of qualia, though. — Paul Michael

Basically we assume that such a definition is rational or reliable. But if the instances are truly or radically individual, they wouldn't fall under the same concept, unless it be the most general concept of an entity, making the concept useless.

My suggestion is that we assume that we have the same qualia because we 'live in' the same language, and that 'qualia' are something like shadows cast by language.

One interesting remark which may lead many of us to feel less alone in thinking about the nature of consciousness, especially in relation to where it stands in relation to physicality is Dennett's remark, ' I was the one who's terminally confused, and of course it's possible that our bold community of enthusiasts are deluding each other.' — Jack Cummins

I don't know the context of that quote, but I like Dennett suggesting that he is confused. To me that's the point. It's an important to first step to realize and confess that we don't know what we are talking about. This doesn't just apply to 'consciousness' but also to its supposed opposite the 'physical.' I guess I'm gesturing toward the mystery of the mystery. To ask the hard question earnestly is (hyperbolically) like asking why the integers are made of whipped cream. For context, I think that it's not about denying or defending the existence of consciousness but rather of emphasizing how realizing how murky the issue is in the first place. (What exactly is being defended or denied?)

To what degree can we really be said to know what we mean by 'qualia'?

To test the effect of alcohol we'd look at things like reaction time, which can be uncontroversially measured.

If we wanted to test whether alcohol 'feels good,' I think we'd have to reframe that question so that the dependent variable is a choice of statements on a survey. The language we use can be measured (translation software depends on statistical relationships between words scraped from the internet.) This kind of statistical relationship might be about as much meaning as we can hope to get from 'qualia.'

Of course, isn't science? Language? Life itself for that matter? — Outlander

Yes, or I think so.

We might hypothesize a human tendency to project an 'ideal adult status' on this or that figure of the present or the past ( such as a 'visionary' tech billionaire or a long-dead spiritual master.) 'I may be blind, but someone has mastered the darkness.'

As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists somewhere there is transference. — Lacan

Also:

The term "subject supposed to know" also emphasizes the fact that it is a particular relationship to knowledge that constitutes the unique position of the analyst; the analyst is aware that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him. In other words, the analyst must realize that he only occupies the position of one who is presumed (by the analysand) to know, without fooling himself that he really does possess the knowledge attributed to him. The analyst must realize that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.

https://nosubject.com/Subject_supposed_to_know

Where does one draw the distinction between something you can control and understand and something worth pursuing? — Outlander

It feels good to overcome resistance, to carry a torch into the darkness and map it out for the tribe. Even if total conquest of the territory looks impossible and every success looks temporary and fragile.

So, I am still asking about the relevance of language for understanding how human consciousness emerged? — Jack Cummins

To me this is connected to Wittgenstein's comments on sensation.

We can also question the leap from us having the word 'consciousness' to the taken-for-granted 'fact' of there being some grand Entity that corresponds to that word.

what does Daniel Dennett mean by the idea that consciousness is an illusion? — Jack Cummins

As I see it, the issue for Dennett is that people typically don't know what they are talking about. One gets instead indignant hand-waving, the kind that he himself mischievously instigates by phrasing this situation so aggressively.

Isn't randomness in fact the most simple? — Raymond

One could argue that that which is random is the least simple (as in the least compressible or amenable to abbreviation or summary.)

.

All of it requires millions and millions of minutia-knowledge that I can never fully comprehend.. And even if I did, all the minutia that is adjacent to that , and to that, and to that.. What is it about this behemoth complexity upon complexity that seems to subsume ones own efficacy? It is pathetic our reliance but inability to know all of it.. But it is more than that. — schopenhauer1

Is there something like the fantasy of an ideal adult that is frustrated here? Even our 'visionary' tech billionaires are riding on the back of a beast they can't control or understand. Some of us have tiny maps of the abyssal territory that are just a little less tiny than the maps of others.

I see it as a major problem that most of us have minimal understanding of how and what produced the items we use to live (survive, find comfort in, and entertain). I see this as a major problem in terms of our helplessness to a system that is beyond our efficacy. — schopenhauer1

It's humiliating to depend on that which we don't understand. At the same time, it's the special trick of our species to specialize in techniques as we do (divide and conquer), while also being able to pass down and therefore build up bodies of specialized knowledge that are well beyond any individual's comprehension. This allows us to form a kind of technologically evolving 'superhuman' entity. It's hard to feel that one fully exists in the shadow of this beast. If I die, the machine will roll on, just as I roll on as one of my skin cells dies. A few neighboring cells notice perhaps in each case.

And speaking of cells, consider also that our bodies themselves are more complex machines than our spaceships or our computers. So even the caveman depends on that which he does not understand. He's just ignorant of his ignorance.

Finally, a more practical response: living a simpler life that is easier to understand will likely involve living a sweatier life, digging in the dirt. And no Novocain either.

Darwin's so-called "explanation" is incomplete. It is explained here how the animals which survive are the ones which happen to have longer necks, but it does not explain why they happen to have longer necks. — Metaphysician Undercover

Darwin stopped at what he didn't know. I read his bio lately, and he was exceedingly careful when making claims. His Origin is a fraction of the book he wanted to write.

Lamark's explanation belongs a pre-Darwinian style of evolutionary theory that tended to be mixed with mysticism. For Shaw, something like God is creating itself through various biological forms, climbing from the lower to the higher animals where 'higher' means toward omniscience, omnipotence, and (perhaps) dematerialization.

Since the discovery of Evolution as the method of the Life Force the religion of metaphysical Vitalism has been gaining the definiteness and concreteness needed to make it assimilable by the educated critical man. But it has always been with us. The popular religions, disgraced by their Opportunist cardinals and bishops, have been kept in credit by canonized saints whose secret was their conception of themselves as the instruments and vehicles of divine power and aspiration: a conception which at moments becomes an actual experience of ecstatic possession by that power. And above and below all have been millions of humble and obscure persons, sometimes totally illiterate, sometimes unconscious of having any religion at all, sometimes believing in their simplicity that the gods and temples and priests of their district stood for their instinctive righteousness, who have kept sweet the tradition that good people follow a light that shines within and above and ahead of them, that bad people care only for themselves, and that the good are saved and blessed and the bad damned and miserable. Protestantism was a movement towards the pursuit of a light called an inner light because every man must see it with his own eyes and not take any priest's word for it or any Church's account of it. In short, there is no question of a new religion, but rather of redistilling the eternal spirit of religion and thus extricating it from the sludgy residue of temporalities and legends that are making belief impossible, though they are the stock-in-trade of all the Churches and all the Schools. — Shaw

So is three a privileged state of knowledge and did Godel (the Platonist) take away Nietzsche's thunder? Or is it "all just your opinion man"?
Thanks — Gregory

False dichotomy? Is it not more like a continuum that runs from '1 + 1 = 2' to 'vanilla is the best flavor of ice cream ' ? Note that comments about this continuum also belong on it.

[T]he essences of human cognitive processes and structures are semantic networks, webs of meaning held together by ordered sequence of analogies. Metaphor and simile are the characteristic tropes of scientific thought, not formal validity of argument...

"Scientific rationality" may be no better, indeed it may be even worse as a general ideology for regulating the relations of people one to another and to the natural world than lay rationality.'



— Harr

I find the centrality of metaphor highly plausible, so no issue there. But what exactly is 'lay rationality'? If not less disciplined serious rationality? Is science something like refined common sense
partnered with specialization?

To me anyway, statistics just makes sense. Controlled experiments, p-values, etc. Can someone show me a more convincing way to establish trust in an empirical thesis?

Let's also consider a group of specialists all trying to impress and compete with another. A consensus among them could still be wrong, but what's the better alternative?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I suspect that anti-scientific feeling is primarily generated by the threat that a scientific worldview poses toward traditional forms of spirituality. Darwin's idea of the blind watchmaker ( as Dawkins calls it) is particularly offensive. Recently I've been reading the strange and mostly forgotten Back to Methuselah by Shaw.

This superstition of a continual capricious disorder in nature, of a lawgiver who was also a lawbreaker, made atheists in all directions among clever and lightminded people. But atheism did not account for Paley's watch. Atheism accounted for nothing; and it was the business of science to account for everything that was plainly accountable. Science had no use for mere negation: what was desired by it above all things just then was a demonstration that the evidences of design could be explained without resort to the hypothesis of a personal designer. If only some genius, whilst admitting Paley's facts, could knock the brains out of Paley by the discovery of a method whereby watches could happen without watchmakers, that genius was assured of such a welcome from the thought of his day as no natural philosopher had ever enjoyed before.

The time being thus ripe, the genius appeared; and his name was Charles Darwin. And now, what did Darwin really discover?

Here, I am afraid, I shall require once more the assistance of the giraffe...How did he come by his long neck? Lamarck would have said, by wanting to get at the tender leaves high up on the tree, and trying until he succeeded in wishing the necessary length of neck into existence... Darwin pointed out—and this and no more was Darwin's famous discovery—that [another] explanation, involving neither will nor purpose nor design either in the animal or anyone else, was on the cards. If your neck is too short to reach your food, you die. That may be the simple explanation of the fact that all the surviving animals that feed on foliage have necks or trunks long enough to reach it...Consider the effect on the giraffes of the natural multiplication of their numbers, as insisted on by Malthus. Suppose the average height of the foliage-eating animals is four feet, and that they increase in numbers until a time comes when all the trees are eaten away to within four feet of the ground. Then the animals who happen to be an inch or two short of the average will die of starvation. All the animals who happen to be an inch or so above the average will be better fed and stronger than the others. They will secure the strongest and tallest mates; and their progeny will survive whilst the average ones and the sub-average ones will die out. This process, by which the species gains, say, an inch in reach, will repeat itself until the giraffe's neck is so long that he can always find food enough within his reach, at which point, of course, the selective process stops and the length of the giraffe's neck stops with it. Otherwise, he would grow until he could browse off the trees in the moon. And this, mark you, without the intervention of any stockbreeder, human or divine...

There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural Selection is a blasphemy, possible to many for whom Nature is nothing but a casual aggregation of inert and dead matter, but eternally impossible to the spirits and souls of the righteous. If it be no blasphemy, but a truth of science, then the stars of heaven, the showers and dew, the winter and summer, the fire and heat, the mountains and hills, may no longer be called to exalt the Lord with us by praise; their work is to modify all things by blindly starving and murdering everything that is not lucky enough to survive in the universal struggle for hogwash...

[T]he explorer who opened up this gulf of despair, far from being stoned or crucified as the destroyer of the honor of the race and the purpose of the world, was hailed as Deliverer, Savior, Prophet, Redeemer, Enlightener, Rescuer, Hope Giver, and Epoch Maker; whilst poor Lamarck was swept aside as a crude and exploded guesser hardly worthy to be named as his erroneous forerunner. In the light of my anecdote, the explanation is obvious. The first thing the gulf did was to swallow up Paley, and the Disorderly Designer, and Shelley's Almighty Fiend, and all the rest of the pseudo-religious rubbish that had blocked every upward and onward path since the hopes of men had turned to Science as their true Savior. It seemed such a convenient grave that nobody at first noticed that it was nothing less than the bottomless pit, now become a very real terror.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13084/13084-h/13084-h.htm#link2H_4_0003

As you might sniff out, Shaw is trying to get around Darwin, and his play presents the religion of 'Creative Evolution.' The problem is that the 'willful' creativity Shaw wants to read into nature seems to be as easily explained by Darwin's Blind Watchmaker. Given all this, I'm tempted to understand 'lay' rationality as traditional religious claims, horoscopes, conspiracy theories, etc. Why not 'lay' plumbing? Or the 'lay' version of any specialization that doesn't touch on sacred matters? Because, perhaps, it's easier to think more clearly on such matters.

That is good stuff. It would be great to have a citation if it is easily available. I am not asking you to go and track it down. But I like it. — Arne

source

Seems to be from Contributions, which I haven't looked at. But it's on the theme that I find central to Heidegger. A little more from that source, to amplify my previous post:

A definite sense of being guides every natural interpretation of beings. This sense does not need to be made catergorially explicit, and precisely when it is not, it possesses its genuine being and its authority…Precisely by its being inexplicit, it possesses a peculiar stubbornness...

The fundamental way of the being-there of the world, namely, having the world there with one another, is speaking…In the manner in which being-there in its world speaks about its way of dealing with its world, a self-interpretation of being-there is also given. It states how being-there specifically understands itself, what it takes itself to be...

But my all time favorite orienting mantra is being is that on the basis of which being is already understood.

I have wasted many a fine summer hour smoking a cigar while trying to understand what the hell that means. — Arne

That's a rich and circular line.

Dasein is history.
...
Dasein, whiling away its own time in each case, is at the same time always a generation. So a specific interpretedness precedes every Dasein in the shape of the generation itself. What is preserved in the generation is itself the outcome of earlier views and disputes, earlier interpretations and past concerns.
...
The wellspring of such persistent elements lies in the past, but they continue to have such an impact in the present that their dominance is taken for granted and their development forgotten. Such a forgotten past is inherent in the prevailing interpretedness of being-together-with-one-another. To the extent that Dasein lives from (cares about) this past, it is this past itself.
...
The world with which we are concerned and being-in itself are both interpreted within the parameters of a particular framework of intelligibility.
...
One has a timeworn conceptuality at one's disposal. It provides the fore-concept for the interpretation. The interpretedness of a 'time' is strictly determined by these structural factors and the variable forms of their realization. And it is precisely the unobtrusiveness of these factors --the fact that one is not aware of them -- which gives public interpretedness its taken-for-granted character. However, the 'fore'-character in the structure of interpretedness shows us that it is none other than what has already been that jumps ahead, as it were, of a present time pervaded by interpretedness. Guided by its interpretedness, expectant concern lives its own past. — Heidegger, first draft B & T, chap. 4, quotes in order

'Being is that on the basis of which being is already understood.'

That's a tough one. Given the quote above, I think of us as self-interpreting interpreters acting upon and thinking from inconspicuously automatic and therefore unquestionable interpretations of ourselves and the world. One might say that, with especially automatic ('unconscious') interpretations, culture is mistaken for nature, the contingent for the necessary.

History is a nightmare from which the fundamental ontologist is trying to awake.

Being-there as being-in-the-world is primarily governed by logos…Coming into the world, one grows into a determinate tradition of speaking, seeing, interpreting. Being-in-the-world is an already-having-the-world-thus-and-so. This peculiar fact, that the world into which I enter, in which I awaken, is there for me in a determinate interpretedness, I designate terminologically as fore-having. — Heidegger

“Idle talk conceals simply because of its characteristic failure to address things in an originary way [urspriinglichen Ansprechens]. It obscures the true appearance of the world and the events in it by instituting a dominant view [herrschende Ansicht].” — Joshs

I like to interpret idle talk as automatic talk, as bot-speak. One is governed by habits of interpretation so automatic that one takes such interpretations for the essence of the world.

If the mind of the writer knows what he means then how is it inherently obscure? — Gregory

That's a big if. We love to get drunk on words, my friend. We may get the best high exactly when we don't understand, when perhaps the triviality or absurdity of our mantra is hidden from us.