Bacteria direct their movements according to the level of noxious or beneficial chemicals in their environment. In order to swim in the right direction (let's say towards an attractive chemical) it seems that the bacterium must be able to track the change in concentration of the chemical over time. That would seem to require a memory, which is an aspect of mind. — Daemon

Bacteria do more than track levels of chemicals. The nature of their functioning is unified such as to form a normative anticipative sense-making. The organism doesn’t just adapt to an independent environment. It co-defines that environment through the aims of its its own functioning. Put differently , the environment is shaped by the organism as much as the organism adapts to its environment. That’s a reciprocal feedback dynamic.

“Bacterial chemotaxis provides a minimal yet rich and fundamental case of living as sense-making in precarious conditions. Sucrose and aspartate, for example, have valence as attractants and significance as food, but only in the milieu or niche that emerges through bacterial liv-ing. Put another way, the status of these molecules as nutrients is not intrinsic to their molecular structure; nor is it even simply a relational feature of how these molecules can bond to other molecules in the cell membrane.

Rather, it belongs to the context of the cell as an individual, that is, as a self-individuating process that be-haves as a unity in dynamic concert with its immediate environment. When Merleau-Ponty writes, in his lecture course on Nature (discussing von Uexküll), “the reactions of the animal in the milieu . . . behaviors . . . deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of objects,” his description applies also to microbial life: the reactions of the bacteria in their milieu—their tumbling and directed swimming—deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of molecules. Clearly, this significance depends on the structural features of physiochemical processes; it depends on the molecules being able to form a gradient, traverse a cell membrane, and so on. For this reason, the physico-chemical world is not formless and undifferentiated, receiving form only from living beings; rather, the physicochemical world is a morphodynamical world of qualitative discontinuities that offer regions of salience for living beings. But the significance and valence of these saliencies as attractants and repellents emerges only given the bacterial cell as a metabolic and behavioral unity—in other words, as a living being.”

we can see that the bacterium achieves what it does without consciousness. So I don't agree with Thompson when he says where there is life there is mind. — Daemon

I would argue that the unified functioning of the bacterium is a kind of proto-consciousness. It involves sense-making, affective valence and intentional purposiveness.

“My proposal, spelled out in Mind in Life, is that living as sense-making in precarious conditions is the living source of intentionality. Sense-making is threefold: (1) sensibility as openness to the environment (intentionality as openness); (2) significance as positive or negative valence of environmental conditions relative to the norms of the living being (intentionality as passive synthesis— passivity, receptivity, and affect); and (3) the direction or orientation the living being adopts in response to significance and valence (intentionality as protentional and teleological). This threefold framework structures my discussions in Mind in Life of the sensorimotor and affective sense-making of animal life, which is made possible by the unique structure of the nervous system, as well as my discussions of human forms of sense-making, such as time-consciousness, emotion, and the participatory sense-making of empathy and social cognition.”
(Evan Thompson)

What's the relevance to consciousness or the mind? — Daemon

The model of a normatively based dynamical non-linear reciprocal feedback system is precisely how many are. now conceiving of consciousness. See Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life’.

I don't think those processes do "express" increases in complexity. A little more explanation perhaps? — Daemon

Much of our orientation toward science and other aspects of life is based on learning and growth of knowledge. Standard of living is measured by economic productivity , which is a product of innovation. Is there a direction to knowledge or just random
change?

Descartes thought we were born with a divinely given ability to ascertain rational truths about the world. Kant believed truth was pattern
or scheme-based. We contribute our own categories to our experience of the world, so that causal
relations of physical stuff come pre- ordered in some fashion. Biologists now talk about living systems as self-organizing. Their functioning is norm-based tether than just arbitrary relations among chemicals.

What’s crucial in these examples are the concepts of complexity , pattern, scheme, thematics, normativity. I think they imply a non-linear, reciprocal feedback idea of interaction between physical entities that is a more sophisticated understanding of causality than linear causal dynamics allows for.

The mouse would press a button when it saw the line, to get a reward. Is that close enough to "sign evaluation" for you? It all takes place thanks to the bioelectrochemical processes (and not "information"). — Daemon

How would you talk about the difference between the chemical environment of the sun vs the earth. They both involve law-governed interactions among particles. The
chemical environment on earth is clearly different than the sun, but is it just different or different in a particular way? What about the difference between inorganic and living processes, or between lower and higher animals , or the. neurological organization with the brain as we move from early humans up through cultural history? Would you agree that the kinds of differences we are looking at have to do with increases in the complexity of organization?

How do bioelectrochemical processes express increases in complexity of neural organization as opposed to just arbitrary differences? How do we know that a sequence of chemicalinteractions is a pattern rather than an arbitrary causal chain of events? Within a causal physical description , what is the difference between pattern and random causal change?

The corollary of this argument, the one that information ontology rests on is the question "once you've recorded all the information about an object, what else is there?" If the information about the object is the only thing you can show to exist, then the next step is to cut out the unnecessary metaphysics and posit that physical things are information. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Relating this discussion of information, thermodynamics and semiotics back to the OP, which is the contribution of neuroscience to the elucidation of consciousness, I suggest that to the extent that neuroscience sees itself unproblematically as a naturalistic science, it will fail to grapple with what are emergingas the most relevant t tooics concerning what is inextricably correlated with consciousness , such as self-awareness, emotion, empathy , sense of identity and time.

Put differently, neuroscience needs to radically rethink reductionist models of ‘information’ and ‘code’ in the direction of phenomenology and Wittgenstein.

So, to put the question directly, how can you support the claim that all of the examples he cites here are physical? As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws. — Wayfarer

From a phenomenological perspective, it would not be the case that subjective experience stands apart from physical laws in its own realm, but that it is the condition of possibility of the natural attitude and its accompanying physical laws.

“The purely Objective consideration, which investigates the Objective sense of thingness, requires that things be dependent on one another as regards their states and that they, in their real existence, mutuallly prescribe something to one another, regard­ing, specifically, their ontological content, their causal states.
The question now is whether a thing, which indeed remains one thing under all circumstances, is the identical something of properties and is actually in itself solid and fixed with respect to its real properties; that is, is a thing an identity, an identical subject of identical properties, the changing element being only its states and circumstances? Would this not then mean that
according to the various circumstances into which it can be brought, or into which it can be thought to be introduced, the thing has different actual states, but that in advance- a priori - how it can behave, and, further, how it will behave, is predelineated by its own essence?

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the "Objectivity" of natural science.”(Husserl, Ideas II)

I grant you that the with consciousness we are attempting to examining the very same process or entity by which we examine that process or entity. However, there are two sides of this equation, the third-person examination, and the first person phenomenon we are trying to explain. — hypericin

I suggest that whatever our alleged subject matter, be it consciousness or quarks, we are always at the same implicitly experiencing the object we are conscious of and the subjective consciousness of it. The third person examination simply isn’t able to make explicit what is implicit in it, which is that any experience of an entity is the experience of a a particular contextual sense of that entity, which is a sense for me , from my point of view, at this moment. Built into the very meaning of the entity as I experienced it right now is its particular relevance to me. Relevance is covered over by the third person mode of thinking.

I wasn't making any theoretical claims about the relation between mind and world or that there is a mental theatre. I know from experience that I perceive things with greater clarity and vividness the less my mind is agitated by thoughts; that's all I was referring to. — Janus

I was trying to convey the idea that every awareness we have is a kind of change and therefore a kind of thought. So to distinguish between the receiver of stimulation and the stimulation itself, or between the mind and the thoughts it thinks, is to focus on two kinds of awarenesses, two kinds of changes and therefore two kinds of thoughts.
When I perceive myself as ‘stilling’ or quieting my mind, I am not reducing thoughts. What I am doing is shifting the mood of my thinking fro anxious to peaceful. We tend to think of thoughts as discretely felt packets of things. The more out of sorts or anxious we are , the more the flow of experience seems to be cut up into these discrete bits. When we are simply drifting pleasantly along , it is not as if this flow of thought is slowed. On the contrary, the feeling of pleasant thought-free awareness is one of a more accelerated kind of thinking that is marked by a thematic consistency and intimacy. Becuase this kind of flow of thinking is so smoothly self-consistent it seems to us that we are thinking fewer thoughts.
So the opposition you make between agitated thinking and vivid clarity is the distinction between this smooth flow, i. which things make sense , and the interruptive, alienated flow of thinking.

The "ordinary" mind is like a pond into which a stone has been thrown; it doesn't reflect the environment clearly. In a state of stillness, thoughts can be observed arising and crossing the mind like birds flying across a clear sky. — Janus

Except the mind isn’t a mirror of the world, it’s a reciprocal interaction with an environment. Thoughts don’t appear before an unchanging theater of the mind , they transform the experiencer. We come back to ourself from out of what we perceive.

And yet, I cannot account for how these images arise from physical processes, despite knowing that they do. It is uncontroversial that it happens from physical processes. Those who dispute that are properly marginalized. The explanatory gap results from the collapse of Cartesian dualism as a respectable philosophical position.. If Cartesian Dualism were allowed, there would be no gap, matter would be one kind of thing, mind another. — hypericin

“One way of formulating the hard problem is to ask: if we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world.

One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way presuppose our own cognition and lived experience. In other words, the hard problem seems to depend for its very formulation on the philosophical position known as transcendental or metaphysical realism. From the phenomenological perspective explored here, however — but also from the perspective of pragmatism à la Charles Saunders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, as well as its contemporary inheritors such as Hilary Putnam (1999) — this transcendental or metaphysical realist position is the paradigm of a nonsensical or incoherent metaphysical viewpoint, for (among other problems) it fails to acknowledge its own reflexive dependence on the intersubjectivity and reciprocal empathy of the human life-world.

Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James's thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. What the naturalistic perspective fails to take into account is that the mind as a scientific object has to be constituted as such from the personalistic perspective in the empathic co-determination of self and other. The upshot of this line of thought with respect to the hard problem is that this problem should not be made the foundational problem for consciousness studies. The problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and consciousness?' because, to use the language of yet another philosophical tradition, that of Madhyamika Buddhism (Wallace, this volume), natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable (svalaksana); they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations' of intersubjective experience.” (Evan Thompson, Empathy and Consciousness)

“Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it.

It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself.

But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes.”( Dan Zahavi)

And they then fail to point to the third thing of their fruitful connection? — apokrisis

I think you’d be surprised by how compatible their views are with Peirce’s

Once you assert the primacy of either values or facts, then you have fallen into a deep misunderstanding about how intelligent dissipative structures, or Bayesian mechanics, are meant to work. — apokrisis

I wouldnt say that Prinz and Haidt are giving preference to empirical fact over subjective moral valuation. They are pointing to two equal but different categories of judgement.

Biosemiosis and neurosemiosis build the biological organism - the one that is “driven by in-the-moment emotions”. The semiosis of word and number - language and maths - then build the social level of organism that is the human animal with its extra level of “dispassionate, reasoned, self-regulating behaviour” — apokrisis

Does this mean that dispassionate reason is built on top of in-the-moment-emotions and longer lasting moods? Perhaps, then, ‘emotionless reason’ is always affectively charged. If so, is empirical validity the expression of an affect-driven value system? Does this make changes from one empirical worldview to the next arbitrary and incommensurable, like transitioning from one historical aesthetic movement to another?

Again we have the two worlds of symbol and matter. — apokrisis

And what of fact and value? Are you familiar with the work of Jonathan Haidt, Jesse Prinz and Ronald De Sousa? Opposing Moral universalists like Nussbaum , they argue for empirical naturalism in the realm of science. and subjective relativism in the realm of moral
values. Values are drive by emotion, which is a subjective and intersubjective response , whereas science is fact-based.
Thus there can be consensus on empirical facts but not on moral values. Opposing sides of a political or ethical dispute can agree on all the facts relative to the dispute and yet disagree on the valuative
conclusions.

My question is, what does the "informational" account tell us about the phenomenon, in addition to what the biochemical account tells us? — Daemon

It seems to me that when we recognize a pattern as a pattern rather than a random collection of discrete parts, we are making use of a different sort of account. A hardware description of a computer includes all the contents of its software, but isn’t the sort of account that can give us the meaning of the software as software. Similarly , a biochemical description of a neural network that is organized to understand language ‘includes’ the biochemical contents underlying the hierarchically organized semantic categories on the basis of which language processing is structured in the brain. But notions like semantic pattern and category are invisible at the level of biochemical description. An informational code must be ‘added’ to the biochemical account. One couldgo further and argue that the informational level isnt just added on top of the reductively causal biochemical account. It is more fundamental, i. the sense that one can generate a reductively causal description within a semiotic language but not the other way around. This is the claim of Peircean pansmiotics.

Do you think information does something in addition to what the nucleic acids and proteins do? What is it? — Daemon

I think there are many sciences, eaxh with their own account of the ‘same’ phenomena, but described in relation to different levels of observation, and, more importantly, in relation to different purposes of description. Infrormational semiotic code is one account and a physico- chemical is another account of the ‘same’
phenomenon.

This is true of something as a simple as a point in space. Is there more than one legitimate account of what a point is ?

“If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.”(Nelson Goodman)

If you think "information" does something in addition to what the nucleic acids and proteins do, then tell us what that is — Daemon

I guess the issue is how they do what they do. There is more than one account involved here. A reductively causal chemical description is a different account than a semiotic one.

Who do you agree with in this video, Dawkins or Rose?


https://youtu.be/QceGqKZMqIM

— Matthew Ratcliffe’s paper

In other words, a science that accounts for experiencing organisms needs a theory of semiosis. It needs to place the epistemic cut (between self and world) at the centre of its inquiry. It needs a general theory of modelling relations to create a meta-theory large enough to encompass both mind and matter, healing the Cartesian rift. — apokrisis

It sounds to me like you’re more sympathetic to Dennett’s heterophenomenology than to Ratcliffe’s critique of it. Would you agree?

Science examines the examinable, measures the measurable, and this very much relies on that basic public availability. By contrast, phenomenology attempts to describe how we experience; and the only agreement possible in that consists in the fact that we all experience, and can reflect on the general character of that experience; so we have here two different arenas of sense-making; that is all I've been saying. — Janus

The only issue for you is whether these descriptions are of private stuff or public stuff.

Do you really have nothing to say at all about epistemological fundamentals? You just damn science because ... naive realism? — apokrisis

I wonder if Matthew Ratcliffe’s paper ‘The Problem with the Problem of Consciousness’ may mediate between your two views by putting phenomenology between them rather than on one side or the other.

Abstract. This paper proposes that the „problem of consciousness‟, in its most popular formulation, is based upon a misinterpretation of the structure of experience. A contrast between my subjective perspective (A) and the shared world in which I take up that perspective (B) is part of my experience. However, descriptions of experience upon which the problem of consciousness is founded tend to emphasise only the former, remaining strangely oblivious to the fact that
experience involves a sense of belonging to a world in which one occupies a contingent subjective perspective. The next step in formulating the problem is to muse over how this abstraction (A) can be integrated into the scientifically described world (C). I argue that the scientifically described world itself takes for granted the experientially constituted sense of a shared reality. Hence the problem of consciousness involves abstracting A from B, denying B and then trying to insert A into C, when C presupposes aspects of B. The problem in this form is symptomatic of serious phenomenological confusion. No wonder then that consciousness remains a mystery.

“…formulations which start by taking the scientifically described world for granted and then go on to puzzle over how people‟s internal experiential worlds fit into the scientifically described world are incoherent.”

“ In thinking about consciousness, there is a tendency to start by replacing the world as it actually appears with the world as described by certain choice sciences, a description that includes only inanimate, physical stuff. Rather than describing experience and then turning to address the question of how it relates to the scientific worldview, experience is interpreted from the outset as something arising in the world that is characterised by science. It cannot be outside of the head, as there is no phenomenology out there anymore. So it must exist only in the residue, taking the form of subjective states or strange internal qualia that do not fit in anywhere but have nowhere else to go.”

Dennett, in describing his own conception of phenomenology, appeals to the Sellarsian contrast between scientific and manifest images, and proposes that:

“What phenomenology should do is adumbrate each individual subject‟s manifest image of what‟s going on with them. The ontology is the manifest ontology of that subject. It can be contrasted with the ontology that is devised by the cognitive scientist in an effort to devise models of the underlying cognitive processes.” (2007, p.250)

However, each subject‟s experience is not simply „subjective‟ but involves being part of a shared experiential world. A subjective manifest image is not to be contrasted with the manifest image. The “manifest ontology of a subject‟ includes a sense of its not just being an ontology for the subject but a world shared with other subjects. Consciousness was never a matter of some idiosyncratic, subjective view of the world, estranged from all other such views and from the objective world as described by science. Consciousness is not just a matter of having a subjective perspective within the world; it also includes the sense of occupying a contingent position in a shared world. From within this experiential world, we manage to conceive of the world scientifically, in such a way that it fails to accommodate the manner in which we find ourselves in it. Hence the real problem of consciousness is that of reconciling the world as we find ourselves in it with the objective world of
inanimate matter that is revealed by empirical science. It should not simply be assumed from the outset that a solution to the problem will incorporate the view that science reigns supreme.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292369294_The_Problem_with_the_Problem_of_Consciousness

Third person vs first person is just publicly available vs not publicly available. — Janus

Could we say instead that the public realm is the intersubjective arena? Rather than there being the same object viewed by all , there would be a reciprocal coordination among points of view. Each directly sees only their own perspective on an object but indirectly incorporates the others’ perspectives. The third personal ‘same object for’ all is never actuallly seen by anybody but exists as a convenient idealization , the result of consensus.

In Descartes’ day the Hard Problem concerned the relation between the Divine realm and the mechanistic realm of physical nature. Many dismissed the problem by arguing that it was a category error, a conflation of different areas of sense. Fortunately , those who managed to dissolve the problem rather
than reify it won out.

They may or may not abandon those ideas; but whether or not they do will have no impact on their ability to do science. As is said in the context of QM: "Shut up and calculate"; that is the methodology. We have practicing scientists who are Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, nihilists or whatever: no metaphysical belief or faith precludes them from doing science as well as the next person. — Janus

This is like saying that whether one is a Kantian, Hegelian or phenomenologist will have no impact
on one’s ability to do philosophy.’Shut up and philosophize!’ That’s right, these different notions of philosophy dont preclude someone from doing philosophy. But one will do philosophy as a Kantian or Hegelian or phenomenologist, which understand the very meaning and method of philosophy differently from each other. Like philosophy , Science isn't one thing. Only scientism believes that. It is a changing history of approaches to method and practice. (Check out Joseph Rouse. There are as many notions of science as there are philosophical systems. It’s just more difficult to discern these differences because they are not emphasized by scientists so we end up with the illusion of ‘a’ scientific method. If there is anything common to different eras and approaches to science it isn’t attention to the object but to our construct of the object.

basically science is a "third person" investigation. The various epistemological theories you cite are examples of philosophy of science, which is a kind of phenomenology, bot a kind of science. — Janus

These are not just ideas on one side of a divide between philosophy and science. There is no such divide. Newer ideas in quantum physics , in neuroscience and in numerous other scientific fields are implicitly , and in some cases explicitly (see predictive processing , for example) based on different philosophical preconceptions than previous scientific approaches. Their theories would be impossible without tacit recognition of such shifts in perspective. Already, we have contributors to cognitive science that reject the idea that science should be ‘third person’ based. I suggest eventually all scientists will abandon. such a notion of the third -personal
stance , just as many of them now have abandoned the myth of the given or the gods-eye view.

"To the things themselves" is an injunction to examine the ways in which things are experienced by us; a different investigation altogether, where it is our experience of the objects, and not the objects themselves, that are in view. — Janus

How do we know what an object is in itself? What happens when we try to describe the characteristics of this so-called object in itself? You might respond that that is exactly what the natural sciences do. Well, yes, they do that now, but in order for them to make progress in their own fields, they will eventually have to
catch up with where enactivists and phenomenologists have arrived.

“ Knowledge is taken to consist in a faithful mirroring of a mind-independent reality. It is taken to be of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed independently of any thought and experience (Williams 2005, 48). If we want to know true reality, we should aim at describing the way the world is, not just independently of its being believed to be that way, but independently of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings. An absolute conception would be a dehumanized conception, a conception from which all traces of ourselves had been removed. Nothing would remain that would indicate whose conception it is, how those who form or possess that conception experience the world, and when or where they find themselves in it. It would be as impersonal, impartial, and objective a picture of the world as we could possibly achieve (Stroud 2000, 30). How are we supposed to reach this conception? Metaphysical realism assumes that everyday experience combines subjective and objective features and that we can reach an objective picture of what the world is really like by stripping away the subjective. It consequently argues that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between the properties things have “in themselves” and the properties which are “projected by us”. Whereas the world of appearance, the world as it is for us in daily life, combines subjective and objective features, science captures the objective world, the world as it is in itself. But to think that science can provide us with an absolute description of reality, that is, a description from a view from nowhere; to think that science is the only road to metaphysical truth, and that science simply mirrors the way in which Nature classifies itself, is – according to Putnam – illusory. It is an illusion to think that the notions of “object” or “reality” or “world” have any sense outside of and independently of our conceptual schemes” ( Zahavi)

I simply ask what specifically does Husserlian intentionality add here that we don't already know? — apokrisis

It doesn’t add anything to an account grounded in naturalism. It reveals the conditions of possibility of that naturalism. One could trace the irreducible primitives of
your naturalism to Pierce’s Firstness. One cannot get to phenomenology from naturalism if one begins from a concept of pre-relational intrinsicality and tries to add phenomenological intentionality on top of it. One has to instead open up Firstness and reveal it as a derived abstraction.

One is an easy mistake to make - a high level act of interpretation. The other is found to be constitutive of interpretations themselves.

You can unsee the mysterious figure. But you can't unsee the Mach bands. And having noted this interesting difference in your qualitative experience, you would then look to its separate causes.

What answer does Husserlian intentionality give us here? — apokrisis

One does not unsee the mysterious figure. What appears to one as the figure is the product of a specifically correlated concatenation of retentions, expectations and actual sensation. The changes one makes in one’s spatial relation to the phenomenon via bodily movements changes that constellation of retentions,
protentions and sense data. One has now constituted a different phenomenon, but idealizes the changes by dubbing this process of perceptual transformation as my seeing the ‘ same’ object correctly now but incorrectly before. As realists, our belief in persisting real objects makes our conformity to the ‘ facts’ of the real
external thing the arbiter of correctness. But from a phenomenological vantage , the difference between illusion and correctness is a function of the ways changing inferential compatibility between one moment of perception and the next, which can be relatively stable over time but never self -identical.

I could learn to see the "illusion" behind my naive phenomenology ... and start to worry about mind~body dualism when I went off to philosophy class.

So sure. Phenomenology is fine if it begins a process of reverse engineering the causes.

And sure, it is neither objective or subjective in the traditional sense. I'm always saying that it is not that, but instead, semiotic. And semiotic on both the biological and sociological levels. — apokrisis

Semiotics and Husserlian intentionality are different notions of causality. You may consider the latter naive while I consider the former to be naive and derivative. Semiotics allows for the consideration of what is subpersonal , independent of but underlying and inclusive of conscious awareness. For phenomenology there is no outside of consciousness but rather constitutive levels of meaning. My ‘naive’ perception of a mysterious figure in the distance center that turns out on closer inspection to be nothing but a shadow is no different than the ‘naive’ perception of mach bands. In both case, there is no end run around the temporally unfolding synthetic activity of phenomenological constitution, only an enrichment of perception achieved i. accordance with the assimilative function of intentionality.

But where does phenomenology connect with causality in accounting for consciousness as the phenomena it decides is its subject of study? — apokrisis

Phenomenology doesn’t begin from objective causality, it deconstructs it by grounding it in the structure of intentionality, which is neither objective nor subjective in a traditional sense.

So, the idea is that science generally brackets (leaves out of consideration) subjective experience and focuses on the objective, while phenomenology generally brackets the objective world and focuses on how we, subjectively, experience ourselves and it, ourselves in it.

If you, as Heidegger does, count phenomenology as ontology then obviously ontology is part of phenomenology. But that is a non-traditional conception of ontology.

From the perspective (and I maintain it is just a perspective) of phenomenology consciousness is prior, just because of its focus on subjective experience. From the perspective of science (and it is also just a perspective) consciousness is not prior, since it never what is being studied, because the subject of study here is simply the objects as they are encountered.

Science is not an ontology either, it is a methodology, as it makes no necessary assumptions about the independent existence of its objects. — Janus

First off, I should say that science’s conception of itself, including such things as what it does, how it differs from philosophy and what an object is, has undergone and will continue to undergo change alongside historical changes in philosophical wordviews. We can see this evolution in philosophy of science, from its faith in Baconian inductive method and cumulative progress, to Popperian falsificationism and the embrace of deductive method, to Kuhn , Feyerabend and Rouse’s postmodern relativism and rejection of falsification and the correspondence theory of truth.

In the latter philosophies of science we have something close to a phenomenological approach to science.
But let’s take the notion of objective realism that is still prevalent in the natural sciences today and compare it to a phenomenological approach. Does objective realism simply take objects ‘as they are given’ , as you say? If that were the case , there would seem to be no need for Husserl’s famous dictum countering the Kantian unknowable noumena, ‘to the things themselves’.
Objective realism doesn’t take objects as they are perceived, it takes them as preconceived according to presuppositions about objects, such as that an object is identical with itself over a certain duration. You say that science makes no necessary assumptions about the independent existence of its objects, but it does indeed do this in that it requires that objects be mathematizable. This is the fundamental basis of empirical objectivity. As Heidegger and Husserl both pointed out, only an object assumed as identical persisting over time is a mathematical object. Such identical self-persistence is assumed as independent of the relation between the object and the subject that is perceiving the object.

“A true object in the sense of logic is an object which is absolutely identical "with itself," that is, which is, absolutely identically, what it is; or, to express it in another way: an object is through its determinations, its quiddities [Weisheiten], its predicates, and it is identical if these quiddities are identical as belonging to it or when their belonging absolutely excludes their not belonging. Purely mathematical thinking is related to possible objects which are thought determinately through ideal-"exact" mathematical (limit-) concepts…”(Husserl)

Husserl argues that the self-identical object on which duration and mathematical quantification is based is transcendent to what is actually experienced; it is an idealization , a synthesis pieced together from moments of experience that never reproduce their sense identically.
What we actually perceive is not a persisting thing , but a constantly changing flow of perspectives and senses. The nature of this changing flow is only apparent once we see it as dependent on the anticipatory protentions and retentions of the perceiving subject. Put differently, and object isnt just a ‘what is the case’ , it is also a ‘how it is the case’, which is a matter of pragmatic relevance and use. What an object is is stance-dependent. Change the stance and you change the object.

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, as remanens capax mutationem, constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”(Heidegger 2010)

Heidegger explains that the fundamentally undiscussed ontological foundations of empirical science since Descartes are based on his formulation of objective presence.

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.

Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger)

Okay. Very clear. Can I think of Kuhn as one who examines the (scientific) zeitgeist? — ucarr

Yes. In fact I will see your zeitgeist and raise you one Weltanschauung( I’m such a card).

I suggest other participants in this discussion take a look and decide for themselves — T Clark

Don’t you go messin’ with the laws of nature, Mister.

Does it actually 'reject' them as false, or is it the case that the phenomenological project explores other avenues? — Tom Storm

Phenomenology has to find a way to explain how it came to be that philosophers and scientists began to split into separate entities what always was a unitary phenomenon. Their explanation is that the assumption of such entities aren’t false , it’s an abstraction, an idealization.

“…first we carve nature up at artificial joints – we split mind and body apart – and then we need to fasten the two together again. But glueing the two back together does not bring back the original ‘‘integrity and nature of the whole”“ (Hanne De Jaegher )

It's fascinating how so many of you want to escape from the world. I suggested to GT in an earlier post that it is probably due to egotism. One thinks, "My mind is so special, so important. How can it be limited to a hunk of meat?" — Real Gone Cat

That’s nice, but it has nothing or do with what phenomenology is about. Phenomenology is not an idealism or subjectivism , a privileging of mind over matter. It rejects both sides of this dualism in favor of a radical interaction.

As I see it, phenomenology brackets the external world for methodological reasons and science brackets the internal world for methodological reasons. Neither are justified in making ontological claims that are beyond the ambit of their methodologies. — Janus

I would argue that phenomenology brackets both the external and the internal world as understood according to scientific naturalism, and it does so for ontological reasons, which are used to justify it’s methodology. The notion of phenomenology as introspection is a common but mistaken assumption.

Still, it's not a valid alternative and easily dismissed. No antenna, no reason for evolution to produce receiver-brains — Real Gone Cat

Then there’s the phenomenological claim that consciousness produces the brain , in the sense that the brain, as a concept arising out of natural science, is a derived abstraction grounded in the constituting activities of consciousness. An evolutionary argument would be irrelevant here, since evolutionary theory is itself a naturalistic conception and therefore also derivative.

I'm thinking subjective values systems, almost by definition, are rooted in relativity, as subjectivity is always local to the individual. Paradigmatic subjectivity therefore implies zeitgeist, ethos. How does Kuhn separate his ideas from such? — ucarr

A paradigm is an intersubjective , social achievement, the product of reciprocal interchange among subjectivities. A new theory can spring up in the head of a solitary individual, but the practice of science is a social endeavor. So we don’t get to the point of having an accepted working paradigm until it is embraced by a scientific community.

This is some 19th century made-up mystical mumbo-jumbo (he mentions souls :roll: ) — Real Gone Cat

Have you read James’ Principles of Psychology? Most of the field of experimental psychology ( and I suspect that includes your perspective) still hasnt caught up
to the ideas in that book, so I wouldn't be so dismissive of his speculations, just because his language is sometimes archaic by today’s standards.

I have asked and received no answer to the question as to how the experimental results would be expected to look any different if the brain was a receiver of consciousness rather than a producer of consciousness.
— Janus

And how, exactly, does the brain "receive" consciousness? Is there any indication of an antenna? — Real Gone Cat

William James had some ideas on this subject:


“When the physiologist who thinks that his science cuts off all hope of immortality pronounces the phrase, "Thought is a function of the brain," he thinks of the matter just as he thinks when he says, "Steam is a function of the tea-kettle," "Light is a function of the electric circuit," "Power is a function of the moving waterfall." In these latter cases the several material objects have the function of inwardly creating or engendering their effects, and their function must be called productive function. Just so, he thinks, it must be with the brain. Engendering consciousness in its interior, much as it engenders cholesterin and creatin and carbonic acid, its relation to our soul's life must also be called productive function. Of course, if such production be the function, then when the organ perishes, since the production can no longer continue, the soul must surely die. Such a conclusion as this is indeed inevitable from that particular conception of the facts.

But in the world of physical nature productive function of this sort is not the only kind of function with which we are familiar. We have also releasing or permissive function; and we have transmissive function. The trigger of a crossbow has a releasing function: it removes the obstacle that holds the string, and lets the bow fly back to its natural shape. So when the hammer falls upon a detonating compound. By knocking out the inner molecular obstructions, it lets the constituent gases resume their normal bulk, and so permits the explosion to take place.

In the case of a colored glass, a prism, or a refracting lens, we have transmissive function. The energy of light, no matter how produced, is by the glass sifted and limited in color, and by the lens or prism determined to a certain path and shape. Similarly, the keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes.

My thesis now is this: that, when we think of the law that thought is a function of the brain, we are not required to think of productive function only; we are entitled also to consider permissive or transmissive function. And this the ordinary psycho-physiologist leaves out of his account.”

https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/JamesHumanImmortalityTwoObjections1898.pdf

Children are the exact opposite of altruists, they are irrationally selfish beings by nature, as are all animals that are not eusocial, which we are not. And I'm not altruistic at all, and I find it to be grotesque, the concept. Exchanging value between people who value one another is not altruism. Altruism is specifically placing a higher value on life that is not my own. — Garrett Travers

Let me retract my use of the term altruism then. What I want to say is not that we value others above
ourselves but that in our dealings with people in our lives that we care about , we find what they offer us to be almost as valuable as our own thoughts and feelings. In relating to loved ones it’s mostly not a question of choosing between ourselves and them but of having both. What difference does it make that I know and care for my self a little better than I know my loved one? I need both my own thoughts and feelings and what they contribute to me, even thought I slightly prefer my own. Those aspects of the other that I can’t relate to or embrace I will reject, but in any close relationship those moments are secondary. Small children love and need their parents intensely. So why do they appear irrational selfish? Because one minute their parent offers them
exactly what they need in terms of love, comfort or understanding , and the next minute the parent seems to deprive them of what they want , or punish or ignore them. The young child doesnt understand why the parent cannot act and think exactly as the child thinks all the time, and so moves from love to hate and back again for the parent constantly. But when the child is in a loving mood, it wants only the best for the parent, even though it still recognizes its own thinking and feeling as slightly preferable to the parent. So in love the child isn’t choosing itself over the parent, it is choosing both.

As adults, mostly I and my beloved find our interactions to be mutually valuable without having to worry about the fact that each of us value ourselves slightly higher than we value the other. This is because in my day to day living the central choice is not between my interpretation of a situation and my friend’s interpretation of that same situation, but between my being alone and isolated or in the company of someone who I value. So we dont spend most of our lives choosing our selves over others, we spend most of our lives using the valuable qualities we find in others to trigger richer thoughts and feelings in our own selves that we could not have generated without their help.

We make these choices all the time. We can sleep all day, stare at a wall, listen to music , watch television or be with a friend. In each of these examples our ‘self’ is being stimulated by something that is added to our experience. Each of those situations expands our ‘self’. But why is it that being with a close friend causes me to have much more enjoyable thoughts and feelings than staring at the wall? It’s because what my friend contributes is almost as valuable to me as my own thoughts and feelings, so much so that being with them triggers richer and more valuable thoughts and feelings within my ‘self’ than I ever could have generated alone. Thus, I can only achieve my best self by seeing the world through their eyes.

I will never be treated with disrespect to my value as a conscious being ever again, — Garrett Travers

What does seeing others as almost as valuable as yourself have to do with disrespecting your own value?

One becomes more individual as one gains knowledge and independence from basic programming. Not to mention, even with automaticity, a biological entity is unequivocally, and inarguably, self-contained. — Garrett Travers

How can a biological entity be self-contained if it is not a container? Does the body contain organs? If we extract a liver, is the liver a self-contained entity? What about liver cells? Is each cell self-contained? What about mitochondria within the cell wall? Are these self-contained? We could go on and on , accumulating all sorts of little selves within the body. But any of these little containers are just arbitrarily labels we slap onto aspects of organismic functioning that tell us nothing about themselves, how they function and what role they play in the organism’s functions. If we put a liver on a table, its structure and function only become clear when we know that it belongs to a digestive system , and this digestive system serves the purpose of dealing with fuel for an active organism , which has means of moving around itse environment. Each animal has parts that are exquisitely organized in relation to its functioning as a whole , and this functioning can only be understood in terms of how it fits i it that animal’s specific ecological niche, what it eats, where it lives , what nests it builds , how it breaths, what its social behaviors are. So if there is a container , it is not some imagined boundary around a body , but the ecological niches that the animal is a part of.
The human body includes the air it breaths and exhales , the food it eats and eliminates, the surfaces it moves onithat keep its bones healthy , its social stimulation that allow its perceptual system to take shape. The adaptive patterns of our neurological functioning , the specific nature of our rationality , is created, supported by and dependent on the human-built social-technological environment that we live in. We can only move forward in our understanding of our world by changing that niche through social and technological progress.This changed environment will then in turn feed back to us and enable further innovations of thought. So our ‘container’ is this culture that supports us. Of course , each of us inhabit our own micro-culture within the larger one consisting of our families, friends , neighborhood, etc.
Everything that is precious to you as a modern rational philosopher and scientist comes to you as pieces of the minds of others, the devices you use and services, education and entertainment you make use of , the advice and support you get, the medical care, etc. Those pieces from others is what allows you to grow as a person. Every time you make a decision to expose yourself to and benefit from anything anyone else has produced, you are expanding your self by incorporating a piece of them into you. We are always ‘altruistic’ towards those pieces of value and creativity we embrace from others from the time we are in the womb, and do everything f we can to protect, nourish and encourage them. Because there are other pieces of others we cannot relate to or embrace , we say we are selfish , but in fact we are discriminating altruists.

Right, that's why your ethics are grounded in rational selfishness. You don't eat the chocolate, because the choclate is a detriment to your life, and your benefit is the standard of your ethics. It's way more straight forward than what you are just letting yourself see. Try to simplify things in your mind here. Self-good = Moral. Self-harm = Evil. Basic as hell. — Garrett Travers

I wonder how you reconcile your notion of self with that of Varela , who integrates results from cognitive neuroscience and mindfulness traditions to conclude that there is no such thing as a ‘self’ as a self-same entity, only a constantly changing relational process that integrates bodily and social inputs. Because the self is its relations with others, it is the interaction that is primary.

“We believe that the view of the self as an economic man, which is the view the social sciences hold, is quite consonant with the unexamined view of our own motivation that we hold as ordinary, nonmindful people. Let us state that view clearly. The self is seen as a territory with boundaries. The goal of the self is to bring inside the boundaries all of the good things while paying out as few goods as possible and conversely to remove to the outside of the boundaries all of the bad things while letting in as little bad as possible. Since goods are scarce, each autonomous self is in competition with other selves to get them. Since cooperation between individuals and whole societies may be needed to get more goods, uneasy and unstable alliances are formed between autonomous selves. Some selves (altruists) and many selves in some roles (parents, teachers) may get (immaterial) goods by helping other selves, but they will become disappointed (even disillusioned) if those other selves do not reciprocate by being properly helped.

What does the mindfulness/awareness tradition or enactive cognitive science have to contribute to this portrait of self-interest? The mindful, open-ended approach to experience reveals that moment by moment this so-called self occurs only in relation to the other. If I want praise, love, fame, or power, there has to be another (even if only a mental one) to praise, love, know about, or submit to me. If I want to obtain things, they have to be things that I don't already have. Even with respect to the desire for pleasure, the pleasure is something to which I am in a relation. Because self is always codependent with other (even at the gross level we are now discussing), the force of self-interest is always other-directed in the very same respect with which it is self-directed. What, then, are people doing who appear so self-interested as opposed to other-interested? Mindfulness/awareness meditators suggest that those people are struggling, in a confused way, to maintain the sense of a separate self by engaging in self-referential relationships with the other. Whether I gain or lose, there can be a sense of I; if there is nothing to be gained or lost, I am groundless. If Hobbes's despot were actually to succeed in obtaining everything in the universe, he would have to find some other preoccupation quickly, or he would be in a woeful state: he would be unable to maintain his sense of himself. Of course, as we have seen with nihilism, one can always turn that groundlessness into a ground; then one can maintain oneself in relation to it by feeling despair.

The mindfulness/awareness student first begins to see in a precise fashion what the mind is doing, its restless, perpetual grasping, moment to moment. This enables the student to cut some of the automaticity of his habitual patterns, which leads to further mindfulness, and he begins to realize that there is no self in any of his actual experience. This can be disturbing and offers the temptation to swing to the other extreme, producing moments of loss of heart. The philosophical flight into nihilism that we saw earlier in this chapter mirrors a psychological process: the reflex to grasp is so strong and deep seated that we reify the absence of a solid foundation into a solid absence or abyss.

As the student goes on, however, and his mind relaxes further into awareness, a sense of warmth and inclusiveness dawns. The street fighter mentality of watchful self-interest can be let go somewhat to be replaced by interest in others. We are already other-directed even at our most negative, and we already feel warmth toward some people, such as family and friends. The conscious realization of the sense of relatedness and the development of a more impartial sense of warmth are encouraged in the mindfulness/awareness tradition by various contemplative practices such as the generation of loving-kindness. It is said that the full realization of groundlessness (sunyata) cannot occur if there is no warmth.“

Does the Kuhn content you've quoted contain a component of relativity?

Is Kuhn's statement implying that just as the rate at which time elapses is specific to a local inertial frame of reference, so is an artistic or scientific paradigm (frame of reference) comprised of local beliefs and local evidence that warrant consideration on ther own terms, thus crediting such paradigms as being modular? — ucarr

They are modular , but in a different sense than relative space-time location. The latter is a relativity defined as objective relations structured mathematically. Kuhn’s paradigmatic relativity isnt based on objective structures but subjective values systems.