I dont disagree. My point is just that we need different empirical accounts to explain different phenomena. A quantum account of consciousness wouldn’t be ‘wrong’, but I don’t think it would address what psychologists need it to in their approach to consciousness.

You’re thinking idealism, I’m thinking phenomenology. Constructs aren’t ‘all in the mind’ , they are products of mind-world interaction. Our constructs make direct contact with reality, but reality is always perspectival.

this post/thread is simply the brain/mind telling itself how insignificant it itself is in the grand scheme of things I suppose. — TheMadFool

You’re right. The brain-mind don’t dominate. It’s brain-mind-body and environment together. They cannot be separated except artificially.

I expect researchers to eventually model in the context of a quantum consciousness theory — Enrique

This would be of interest mainly to physicists. My impression is that for most psychologists a
quantum theory of consciousness would be almost useless. The most promising theories of consciousness deal with such issues as empathy, affectivity and self-awareness These make uses of an intentional account of motivation, not a physically causal one.

the spirit and the soul do not exist and are merely artificial constructs or concepts. The mind, a result of complex brain function, and body is all we have. — Brock Harding

The mind and the brain are also the result of artificial constructs. It’s not a question of getting beyond our constructs, but of deciding which ones appear more
useful to us in navigating our world.

I do see a strong affinity between Scheler and Merleau-Ponty, but not with Heidegger.

Interesting. I’m less familiar with Scheler’s approach to perception than with Husserl. But there’s a lot of interest these days among psychologists in Scheler.

have you never heard and instantly responded, "What was that?" Or listened to the same music played by different musicians, encountering their differences in interpretation, amounting to differences in sound. Or for that matter tested different instruments listening for exactly their "noise"? — tim wood

But notice that in each case there was a prior context of interest and relevance that made it possible for a sense to break through into consciousness as something meaningful. What determines the difference between all those situations in which background noise is entirely ignored while we intently focus on what is drawing our interest, and a situation in which we suddenly ‘notice’ something as a noise? It’s not as if there is no awareness at all of background stimulation in the first instance, but the relevance and therefore the very substance of the ‘sound’ changes with our interest in it Context is key here, and I think that’s Heidegger’s point. He’s saying there are no isolable
primitives of sensation independent of the meaningful, relevant contexts of human activities.
As you know , how musical notes are heard is dependent on the prior context out of which they arise.

Phenomenology, the school of thought that started with Kant I believe, says that reality is being and flux together, thereny taking the steps of the ancient Greeks to a third point. Phenomena, I believe, means that reality is both becoming and being, both subjective and objective, and both phenomena and noumena. — Gregory

Modern phenomenology began with Husserl around 1900. While it is indebted to Kant’s phenomenology , it functions as a critique of Kant. For Husserl, Being IS becoming. The subject provides no contentful categories of meaning but is merely a pole alongside the objective pole in the constitution of sense from
moment to moment. There is no noumenon, only appearance.

How easy it is to counter that the cup, of all "things," we never, ever encounter, but only the atoms. — tim wood

Is the empirical physical description really the most primary one from a philosophical point of view, or is it just one of may possible derived products of the direct perception of an object , in which we don’t experience atoms but this object in its relevance for us?

““Initially" we never hear noises and complexes of sound, but the creaking wagon, the motorcycle. We hear the column on the march, the north wind, the woodpecker tapping, the crackling fire. It requires a very artificial and complicated attitude in order to "hear" a "pure noise."” Heidegger

some objects only exist in specific realms, e.g. a cup exists in the realm of natural objects, — Pantagruel

One could argue from a phenomenological point of view that the cup is a cultural object. It loses its sense when we take away its socially assigned use.

I agree with everything you said , but it doesn’t sound like Cartesian trigger-puppets would accept that empirical facts are dependent on and a product of subjective organization.

I think I misread your position as a postmodern form of subjectivity.

Subjectivity is probably best understood as a psychological context about the way things are and also as the opposite of objectivity, which is the way things are independent from individual subjectivity — Cartesian trigger-puppets

For postmodern and phenomenological positions , it is incoherent to talk about the way things are independent from individual subjectivity, because subjectivity is merely a pole alongside the objective pole in the experience of the world. That is, objectivity is a derived product of subjective experience rather than the ‘opposite’ of it.

The totality of physical and phenomenological variables — Cartesian trigger-puppets

the deterministic flow of the universe i — Cartesian trigger-puppets

What is the relationship between subjectivity and empirical notions like the physical , neurophysiological facts and adeterministic universe? Are empirical facts the product of intersubjectivity? Are they social constructs, and if so, is s scientific truth adjudicated the same way as subjective moral truth?Does science progress through falsification or change the way the arts and politics do?

I just want to add that Marx and Freud tend to be treated in a much narrow context in the U.S. than in Europe. Here the focus is typically on applied political theory only, whereas among Continental philosophers he is looked at as a philosopher
with wide ranging interests, including ethics , aesthetics and psychology. Freud is thought of here only in terms of a clinical approach , whereas in Europe Freudianiam means much more than that.

Epistemic justification/explanations. — Marty

How are these grounded? In some idealist a priori?
Are you appealing to revelation?

As you may know, Husserl didn’t consider epistemic justification to be self-grounding , but a constituted product of motivated associative acts.

An entire generation sold-out to McMansions, European luxury sedans/SUVs, and whatever else people find it necessary to rip-out off the common man. — synthesis

That was the theme of ‘The Big Chill’. But the premise was kind of silly, because they were all just followers of fashion to begin with. One could argue that BLM protesters are in their own way followers of fashion.

I am 66 and the amount I know now as compared as what I knew at thirty is incalculable ( — synthesis

I think that’s true of my favorite pop composers. But the issue isn’t just how much more you know now that 30 years ago, it’s how much younger generations have leapfrogged over your knowledge. Frank Sinatra was undoubtedly wiser at 70 than at 25, but his way of thinking about music became irrelevant to a new generation.

Everything of significant value in life you gain through direct experience. — synthesis

Everything of significant value in my life came from sitting in a quiet room and generating ideas out of all variety of experience, both direct and indirect. All ‘direct’ means to me is a set of ideas I generate that link to what I learned from others but goes beyond it.

What I'm saying is Marx is far less original than some people think. — Apollodorus

The ‘some people’ that I respect are among the the most notable philosophers ( and psychologists) of the past 100 years, and they find Marx to be a seminal thinker. So you would have to go down that long list and explain why those thinkers should also be de-valued.

btw, can you give me the names of a few favorite
psychologists of yours?

our generation (baby boomers) have been a complete disaster. Starting out as the philosophical idealists and ending up completely corrupt, obese, the worst parents ever, uber-materialists, with barely a morsel of dignity or a whiff of honor to be found among 75M FRAUDS. — synthesis

I’ve always found it interesting that the movers and shakers of the social revolution of the ‘60’s were not baby boomers( Jane Fonda, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Tiom Hayden, Paul Krassner, Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman) Even John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Jimmu Hendrix technically weren’t baby boomers.

the folks with the most direct experience are older and that is why older people are generally chosen for positions of the greatest responsibility. — synthesis

Otoh, it is a truism in mathematics and physics that if you havent produced anything groundbreaking by the time you’re 30 you never will. Pop music seems to be another arena where the most brilliant work generally seems to be done before the age of 35. I agree that politics is different, but maybe that’s a function of a mellower temperament in older age rather than more insight. Politics is precisely NOT about groundbreaking ideas but consensus building.

What "innovations"? Utopian socialism? Communism? Atheism? Class war? Revolution? Economic theories? All borrowed from others! — Apollodorus

Do you know of a philosopher who didn’t borrow from others?

You were just involved in thread where you justified linking psychological research with politics. Give me a short list of your favorite psychologists ( would Piaget, William James, Freud or Vygotsky be on that list?) and I’ll try and link them with Marx.

I'm also not sure why I'd reduce human agency to causal explanations alone. — Marty

What else is there except causal explanations? Of course, one can speak of different kinds of causation. Husserl grounded material causation in the motivational
principle of intentionality.

Youre missing the point. Marx is just one among a long list of philosophers and psychologists after Hegel who put Enlightenment liberalism under critique. There are two ways to critique Marx ( or Freud). One is to recognize his innovations and go beyond him. The other is to misread him and thus to dismiss what you’re not really understanding. The only way to deal with and counter aspects of wokeness that you find objectionable is to effectively understand the underlying philosophical basis so that you can move beyond it. You don’t stand a chance by throwing classical liberal ideas at it. Those values are on their way out one way or the other. Critical theory began 70 years ago as the work of a small group of continental philosophers. Now it has gained acceptance in practically every large university in the U.S.

it's good to know that they aren't the majority. — Apollodorus

I wasn't worrying. Just stating a fact — Apollodorus

Oh. Sounded like a worry.

It sounds like your view of what science does is based on the ideas of one of those philoaophers who have been dead for 200 years

I'm sure there are some who are Marxists even if they don't call themselves that. But it's good to know that they aren't the majority. — Apollodorus

I wouldn’t worry. In 50 years today’s left wing will be the moderate center.

Who wants to admit that everything they think has already been thought by a person that has been dead for ages? — ssu

A more important question is how many believe that everything cutting edge in science has already been produced by people that have been dead for ages.
I would say almost none. And yet they think there can be this disparity between scientific advancement and innovation in philosophy.

[reply="ssu;530659"

Well, being "post"-everything is so hip. — ssu

I don’t know anyone who is post-everything, but I do see intellectualideas in developmental terms , so any particular philosophy can be placedas pre something and post something else.

Sure, there are some who would call themselves Marxists, but they aren't the majority. — ssu

Don’t forget the post -Marxists. That would
include fans of William James, Sartre, Derrida, Heidegger, social constructionism , deconstruction , phenomenology, Freudianiam and neo-Freudianism, post-structuralism and post-modernism, just to name some figures and movements. If you want to escape the influence of Marx in rigorous philosophy, you generally have to find philosophers born before 1840.

Views are often inculcated through upbringing and education. Once they've become part of the system, of the psychological makeup, it may be difficult for somebody to consciously isolate, identify, and analyze them in any meaningful way. And what if subconscious memories from previous lives, or genetic factors, play a role? — Apollodorus

Norms are inculcated , but every one of us interprets those norms in slightly different ways in relation to our own outlook. We never simply , blindly internalize ideas
from the culture. We are not vacuum
cleaners , we are interpreters. We make use of the informational resources of our culture , and that limits us , but we can only select from those resources what is consonant with our own system of understanding, even when it seems at a distance like an entire community is in lockstep with each other.


It’s true we are not always very good at articulating in words what we believe and why we believe it , but there are ways of helping someone to express what they think by having them put it in contrastive terms with positions they oppose. What I can say is that if someone has a conviction that is important to them, then there are ways to allow them to articulate it and show what makes it different from alternatives. It’s also possible that their political alignments are not very important to them and they are happy to just follow others.

Unconscious memories of course will influence belief, but only in the way that all aspects of our history do. But memory is always filtered though and reinterpreted in accordance with our current thinking. So we are never simply slaves to our past. The past that you recall is always a reconstruction. You never have direct access to what you experienced in an earlier time. Your past in some sense is always ahead of you.

how is this system built, supported and maintained, and what role do "traits" play in any of this? Do "traits" exist or not and if yes how do they relate to this system of anticipations? — Apollodorus

The system is built from experience. No event ever duplicates a previous event , so the system is always adapting and accommodating itself to the novelties it encounters by creating new categories and subcategories to make sense of events. if there must be some recognizable aspect or feature of an event , some similarity between it and a subordinate category of the system in order for it to be seen. Emotional crises are the result of the encounter with experience that the e system cannot assimilate on the basis of likeness and similarity on any level.

We see this clearly in today’s polarized political environment. Neither side can subsume the other’s thinking enough to see its validity for the other side.

What people think of as ‘ traits’ may correspond to variations from one person to the next in styles of organizing events, but in most cases , the concept of trait is used incorrectly to explain behavior that is the result of the content of one’s system. ‘ Emotionality’ of various sorts is a function of how comprehensively and assimilatively one’s system can cope with events. That’s a function of what one understands, the content of ones system , not some stylistic feature of engaging with the world.

Birth order, proneness to anger , shyness, extroversion can be studied in any culture, but have no direct bearing on the content of one’s outlook. and thus of one’s politics. If you want to know why someone believes a certain way, you’re better off asking them than assuming f secret traits. They will most likely be able to tell you why they think the way they do.

Being confronted with opposite views does tend to make you more aware of your own and reinforce them when you start defending them. And it seems that psychology, innate or acquired, does play a role in it. — Apollodorus

I hold to a different approach to psychology that one that sees behavior as innate or acquired. One could say that it is both at the same time, or neither. I hold with psychologist George Kelly that a person’s psychological
processes are channelized by the way that they anticipate events. And the way we anticipate
events is organized as a functionally integral system of anticipations that is our worldview. The relative stability of this system , rather than ‘traits’, makes us resistant to coercion and conditioning from outside forces, but it is not a frozen template. If events don’t validate our hypotheses, our system can crumble if we don’t reconstrue. What is validating to the left is not validating to the right , because the underlying worldviews are so different.

I can understand how a psychopath ended up that way if I see a lesion in the vm prefrontal cortex, that doesn't mean I can now diffuse his rage with talking. — Isaac

I understand that you don’t see political perspectives and moral systems this way, but just as a hypothetical , what if instead of connecting such complex ways of thinking with reductive causes like lesions in the brain, or reinforcement contingencies, we saw them as akin to scientific theories? That is, if we saw every social-political-ethics stance as the manifestation of an underlying ‘scientific’ theory that was constructed by the person on the basis of the evidence as they interpreted it? Would you then agree that coercion, condemnation, peer pressure and violence would not be particularly effective in changing their theoretical view? Can such methods change the theories of good scientists?

Again, I know the idea of an integrated gestalt-based personal foundation for social understandings conflicts with your conditioning-based approach, but I just want to suggest that it explains why countries under the weight of sanctions and international
condemnation can dig i. their heels rather than succumb to the ‘shaping’ effect of internetional pressure.

We're a social species, ostracisation is our main tool for setting group rules, so condemnation works. Look at how riled neo-liberals on this site are that we don't take their arguments seriously, they shouldn't care to debate with such obvious moral reprobates, but they do, because they want to be in the beard-stroking intellectuals gang. — Isaac

Group rules and ostracization only work when those being ostracized have enough overlap of their thinking with the dominant group. It has the opposite effect when the two parties have profoundly different worldviews.

Conservatives and liberals interact online all the time in the U.S. on comment sections and blogs, but studies have show that rather than causing them to come closer to the other’s point of view, it simply reinforces their differences.
It is impossible for someone to be successfully cajoled or threatened to some behavioral goal if that form
of behavior is based on a certain complex underlying understanding the the person has not arrived at. All you will end up with, at best, is a clever soul who learns how to ape the superficial aspects of your ways of acting in order to keep out of trouble. But in the meantime that person will strategize how to gain power in order to overthrow what they never bought into to begin with. And in terms of that person’s day to day intimate behavior with friends and family , they will implicitly continue to behave in the ways that intrinsically make sense to them. Even pigeons have been known to outfox reinforcement contingencies.

What fuels today’s polarizing political scene is not simply that the opponents see the world differently , it’s that they cannot fathom how one could in good conscience hold the views of the opposing side. This leaves only delegitimizing explanations for the other’s behavior.
— Joshs

Yes, I agree, though obviously for different reasons. — Isaac

Where groups are oppressed and have been serially so for decades - the poor, minorities, modern day colonies of TNCs...what's needed is more violence and condemnation. — Isaac

I’m not sure I understand how one can authorize violence and condemnation against an other while at the same
time considering their perspective and actions to be legitimate. As Ken Gergen wrote “ those we excoriate are but living also within traditions that are, for them, suffused with a sense of ethical primacy.”


I can understand how one group might accept an other group’s politics as not at all subject to moral condemnation , and yet find it necessary to protect one’s own community from them. One can defend oneself against a wild animal without condemning them , because we see their behavior as legitimate and natural.

I really don't see any reason to think that Side A or B have any kind of 'logic' to their respective worldviews at all, so there's nothing to see in that respect. There are collections of positions which are generally mutually exclusive sets (though some overlap) that are adopted out of habit, conformity, personal narrative building... — Isaac

I think this gets to the heart of it. For you the idea of a legitimate perspective , an internal logic to a worldview , is incoherent There are only fragmented and arbitrary bits of conditioned habits, so a ‘tough love’ is justified to change the reinforcement contingencies , habits, propositional narratives.

Considering psychology is largely a garbage science anyway, one has to admire the foresight of philosophers. — StreetlightX

I’m aware of your influences: Cavell, Zizek, Wittgenstein, Connolly, Deleuze. Every one of them has waxed enthusiastic about certain psychologists.
I think Deleuze was fond of Guattari, Witt admired James, Connolly quotes Freud up the wazoo, etc.

psychology is uniquely bad at understanding anything because it does not admit of a transcendental perspective. This is why philosophers as diverse as Kant, Husserl, and Frege went out of their way to erase any trace of psychologism from their work. Rightly so. — StreetlightX

The meaning of the transcendental , as well as the psychologistic, has undergone substantial
change since Kant. Psychologists who follow Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology embrace a form of transcendentalism that stands as a critique of Kantian transcendental subjectivity, by recognizing the irreducible reciprocal dependency of subjectivity and objectivity in the apprehension of the world.These authors jettison Kant’s solipsist idealist transcendental in favor of radical self-world interaction.

One finds this a priori in psychologists like Gendlin and Kelly, as well as Evan Thompson.

Of course , an entire generation of neo-Kantian psychologists implicitly based their models on Kantian idealism. So it wasn’t that they didntt admit of a transcendental perspective, but that they took it for granted.

Philosophy is an anti-psychology and that is its essence and greatness. Politics even more so. — StreetlightX

And art is an anti-philosophy and anti-psychology, as is music, literature , poetry and every other mode of human creativity. Each is the anti of the others and that is their greatness. Any attempt or privilege or denigrate
any of these modes with respect to the others leads to silly biases like Heidegger’s elevating of poetry to the ultimate expression of being, or Nietzsche doing the same with art , or Rorty telling us we should chuck our philosophy books in favor of novels, or claiming that politics is ‘even more’ anti psychology than philosophy.

When powerful new ways of understanding ourselves come upon the scene , they can be expressed in any of the above modes. All I know is the most exciting and insightful discourses of being in the world I have found are from a small group of philosophers and clinical psychologists. It seems to me that political theory is lagging behind. Deleuze, Foucault and Marx don’t do it for me.

when they do provide a more accurate non-psychological explanation for why conservatives are minimizing the virus threat, viz. that they are digesting a wide apparatus of conservative messaging, including propaganda from the President, that is downplaying the virus for political reasons, — Maw

This is also a psychological explanation, albeit one not rooted in personality traits but social conditioning , the idea that individuals unthinkingly introject and internalize ‘conservative messaging’.

This shouldnt be surprising. The divide between
paychological theory and philosophy is an arbitrary one(Freud vs Nietzsche, Sartre vs embodied cogntition , Gergen vs Foucault, Heidegger vs Gendlin). If psychology is just a conventionalized form of philosophy, then so is political theory. Between psychology and polic theory I would argue that most philosophers of the past 200 years have been more closely tied to psychology and politics. Nietzsche called himself a psychologist. Husserl heaped praise on intentional psychology.

Tell me a little about your political philosophy and I’ll match it up with a parallel psychological model. I promise it will be more to your liking than Haidt.

it it does not displace the central role of politics which is giving more power to some at the expense of others. People with privileges want to keep them. Those deprived of them want more equality. — Valentinus

Yea, but would you agree that the extreme political
polarization between right and left in the U.S. is not a function of power, but worldview? That is to say , explanations of who wields power, who the victims are and the reason for the inequality are entirely different depending on which side of the partisan divide you lie on.