I find this quite plausible. But what's the status of the world shared with others ? Do they exist 'outside' this consciousness? — jas0n

Husserl actually assumed both that others exist outside my consciousness but that I can never have access to them except as variations of my own experience. An intersubjective world thus emerges for each of us , in which the empirically ‘same world for all of us’ is seen from each’s own point of view.

d you seem to be starting from an implicitly postulated 'ego thing,' for which the world is and must be mediated. I'd call this a constructive approach that tries to patch together a world from snippets of private dreams. IMO, you have not yet made it clear that this isn't just sophisticated solipsism. Is there a world outside of what we know of it? Even if taking about this world is problematic and even if we assume that we only ever get some mediating version of it through the human nervous system? Are you an indirect realist? Or what? — jas0n

What would be private here if every moment of experience subtly remakes this ‘private’ realm? Where is the inside , the dream, the subject , the solipsism if the inside is always redefined by its outside? In order to have a solipsism there must be something , some intrinsic , immanent content lurking at the origin that protects itself from transformation as it encounters a world There is absolutely nothing of this in what I’m suggesting. On the contrary , I am suggesting a radically temporal and radically mobile and transformative notion of subject-object relationality. For me the origin is the difference, the in-between, the differential , neither subject nor object nor just a cobbling together of the two.

I am not an indirect realist , I am a phenomenologist. There is a world outside of what we know of it , every moment, in the very act of intending beyond what we intend. That is the only ‘world beyond’ there is.

If one assumes that an ego is 'given' or 'primary,' then perhaps one can cast everything else as an appearance for that ego. But I don't think this story is plausible. To me it makes more sense to take the ego and the world as 'equiprimordial' or conceptually independent. — jas0n

Ego for Husserl doesn’t mean personality. It is not Freud’s notion of ego. In fact , for Husserl, the pure ego functions as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity. What is given or primary isn’t a content, substance , subject , phenomenon or entity , but the differentiating activity of temporalization. What is fundamental is the tripartite structure of time consciousness.

Modern phenomenology got its start with Husserl's assertion that stripping away the layers of historically acquired philosophical and scientific dogma via the reduction, in order to get to ‘the things themselves', reveals to us an irreducible primitive of immediate present experience. But rather than this primitive subsisting in an objectively present ‘now' point appearing once before being replaced by another in an infinite series of past and future punctual ‘nows', Husserl proposed the ‘now' as a tripartite structure composed of a retentional, primal impression and protentional phase. In doing so, he replaced a temporality justifying objective causation with the temporality of the intentional act. Events don't appear anonymously as what they are in themselves , they appear to someone, are about something, and reach out (protend) beyond their immediate sense.

But this ‘someone’, understood most reductively , is just this empty zero point. So what is essential here is the idea that every experience is an intending beyond itself , and an exposure to an alien outside that remakes the nature of the ‘ego’ . Both the subjective and objective poles of an intention are remade by the act.

I've been reading Popper's Logic, and I was surprised how flexible P was, probably because people like to paint papa Popper as the grinch who stole Christmas. He liked an alternative view (conventionalism) but defended his own. I think it's wrong to frame such a decision in terms of 'could not accept,' as if he was a child afraid of thunderstorms — jas0n

The key for me is that Popper believed that determination of anomalies and the impetus of scientific revolutions were rational affairs, making use of settled method. Kuhn disagreed with this rationalism.


“If, as in the standard picture, scientific revolutions are like normal science but better, then revolutionary science will at all times be regarded as something positive, to be sought, promoted, and welcomed. Revolutions are to be sought on Popper’s view also, but not because they add to positive knowledge of the truth of theories but because they add to the negative knowledge that the relevant theories are false. Kuhn rejected both the traditional and Popperian views in this regard. He claims that normal science can succeed in making progress only if there is a strong commitment by the relevant scientific community to their shared theoretical beliefs, values, instruments and techniques, and even metaphysics. This constellation of shared commitments Kuhn at one point calls a ‘disciplinary matrix’ (1970a, 182) although elsewhere he often uses the term ‘paradigm’. Because commitment to the disciplinary matrix is a pre-requisite for successful normal science, an inculcation of that commitment is a key element in scientific training and in the formation of the mind-set of a successful scientist. This tension between the desire for innovation and the necessary conservativeness of most scientists was the subject of one of Kuhn’s first essays in the theory of science, “The Essential Tension” (1959). The unusual emphasis on a conservative attitude distinguishes Kuhn not only from the heroic element of the standard picture but also from Popper and his depiction of the scientist forever attempting to refute her most important theories.

This conservative resistance to the attempted refutation of key theories means that revolutions are not sought except under extreme circumstances. Popper’s philosophy requires that a single reproducible, anomalous phenomenon be enough to result in the rejection of a theory (Popper 1959, 86–7). Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly is one that undermines the practice of normal science. For example, an anomaly might reveal inadequacies in some commonly used piece of equipment, perhaps by casting doubt on the underlying theory. If much of normal science relies upon this piece of equipment, normal science will find it difficult to continue with confidence until this anomaly is addressed. A widespread failure in such confidence Kuhn calls a ‘crisis’ (1962/1970a, 66–76).

The most interesting response to crisis will be the search for a revised disciplinary matrix, a revision that will allow for the elimination of at least the most pressing anomalies and optimally the solution of many outstanding, unsolved puzzles. Such a revision will be a scientific revolution. According to Popper the revolutionary overthrow of a theory is one that is logically required by an anomaly. According to Kuhn however, there are no rules for deciding the significance of a puzzle and for weighing puzzles and their solutions against one another. The decision to opt for a revision of a disciplinary matrix is not one that is rationally compelled; nor is the particular choice of revision rationally compelled. For this reason the revolutionary phase is particularly open to competition among differing ideas and rational disagreement about their relative merits. Kuhn does briefly mention that extra-scientific factors might help decide the outcome of a scientific revolution—the nationalities and personalities of leading protagonists, for example (1962/1970a, 152–3). This suggestion grew in the hands of some sociologists and historians of science into the thesis that the outcome of a scientific revolution, indeed of any step in the development of science, is always determined by socio-political factors. Kuhn himself repudiated such ideas and his work makes it clear that the factors determining the outcome of a scientific dispute, particularly in modern science, are almost always to be found within science, specifically in connexion with the puzzle-solving power of the competing ideas.”
( Stanford Encyclopedia)

If other subjects exist, then so does the world? Yes? — jas0n

I only know of other subjects and a ‘world’ to the extent that I can construe these entities on some dimension of similarity with respect to my ongoing system of interpretation. Whatever is wholly outside of this system is invisible to me. Thus, a ‘world’ is built up and continually transformed as variations on an ongoing theme.

The plausibility of the thesis that the world is my dream depends upon common-sense experience of myself as a social animal who understands that sense organs can be damaged so that this or that human is shut out from a realm of color or sound. The very notion of an ego seems dependent on other egos. The notion of truth-telling seems to depend on some kind of community in relation to a shared world. — jas0n

He does not believe the word is my dream, but that we don’t represent , mirror, or correspond to
an indepdentlt existing world. He , like Derrida , Nietzsche and Heidegger believes that a world is enacted , produced and continually transformed through my perceptual and intersubjective engagement. My anticipations of events are subject to continual validation or invalidation from an outside which is always already co-defined by my interpretations of it.

Yet it also seems that the flexibility of Popper's system is often overlooked. 'Convention' is a surprisingly prominent word in The Logic. The point made above about basic statements reminds me of passages from On Certainty. — jas0n

Popper rejected Hegelian dialectic in favor of a Kantian notion of an assumption approach of science toward truth He could not accept the notion that all aspects of thought, empirical theorization and methods and practices of scientific verification are contingent. They belong to communities of research which, when they undergo change , displaces not only the former theories but the accepted methods of proof that were tied to theories. Wittgenstein agreed with Kuhn, against Popper, that scientific change is like change in the arts , a matter of aesthetic shifts rather than an asymptomatic approach of truth through falsification.

He literally set out to create a ‘science of consciousness’. That is all. He was not dismissive of science merely critical of the physical sciences encroaching upon psychology and such - rightly so imo. — I like sushi

Firstly, this ‘science of consciousness’ was based on radically different principles than that of empirical
science. Thus , he was not attempting a study of consciousness using methods that have anything whatsoever to do with what you would associate with empirical science. Second, his transcendental method , which is what he means by science of consciousness , doesn’t just apply to consciousness, it also applies to the natural empirical sciences, critiquing their limitations of self-understanding and grounding them in transcendental subjectivity.

I like Husserl, and he's clearly pro-science. He sees the problem too, which is the clash of two 'obvious' realizations: (1) there is a world that precedes, outlasts, and contains me and everyone else and (2) only my functioning nervous system and living body allows me to be a me who is aware of is. — jas0n

Husserl is not an empirical realist. He does not believe it is coherent to make the claim that a world precedes, outlasts and contains me and everyone else like some kind of container. On the contrary , the natural ‘ world’ is constituted via progressively more advanced intentional acts, and cannot be assumed as ha i g an existence out side of these acts. The ‘world’, understood most primordially, has its origin in the subject-object structure of time consciousness. That is to say , the transcendental subject is only what it is as a constantly changing flow of associative syntheses that is every moment exposed to and changed by an outside. But this is. it an outside of worldly objects as empirical naturalism would have it.

“Certainly the world that is in being for me, the world about which I have always had ideas and spoken about meaningfully, has meaning and is accepted as valid by me because of my own apperceptive performances because of these experiences that run their course and are combined precisely in those performances—as well as other functions of consciousness, such as thinking. But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance of mine?

Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out of the proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning? Should I forget that the totality of everything that I can ever think of as in being resides within the universal realm of consciousness, within my realm, that of the Ego, and indeed within what is for me real or possible?” (Phenomenology and Anthropology)

“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis, p.184)

“...it was wrong, methodically, to jump immediately into transcendental inter-subjectivity and to leap over the primal "I,"the ego of my epoche, which can never lose its uniqueness and personal indeclinability. It is only an apparent contradiction to this that the ego—through a particular constitutive accomplishment of its own—makes itself declinable, for itself, transcendentally; that, starting from itself and in itself, it constitutes transcendental intersubjectivity, to which it then adds itself as a merely privileged member, namely, as "I" among the transcendental others. This is what philosophical self-exposition in the epoche actually teaches us. It can show how the always singular I, in the original constituting life proceeding within it, constitutes a first sphere of objects, the "primordial" sphere; how it then, starting from this, in a motivated fashion, performs a constitutive accomplishment through which an intentional modification of itself and its primordiality achieves ontic validity under the title of "alien-perception," perception of others, of another "I" who is for himself an I as I am. ”(Crisis, p.185)

This aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, found in the Tractatus, hence predating Heidegger, does continue in the Investigations. The Tractatus concerns itself with setting out the relation between logic and language, and is quite explicit in separating what can be stated from what cannot, without denigration. Hence,

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. — Banno

But the relation between logic and language is rethought between Tractatus and P.I.

As Ray Monk says “ In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had said that philosophical problems arise because the logic of our language is misunderstood. His attempted solution was to produce a correct account of the logic of our language. But when this collapsed, he began to see things completely differently, to question whether there is something that could be called the logic of our language. Indeed, he now takes his own earlier work as a perfect example of how philosophers are misled. For notice that what he says above about 'the craving for general- ity' applies to the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as much as to any other philosopher. When, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to analyse 'the general form of the proposition', he had fallen victim to the 'tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term', thinking that there must be a single form that was common to all propositions.”

“Some Remarks on Logical Form' is interesting as a record of how and why the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of logical form.”

There are folk who suppose that there can be an answer to this question, as if we could step outside of logic in order to examine it logically.

It's trite to say that the attempt results in nonsense. Indeed, saying nothing might be the correct response, the way forward.

Think I got that from the Tractates. — Banno

You’ll have better luck with Philosophical Investigations.
Here’s you’ll find Witt reiterating Heidegger’s point that logic, as a grammatical construction, is a frame of sense, and the sense of language is in its contextual use.


114. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are."——That is the kind of propo­sition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is
merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
115. A. picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”

The question is this:
What kind of pre-schemarized understanding of the world must be already in place in order for propositional logic to work as a description of empirical reality?

The connection between the logical and the actual is, on the one hand, unsurprising, evolution should have equipped us with a sense of "how things work," but on the other hand is one of the 'deeper' findings in the physical sciences from my perspective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure that it goes much deeper than a set of presuppositions concerning the object that became crystallized as the basis the inseparable relation between logic, mathematics and modern science with Galileo and Descartes. The ‘ actual’ has been pre-figured such that it conveniently lends itself
to the language of logical
formalism.

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, a 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 2010)

Is anyone else reminded of Wittgenstein's later work here? Popper does not take the route of treating sense-data at the absolute which can falsify theories. Instead he talks of decisions. In his Logic, he uses the metaphor of a jury. I think he's trying to jump over the quicksand between language and the world apart from language. This 'swampy' element is something like 'common sense.' I imagine, for instance, everything that goes into a making a legitimate measurement, including one that falsifies a theory. Wittgenstein's discussion of the standard meter comes to mind. Popper admits or tolerates a dimness at the base of critical rationalism.

Thoughts? — jas0n

I dont see Popper as compatible with the later Wittgenstein. Popper’s notion of falsification depends on certain assumptions concerning the invariance of method that Wittgenstein challenged. Many Wittgenstein scholars see his work as consistent with , and inspiring such figures as Kuhn and Feyerabend.

It seems to me that Kantianish idealisms are parasitic upon the 'manifest image' of common sense. The notion of sense organs and a nervous system is part of this manifest image. When a thinker like Kant tries to throw space into the bucket of the manufactured or dream-like, he forgets that it's only our typical pre-critical experience of bodies in space with their sense organs that makes a 'processed sense-experience' vision of the world plausible in the first place. — jas0n

I think that’s Zahavi’s point in the article you’re quoting from.

“ For Husserl, there are, in short, not two ontologically different objects, the appearing (intra-mental) object and the physical (extra-mental) object. Rather, there is only one appearing (extra-mental) object that carries categorically distinct but compatible sensuous and theoretical determinations. This is also why the findings of science and everyday experience, the scientific image and the manifest image, do not have to contradict each other. They can both be true according to their own standards. More generally speaking, the difference between the world of perception and world of science is not a difference between the world for us and the world in itself (falling in the province of phenomenology and science, respectively). It is a difference between two ways in which the world appears.”

Humans shift up a gear by having to make socially-constructed sense of what they are feeling. Is Will Smith being courageous or shameful when he gives into his aggressive impulses. What is our social judgement and therefore what do we think he should be feeling about his feelings. — apokrisis

My in-process paper on anger, blame and moral values sketches moral universalist and moral relativist interpretations of anger contexts. I surmise the view of biosemiotics is in close proximity to Prinz’s.

“Let us say that I have been hurt and disappointed by someone I care deeply about, and as a result
I become angry with them. What form might this anger take? If I believe in free will and desert-based conceptions of blame, then depending on the severity of the perceived offense, my anger may include the desire for retribution, payback and revenge(P.F.Strawson). If I eschew a free will perspective in favor of a deterministic moral universalism ( Nussbaum), my anger will not include the desire for retribution but instead will seek to coax the wrongdoer to conform to the universal norm.

Jesse Prinz’s neo-sentimentalist model of emotion occupies a transitional position situated between moral realism and a full-bodied moral relativism. He divides the realm of subjective emotional sentiment from rational objectivity, supporting an “evaluatively neutral” empirical naturalism t the same time that he claims to maintain a relativistic stance on moral values.
Prinz’s dualist division of knowledge and value, subjectivism and objectivism is incoherent from a Postmodern perspective. Empirical investigation gets its sense and orientation from affectively attuned value systems, which means that in judging an empirical result on the basis of factual correctness, one is making a relativistic moral evaluation. Empirical models are aspects of moral worldviews.

Prinz offers that two communities can agree on all the facts pertaining to a morally relevant situation yet disagree in their moral conclusions. To take a postmodern view is to argue that such apparent agreement on empirical facts is an appearance that results from a superficial over generalization of the two parties’ interpretations of the facts of the matter.

In embodied and social constructionist postmodern accounts, no ultimate moral or empirical telos
is assumed to constrain individual motivation and valuative choices. “ In its critical moment, social constructionism is a means of bracketing or
suspending any pronouncement of the real, the reasonable, or the right.…our sense of moral indignation is itself a product of historically and culturally situated traditions. And the constructionist intones, is it not possible that those we excoriate are but living also within
traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”( Gergen)

Constraints impose themselves in the form of pragmatic and contingent reciprocally causal bodily-social practices.I don’t blame in the name of a divine, free-will based moral order, or in the name of an empirical objective order of truth. I blame in the name of temporary discursive practices, which by their changing nature hold all of us guilty.

Consciousness as a Cartesian substance - a mysterious extra glow that attaches itself to all the physical processes - fails so spectacularly to connect with any neuroscientific account that it is no surprise that folk want to chase it all the way down to "quantum information" or "psychic atoms" — apokrisis

And yet I do think there is a remnant of that Cartesianism lurking in the treatment of affectivity , both on the part of embodied enactivtists like Thompson, and predictive coding types like Barrett. All that’s left of the old inner subject is somatic sensation , the bare registry of positive and negative valence within the body. How pain-pleasure contributes to the organization of motivational relevance and mattering is a complex function of many intertwined aspects of the organism in its total functioning, and yet there remains what for me is an unsatisfying immanence or intrinsicality associated with feeling , as much as it has been embedded within irreducible webs of somatic-cognitive-environmental interactions.

orgasmic experience does not manifest the threefold structure of experienced time, nor does it settle in the temporal order of our practical lives. It dislocates the experiencing subject temporarily and seems to raise her above time or press her underneath its surface.

In this respect, orgasm parallels fainting, loss of consciousness, dreamless sleep and, ultimately, also death. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I dont think Merleau-Ponty would agree with Heinemaa. In Phenomecology of Perceptual, where he mentions orgasm, it is in the context of a discussion about a man with a brain injury involving movement which affects his libido. MP’s conclusion is that sexual pleasure is connected to a global body scheme connecting movement and perception. Rather than organism being out of time , I think he would say the opposite. The more intricately intereconnected the events one construes, the richer and more continuous one’s experience of the flow of time.

That the substance that the universe is composed of is essentially consciousness?
— Watchmaker

That's what I think, yes. Not all panpsychists think that though. — bert1

I think the notion that apokrisis and I take issue with, in different ways, is the depiction of consciousness as a substance or property. What makes this problematic is that it is the tendency to reduce phenomena to physical substance that led to the hard problem to
begin with. If all you have is hammer , then everything looks like a nail, and if your only metaphysics is monistic naturalism, then everything looks like a substance.
But consciousness is neither an object, a substance or a property, but a relational activity.

What's that quote from? — Ciceronianus

It’s from ‘On the Genealogy of Moraity’

I don't think this constitutes wondering that there are things in the world, which seems more along the lines of "wondering why there is something rather than nothing." That's what my questions addressed, for what they're worth. — Ciceronianus

Well, in of support your observation, Heidegger uses your wording rather than Yalom’s.

“For by nature, my friend, man's mind dwells in philosophy” (Plato, Phaedrus, 279a). So long as man exists, philosophizing of some sort occurs. Philosophy — what we call philosophy — is metaphysics getting under way, in which philosophy comes to itself and to its explicit tasks. Philosophy gets under way only by a peculiar insertion of our own existence into the fundamental possibilities of Dasein as a whole. For this insertion it is of decisive importance, first, that we allow space for beings as a whole; second, that we release ourselves into the nothing, which is to say, that we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which he is wont to go cringing; and finally, that we let the sweep of our suspense take its full course, so that it swings back into the basic question of metaphysics which the nothing itself compels: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?( Heidegger, What is Metaphysics)

Grand iconoclastic ideas are useless if we trip up on simple fallacies in logic. — Cuthbert

I think that when we find ourselves in a realm of concern where ‘simple fallacies of logic’ have become important to us, we are so far removed from any relevant and significant form of philosophizing that we have in essence substituted calculating for thinking.

we are filled with wonderment that things are in the world.
— ZzzoneiroCosm

Why, and when, would we wonder that things are in the world? What else would be "in the world"? — Ciceronianus

Heidegger believes that we dont simply experience a world, each of us produces a world. For each of us, all of the particular objects and events that we experience are interwoven as a totality of relevant relations. When we recognize an object as something , it is already familiar
to us at some level in its belonging to our larger pragmatic dealings with the world. From time to time , these overarching schemes by which we interpret our world undergo transformation. We re-frame the frame. When we do this , we wonder anew at the world, because now we look at all its particulars with fresh eyes. This is how science evolves, through such gestalt shifts in outlook.

But how do we shift from the everyday mode to the ontological mode?
— ZzzoneiroCosm

Why would anyone want to do that? To learn what, to know what, for what purpose? — Ciceronianus

Because this allows us to question our presuppositions that often imprison us.

we can't reduce out accounts of reality to phenomenology as our first person point of view - our semiotic Umwelt - is the least general "view of reality" possible. And we are seeking the maximally general view as the ground under our ontology. — apokrisis

What does general mean here? How does the general
escape or transcend the first personal? Keep in mind the referential out of consciousness doesn’t reduce to some reified idealist notion of mind or first personal at the expense of the ‘general’, but simply a
radical situatedness. It is neither a preferencing of the subjective over the general and invariant or the other way around , but a system of mutual constraints .

Bitbol says questions about consciousness are not just referential, they are radically self-referential.

“As any reasoning, a reasoning about consciousness involves a conscious experience ; aknowledging the validity of a personal reasoning, or even of a mechanical inference performed by a Turing machine, is still a conscious experience. A reasoning bearing on consciousness is included in what is reasoned about. So, when consciousness is presented as an object of reasoning, this can only be in a fake sense.

In fact, as soon as we embark on anything like discourse,
reasoning, or scientific research about consciousness, we are driven away from mere aknowledgment of what is lived now, and thereby away from the central topic of the inquiry. So much so that recovering contact with it becomes difficult, and that, from then on, we tend to value more the abstract product of arguments than their
experienced source.

In the science of consciousness, one should neither try to absorb the subjective into a previously defined objective domain, nor objectivize somehow the subjective, nor give the subjective any kind of supremacy over the objective. One should rather go back to the experiential realm from which the very dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity arises, and then establish within it a system of mutual constraints. In actual fact, mutual constraints are enforced between first person statements of phenomenal contents, and third person descriptions of those phenomenal invariants that are established by the collectively elaborated neurosciences.

If science is extended so as to include a “ dance ” of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts (Varela, 1998, p. 42) ; if nature is made of views and situated experiences as well as of their manifold invariants; and if, accordingly, naturalizing consciousness means including its disciplined contents within a strongly interconnected network of objects and experiences, then any problem has disappeared.”

phenomenology that actually examines the structure of experience would not seek to ground itself in the sharp and personal sense of the immediate. It already has to turn towards the subconscious and automatic to find that which is more general. And it is already thus becoming more receptive to standard neuro-reductionism - as an account based on the methodological naturalism which is all about explaining the particular from the better vantage point of the general. — apokrisis

But the sharp and personal sense of the immediate is also involved in the modeling of the subpersonal, the pre-reflective, the unconscious and the automatic; in other words, the general that is placed as outside of the situated awareness of the personal is itself a product of that situated awareness.

first and third person view are the dualised aspects of the model itself. Neither "exist" outside that. — apokrisis

I suspect that semiotic models and Bitbol are not that far apart here. Neither wants to reify either subjectivity or the invariant products of empirical objectivity at the expense of their mutual entanglement.

I think the difference lies in how much ground is being ceded to formal grounding assumptions underlying both the first and third personal dimensions as they are articulated via the ‘code-based’ think of semiotics. There needs to be a way to close the gap between semiotics and Wittgensteinian contextual pragmatics, which is closer to Varela and Bitbol than to Peirce.

What do you make of Bitbol’s attempt to dissolve the hard problem? He’s following Varela here.

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

It has been said that panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness. — Watchmaker

Panpsychism doesn’t solve the hard problem, it reifies it by installing the dualism within each bit of objective reality.
Here’s a way to really solve ( or dissolve) the Hard Problem:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/4007/1/ConsciousnessPrimaryArt2.pdf

I actually think it's safe to say that most philosophers think too much. — SatmBopd

On the contrary, I think it’s safe to say most people think too little.

but he doesn't explain--he doesn't argue, which is what the philosophers I've read do. — Ciceronianus

My favorite passages of Nietzsche are not his aphorisms but paragraphs like the one below, which is as complex a philosophical explanation or argument as any I have come across by a philosopher. And there are many, many other passages like this throughout his writings that add up to a consistent philosophical thesis.

“Now another word on the origin and purpose of punishment – two problems which are separate, or ought to be: unfortunately people usually throw them together. How have the moral genealogists reacted so far in this matter? Naively, as is their wont –: they highlight some ‘purpose' in punishment, for example, revenge or deterrence, then innocently place the purpose at the start, as causa fiendi of punishment, and – have finished. But ‘purpose in law' is the last thing we should apply to the history of the emergence of law: on the contrary, there is no more important proposition for every sort of history than that which we arrive at only with great effort but which we really should reach, – namely that the origin of the emergence of a thing and its ultimate usefulness, its practical application and incorporation into a system of ends, are toto coelo separate; that anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose by a power superior to it; that everything that occurs in the organic world consists of overpowering, dominating, and in their turn
overpowering and dominating consist of re-interpretation, adjustment, in the process of which their former ‘meaning' [Sinn] and ‘purpose' must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated. No matter how perfectly you have understood the usefulness of any physiological organ (or legal institution, social custom, political usage, art form or religious rite), you have not yet thereby grasped how it emerged: uncomfortable and unpleasant as this may sound to more elderly ears,– for people down the ages have believed that the obvious purpose of a thing, its utility, form and shape, are its reason for existence, the eye is made to see, the hand to grasp. So people think punishment has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful, and has impressed upon it its own idea [Sinn] of a use function; and the whole history of a ‘thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs, continually revealing new interpretations and adaptations, the causes of which need not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow and replace one another at random. The ‘development' of a thing, a tradition, an organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal, still less is it a logical progressus, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and cost, – instead it is a succession of more or less profound, more or less mutually independent processes of subjugation exacted on the thing, added to this the resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful countermeasures. The form is fluid, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] even more so . . . It is no different inside any individual organism: every time the whole grows appreciably, the ‘meaning' [Sinn] of the individual organs shifts, – sometimes the partial destruction of organs, the reduction in their number (for example, by the destruction of intermediary parts) can be a sign of increasing vigour and perfection. To speak plainly: even the partial reduction in usefulness, decay and degeneration, loss of meaning [Sinn] and functional purpose, in short death, make up the conditions of true progressus: always appearing, as it does, in the form of the will and way to greater power and always emerging victorious at the cost of countless smaller forces. The amount of ‘progress' can actually be measured according to how much has had to be sacrificed to it; man's sacrifice en bloc to the prosperity of one single stronger species of man – that would be progress . . . – I lay stress on this major point of historical method, especially as it runs counter to just that prevailing instinct and fashion which would much rather come to terms with absolute randomness, and even the mechanistic senselessness of all events, than the theory that a power-will is acted out in all that happens.”

what if God cares about ALL creation equally: the man AND the cancer cell, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 AND the shift of tectonic plates, the comet AND the dinosaurs. With that view, the problem of evil evaporates; we're just not that special. — Art48

It seems to me the problem of evil just gets democratized to include the whole cosmos instead
of just being confined to inter-human affairs. Wouldnt it be better to jettison the whole unctuous concept of
evil?

I don't think Frantic Freddie was a philosopher… Someone who did not think as much as emote. — Ciceronianus

Guess I’ll have to burn all the papers I wrote about his philosophy. Where were you when I needed you? We’ll have to keep in close touch from now on. Could you draw up a list of all the other non-philosophers I can stop studying?

it's time to time to thank our philosophers in time and welcome a new dawn in Philosophia. — EugeneW

Do you have any candidates in mind who you think are contributing to this new dawn? I don’t know of any living philosophers who are offering anything significantly beyond what writers like James and Nietzsche produced over 130 years ago.

My first inclination has been to investigate Schopenhauer, Geothe, and more about antiquity. But those are just influences of Nietzsche, so like, my "wider reading" is still just currently going back to the same sentiments and investigations associated with Nietzsche. — SatmBopd

Not necessarily. My reading of your interpretation of Nietzsche is that you see him within the existentialist camp rather as a postmodernist. According to a postmodernist reading Nietzsche isnt searching for the best value system. On the contrary , hei is against this kind of thinking about values. There is no better or worse value system for Nietzsche. What he advocates is the endless movement from one value system
to the next , without ending up at any final
ideal system.
I think you might find Marx , Sartre, Kierkegaard , Schelling and William James beneficial.

before voting, i would appreciate if i knew what exactly you mean by "mythical"
we might not be on the same page — I love Chom-choms

I’ve known some women to produce mythical orgasms, but that was before they worked out their relationship issues.

depression is an adaptation to traumatic experiences. This is actually in line with physical illnesses to a large extent, in the sense that symptoms are very often adaptations to pathogens - coughing, raised temperature, and so on. — unenlightened

Is depression like the body’s immune response to an invader, designed to protect the organism but also capable of damaging the organism?


I know there are some approaches which claim that depression is adaptive ,

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2734449/

but I disagree. I argue instead that depression is not an ‘adaptation’ to trauma. It is the interpretive experience of the repercussions of the trauma itself. It is not a response to injury, it is the injury itself. It is the opposite of an adaptation. I am not taking the dsm view of depression as a pathology WITHIN the brain , but rather as a crisis triggered by one’s situation as one interprets it.

It is loss of capability, loss of competence, loss of self-esteem, loss of meaning and relevance, loss of coherence. When one suffers a head injury and has difficulty with memory and concentration, these symptoms are not adaptations to the head trauma, they define the meaning the head trauma itself. Just as avoidance of over-stimulating situations is a
coping adaptation to the head injury, adaptations benefit one in dealing with the losses that depression represents. For instance , withdrawing from social situations is an adaptation that protects one from being exposed to painful reminders of one’s loss of competence, and situations which may even deepen the feelings of worthlessness.

Depression isnt a mechanism, it is a way of meaningfully appraising our loss of self-confidence.

If we start by arguing that depression is adaptive, then we may as well also say that failure, confusion. illness , injury and all other psychological and physical responses to our environment are adaptations. But not every response of an organism to its environment is an adaption. Organisms can fail to adapt and fail to thrive. A prolonged severe depressive state is one such failure to thrive. Just because we recover from a depression or an injury doesn’t makes these adaptive. We may not recover from the injury or the depression.


One has to ask what is the baseline normative functioning of the psychological system at a given point, and whether the system’s reaction to a change in its world maintains and enhances that normative functioning( adaptation ) or reduces it ( non-adaptive).

I don't think most ontological claims are possible to vet empircally, so they can't be scientific. That said, science often informs our ontology and sometimes ontologies do make claims that science may be able to support or undermine.

With that in mind, parts of any ontology can be scientific. For example, the rise of information based ontologies comes from insights in quantum mechanics and the physics of how information is stored, particularly in black holes — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would argue instead that all scientific results are elements of theories , theories at elements of paradigms or scientific worldviews , and scientific worldviews are regional ontologies. so an empirical result only makes sense as an element in a relational totality that functions as a gestalt framework. A science can undermine its own claims in a minor way ( falsification) by remaining within a particular ontology(paradigm, worldview) or by replacing one paradigm with another , in which case there is a gestalt shift in the overall worldview , which is not merely a falsification, since the old and the new ontologies are not strictly commensurable.

This process is no different than how philosophy evolves., except for the fact that the methods of science tend to be more conventional and generic than those of philosophical inquiry. The methods of science don’t allow it to ‘progress’ any more effectively or quickly that philosophy.

Both make their bones by positing novel wild claims. — Real Gone Cat

These aren’t wild claims. It’s just good old fashioned neo-Kantianism.

“That which through the medium of our senses is actually perceived by the sensorium, is indeed merely a property or change of condition of our nerves; but the imagination and reason are ready to interpret the modifications in the state of the nerves produced by external influences as properties of the external bodies themselves (Müller 1842: 1059).

Helmholtz accepted this reasoning, and likewise argued that since the information about the external object is transformed beyond recognition on its way through the nervous system, what we end up perceiving is strictly speaking the internal effect rather than the external cause:

The result of [scientific] examination, as at present understood, is that the organs of sense do indeed give us information about external effects produced on them, but convey those effects to our consciousness in a totally different form, so that the character of a sensuous perception depends not so much on the properties of the object perceived as on those of the organ by which we receive the information (Helmholtz 1995: 13).

I would interpret the sensation only as a sign of the object's effect. To the nature of a sign belongs only the property that for the same object the same sign will always be given. Moreover, no type of similarity is necessary between it and its object, just as little as that between the spoken word and the object that we designate thereby (Helmholtz )

I have never seen how moving from ontological identity to ontological difference independent of a concept of identity fixes the problem of the identity of indiscernibles. It seems to me that it "solves" the problem by denying it exists.

However, it does so in a way that makes me suspicious of begging the question. Sure, difference being ontologically more primitive than identity gets you out of the jam mentioned above by allowing you to point to the numerical difference of identical objects as ontologically basic, but it's always been unclear to me how this doesn't make prepositions about the traits of an object into mere brute facts. So in this sense, it's similar to the austere nominalism I was talking about before. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The numerical difference of identical objects is very far removed from the notion of difference that drives the work of authors like Derrida, Deleuze and Heidegger.

They don’t begin from identity and then add difference onto it. What is an identity? What is self-identicality? What is a logical proposition such as A=A? The concern of these writers is to show that what is assumed as an identity with attributes, traits and properties is o my so as an idealization.

Husserl wrote a book , Formal and Transcendental Logic, in which the starting point for writers like Frege and Russell , S is P, is the end product of a long and complex process of constitution. From their vantage, all that Husserl contributes was a pointless psychologistic analysis. But what he actually accomplished was the exposition of the hidden assumptions and conditions of possibility for the abstractions that Frege took as primordial . In other words , in order to have an adequate grasp of the nature of truth as it is asserted in propositions, one must recognize that the form of the proposition is a derived abstraction that takes for granted what is really at stake in determining the basis of assertions of truth.

Donald Hoffman too. It's kind of a mainstream cognitive science view now. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This view is problematic for me because it still implies a split between inner and outer, subjective model vs Thing in itself, Descartes’ veil of appearance regurgitated. Phenomenology dispenses with this dualist residue.

“ For Husserl, the world that can appear to us – be it in perception, in our daily concerns or in our scientific analyses – is the only real world. To claim that there in addition to this world exists a world-behind-the-scene, which transcends every appearance, and every experiential and theoretical evidence, and to identify this world with true reality is, for Husserl, an empty and countersensical proposition.”(Dan Zahavi)

Physicalism is saying, "no, actually what you experience isn't the real deal. You essentially hallucinate a world..."
— Count Timothy von Icarus

Really? Who says we hallucinate a world? — Real Gone Cat

Andy Clark, for one:

https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination

Fish laid eggs well before there were chickens. — Banno

Did the fish lay the chicken? There oughta be a law.