You just want to elevate this secondness to something fixed and standalone when it can only, in Peirce's analysis, arise within a logic of relations. — apokrisis

It's not so. I acknowledge that a sense of self is relational. It's the relation between any experience whatsoever and the sense of me experiencing. It may not be fully formed in infants, but even tiny infants cry for a sense of want.

And then they get back to sermonising on the Hard Problem. — apokrisis

I agree that the Hard Problem is a bogeyman, that comes form expecting a scientifc account to somehow be able to encompass the experiential reality; it can't because it is only an account. "The map cannot be the territory".

So I've done the phenomenological research as well as understanding the neuroscientific reasons why this is a BS ambition. — apokrisis

I don't think you'd say that if you had experienced it even for a few moments.

The way I would attempt to explain it is by using a couple of Zen analogies. 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.

You and me is a second person view of two individuals in interaction. Peircean secondness, in other words. — apokrisis

I would have said it could be either a first person view; I feel me, and I take it for granted that you feel you, even though I cannot feel you. I also take it for granted that you cannot feel me. I don't understand what you are taking the second person view to be; IE how it would differ from both first and third person views.

In medieval times, monks could be had up for the sin of accidie - a failure to feel the full private fervour of religious experience and merely going through the public semblance of prayer and exhaltation. — apokrisis

Yes, I've heard that, but it doesn't change the fact that people either experience God or they don't, and also that there is always the possibility of being mistaken; hence the importance of faith. I have not been able to find it within me to be one of the faithful unfortunately; I have no doubt it provides a kind of solace nothing else can.

Is this really so hard to understand? [Of course it bloody is. :grin: ] — apokrisis

I wish I could grasp what you said there and its significance, but I lack the background. If it is so hard to understand and only grasped by a few specialists after long study, then it would seem arcane, and I'm not seeing how it could therefore be useful to the vast majority of people, and to society and mankind in general.

Claims about stilling the mind are as believable as claims about levitating the body. — apokrisis

That's something you'd need to experience. I can attest that it is possible, but that it does not involve the cessation of all thought. So, it's not what the inexperienced might think, and it really cannot be explained.

Fine, then don't give me the evidence. I go about my way unchanged. Enjoy the rest of your day. — Philosophim

Thanks, I hope you don't drink and smoke dope all day. All I'm really saying is that religious or mystical experiences or intuitions can be evidence for beliefs for the person who experiences them, but cannot be evidence for anyone else, because there is always the possibility of being wrong. And that possibility obtains also in the empirical sciences, which are perennially defeasible.

Phenomenology is socially constructed. It is a modelling exercise using language to externalise the internal in a socially pragmatic fashion. — apokrisis

I don't disagree that phenomenology is socially constructed.

So what you claim to be the facts of two different realms - the public and the private - are instead a way to frame things in a way that there is this epistemic division ... that can then allow a further level of organismic regulation emerge.

You have to construct the division to exploit the division. — apokrisis

Of course how we talk about the division is culturally constructed; but the division is an inevitable fact; because I don't know what thoughts are going in your head other than what you tell me. I don't know what your purported religious experience is like, other than how you (probably inadequately) describe it to me. You are trying to take a position outside of human experience and reduce it to a "modeling relation". It's a form of reductionism; despite your claim that it is not atomistic, but wholistic. This whole question is not worth arguing about.

For animals, there is no such public/private distinction. — apokrisis

Of course not; animals don't make distinctions. But it's still the case that one animal doesn't feel another's pain; whereas as they do respond to each other's body language, so there is a private/ public dynamic going on there nonetheless.

So though I might have an induction that my consciousness is separate from my brain, the premises of neuroscience conclude that my consciousness comes from my brain. — Philosophim

The premises conclude?

Do you get it? I want to know I will live forever Janus. I want to die, go to heaven, see family and friends again. I want to be able to drink and smoke dope all day and it not affect who I am. I have an intuition that this could be. But that's an induction. And there is no evidence that this will happen. You claim you have evidence. Well give it! Why are you holding out? Why can't you give me something where I can rationally pursue my induction?

If you truly believed you had evidence of what was non-physical, you would rush out to help me like the good soul you are. But you don't, do you? Because I believe you're a good soul, and if you had it, you would. So don't run away. If you're a good soul, try. And if you know you can't, then just say you don't have it. We'll both be happier that way. — Philosophim

It's obvious you can't drink and smoke dope all day without being physically affected. I haven't claimed that I have evidence that you could do that without being affected; why would you think I would claim that?

As to whether you will live forever; well, we know the body will die, and that's the extent of the possible publicly available evidence. I think you need to read a bit more closely.

I'm not running away. I didn't require a lesson on the difference between induction and deduction, I'm already clear on that. It seems to me you are the one running away; deflecting because you can't come up with a counterargument to what I'm saying about the difference between public and private evidence, the subjective nature of judgements of plausibility in relation to metaphysical questions; and their consequent undecidability.

Stop telling me what I will and will not accept, and just give me the evidence. I can intuit and imagine. Why do you think we can't corroborate that? — Philosophim

It's obvious; we intuit and imagine differently. I cannot feel your intuitions and vice versa. They thus cannot be evidence in the public sense you are asking for.

I am not precluding that non-physical evidence cannot exist. So no, I am not committing a fallacy. I'm simply asking you to provide evidence that the non-physical exists. — Philosophim

You would not recognize non-physical evidence. The only such evidence is that of the intuitive or imaginative faculties. But such evidence cannot be inter-subjectively corroborated. So it can never be evidence in the "public" sense, but only evidence to the individual whose imagination or intuition tells them that there is something beyond the empirical reality of the shared world.

The fact is we don't know either way. The question is undecidable. Sure, you can say that the idea that there is nothing beyond the physical is the more plausible, but that is a subjective value judgement; there is no empirical warrant for judgements of plausibility.

Go read the evidence of anti-psychotic drugs, hallucinegens, and amazing records of brain damage like loss of long term memory, the inability to mentally see colors, comprehend words, etc, then tell me their consciousness exists on some plane beyond the physical. — Philosophim

There is no evidence either way as to whether consciousness "exists on some plane beyond the physical", because all our (intersubjectively corroborable) evidence is physical evidence. You're assuming that the only possible evidence is physical evidence, and then concluding that there is nothing but the physical; in other words, you;re committing the fallacy of assuming your conclusion.

The fact that chemical agents can affect the brain says nothing about whether the brain generates or receives consciousness; we would expect the same result either way. What happens if you de-tune a radio?

The Wikipedia link I provided is a list of paradoxes (which logical people hold as true). — Agent Smith

You might know they hold them as true, but how do you know they are logical?

Look at you. Ducking and diving like mad.

C'mon. Where is the evidence or the logic that says that consciousness can exist in the absence of a content? — apokrisis

I can't help butting in here. If I am interpreting him correctly, Bert is asking why the kinds of behavior you observe, and capacities you attribute, to the jumping spider, your example, could not exist, for example, in an unconscious robot.

Is there any need for the kind of defensiveness you are manifesting?

That is why a hollow slogan like "everyone just be nice!" is so problematic. — apokrisis

Right, except that is not what I was saying would make a difference. Caring about the community (including of course the environment) and doing something about it is what would make a difference.

If you think small rural communities have a much greater degree of social cohesion, then why not analyse why that might be the case - and apply those principles to the larger world we all now live in. — apokrisis

It doesn't take much analysis. Small communities are like an extension of family, and people naturally care about family (or at least those who are not totally socially dysfunctional do). People don't have a sense of familial connection like that to the larger world. I think much of that is so because the financialization of the economic system has allowed a situation to develop where people think only in terms of use and profit.

Anyway, as you say, what needs to be done is "bleeding obvious", and it is only caring about what needs to be done that will get it done.

We get the lives we design, don't we? At least that was the Enlightenment project. — apokrisis

I don't know whether we get the lives we design, but we get the lives we allow. It starts with what we vote for, for example. Anyway we are now a long way off "The Unequivocal Triumph Of Neuroscience - On Consciousness" track.

Nice. Either I'm original but wrong. Or I'm right, but not original. You win either way. :clap: — apokrisis

Why would you worry; you haven't claimed to be original anyway: Peirce, Pattee, Salthe, Rosen etc.? I'm not saying that semiotics is not interesting or informative, but I just don't see how what is really an arcane discipline, pretty much incomprehensible to those who haven't spent sufficient time studying it (if I had more time I'd probably study it myself to gain what is more than just a general sense of it), is going to help humanity.

You're stomping about making the claim to have the magical potion which cures all ills. But you're not going to let anyone taste even a drop. — apokrisis

I don't claim to have the magical potion; if I had it, I would apply it and save humanity. I don't believe there is any magical potion that will make us all care enough to make a difference, circumstances will either bring that about or they won't. We'll have to wait and see. I live in a small rural community and you can see care operating a lot more there than in the urban environment.

How would we go about trying semiotics? What is it going to tell us about the world situation which is not already obvious?

If people changed such as to care more, then we would see how it pans out. It can't be engineered. So, we'll muddle through as usual, semiotics aint going to help either. No better than snake oil.

Thanks for the chat.

What you seem to be failing to see is that the simple notion that the world would very different if we all, or even a significant number of us, cared about others, about the collective, as we do about ourselves does not require analysis.

I'm not indulging in utopian thinking because I'm not suggesting it will come to pass, either; it most probably won't, . Nonetheless the 'shitness' of the modern world is due to lack of sufficient care to raise it out of its cesspit, mixed with the bewilderment that comes with being faced with unmanageable complexity.

Aporia can be interpreted as a state of readiness (imagine athletes at their starting positions in a race, legs cocked as it were, read to sprint at the signal to do so) to learn. A philosopher then is just a student, an eternal pupil, alway learning, but never, ever completing the process of absorbing information and processing that into knowledge and, ultimately, wisdom. — Agent Smith

You seem to be saying that aporia is the beginning (a state of readiness), but is it not also the middle and end?

Or could it be that we are perennial beginners? Does wisdom grow within the aporia?

Describe to me this world where we all "care enough". — apokrisis

How can I describe what doesn't exist? You know as well as I do that the world would look very different if we all cared as much about others as we do about ourselves.

And I frame this as falsifiable theory. There are two views in play - dualism and triadicism. Which project laments about all its failures, which gets on with its evolutionary progress? — apokrisis

All dualisms are really traidisms; not to see that is just a failure of the imagination where thinking stops up short. As Gurdjieff said "Man is third force blind". Bread is understood as flour and water, forgetting the heat. So people see Saussurean semiology and think it is merely a matter of signifier and signified, forgetting the relation of signification. The Three Gunas: "creation, preservation and destruction" or astrology's "cardinal, fixed and mutable".

These are archetypes; they have been with us for aeons. In any case since humans do not consist of a majority of intellectuals (for better or for worse) our problems are far more basic than a mere failure to grasp semiotics. More broadly, it is a failure to care enough.

If you worship at the altar of science you take account of only one small (albeit important) part of human life

The shitness of the modern world is largely due to a failure to continue the Enlightenment project. — apokrisis

You state that as though it is a fact; but it's a dogma or else it's merely an opinion, depending on how you look at it.
In my view the shitness of the modern world is due to unmanageable complexity coupled with stupidity and cupidity; the financialization of the economic system. Religions warned against usury 2,000 years ago, but scientistic hubris deluded the (un)thinking ape into imagining that he could get away with it,

Thanks, that paper looks interesting, and I will read it when I find the time.

You just damn science because ... naive realism? — apokrisis

LOL, it seems you read not what I say, but what you want to read. Where have I damned science? I have a lot of respect for science. Those who damn science often seem to say it is damnable just because it is based on naive realism or materialism. I don't agree with that; but I do think it is based on common human perception, mostly visual. Science studies perceptible objects as they appear to us, so of course in that sense there is an ineliminable subjective (as intersubjective) basis to science.

I haven't said that our descriptions of things can be trusted to be justifications for any absolutizing claims about the nature of reality; in fact I've said the opposite. But what else do we have? Science and empirical observation in general gives us the most reliable discursive knowledge we have, because observations can be tested in the public arena. Phenomenology is not empirically testable like science is, but relies on the considered assent of those who reflect on the nature of their experience; so more room for disagreement there.

Why is it that you apparently cannot address what I've actually said rather than your own cartoon version?

It is a model-dependent assumption that your pain is "in here" and the prickly rose bush is "out there".

How do you check the truth of this? How do you solve the Kantian riddle and so secure the foundations of your epistemology, rather than just claim it is plain obvious commonsense? — apokrisis

Relative to the body as it seems to us, the pain is "in here" and the rose "out there".

But I'm not claiming that is true in any absolute sense and so I'm not concerned with the brain being "in here" and objects "out there"; we don't need to think about the brain at all in this. I'm saying that people will almost invariably and universally agree about the objects in the public space, whereas no one really knows if you are in pain, or are faking it. People can, in common, see the street, the cars, the park etc., etc., and agree on what they are seeing, but no one can feel your pain except you.

So, I am not attempting to address any metaphysical implications of this undeniable fact of human experience; whether the objects "really exist" independently of human experience, whether they are real energetic structures or ideas in the universal mind or God or whatever.

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.

I've said plenty. It's up to you to make a case worth considering. — apokrisis

Make a case against what? As far as I can tell nothing you've said is relevant as an objection to the simple distinction between what is and what is not publicly available. If you want to lay out your argument in more detail. I'll respond to it.

If you could explain clearly, of course. If it is some recondite rave based on specialized knowledge that I am not familiar with, then probably not. Dispensations from the ivory tower are not what philosophy is about, if you think it is then I would say you are wallowing in elitist bullshit.

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. — Joshs

Yes, "Intersubjective arena" is exactly what I mean by public It can be said that in a certain sense what is seen is not the same object from one moment to the next. It also true that no one can see the whole of an object simultaneously.

Such abstruse questions aside, public availability just means that we can all agree about aspects of objects. Visual aspects are the most determinate. We can all agree on the colour of the apple in front of us; it won't be the case that some will say it is green and others that it is red (colourblindness aside). No one will say it is purple with pink polka dots. No one will say the bulldog in front of us is a Dachsund, or the Mack truck is Lamborghini or the cat is a horse and so on.

Yes, subjectivity will change as objective reality evolves with scientific advance, but a domain of practical immediacy remains, and subjectivity as an aspect of what makes us human should be preserved for all individuals on principle, at least that's my opinion. The hard problem placed in pragmatic terminology is simply how to incorporate these new objectivities into culture, really not so enigmatic in its essentials. — Enrique

Subjective experience is undoubtedly constantly changing in one sense, in terms of content, but it remains affective, qualitative. It's hard to imagine it ceasing to be so. But I'm not quite sure whether you are saying that, or exactly what you are saying. Can you elaborate?

Do you have a counterargument?

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. — Joshs

Yes, or the relation between the mind and the body considered as different substances. Considering the mind and body as different substances just is the reification; Spinoza nailed this by realizing that cogitans and extensa are simply different perspectives or modes of understanding.

You have to believe in an all-seeing God to think that talk about a third person point of view. Do you think such a view exists in any real sense? If you do, then you are simply building dualism and transcendence into your ontology. It is an input rather than an output of your confident arguments. — apokrisis

Not at all. the view does not rely on God at all. That is just your righteous projection. The way I use the term "third person" simply denotes the public realm of objects of sense.

Third person vs first person is just publicly available vs not publicly available. Your pain, as experience, is not publicly available. The tree near my workshop is. It's a simple basic distinction; no metaphysics involved.

It's only interesting if you try to predict how subjectivity and objectivity will be reshuffled with science of the future, which we don't really have to model in any precision way. — Enrique

I'm not sure what you have in mind here: are you suggesting that experience may somehow cease to be qualitative in the future, or that science may somehow be able to quantify the qualitative?

1. Ignorance/Ignorantia (this is, I'm told, the state of mind one dislikes the most)

2. Confusion/Aporia (just a fancy word for total bafflement); a constant source of irritation/vexation for me and others like me)

3. Gnosis/Knowledge (the holy grail of philosophy, excluding those philosophers who think aporia is more their thing) — Agent Smith

In the absolutist context:

1. Ignorance (even of the questions)

2. Knowing the questions, uncertainty of the answers

3, Delusory certainty.

In relative contexts:

1,Ignorance.

2. Learning

3. Knowledge

So, in my view aporia is indeed the wise state in relation to so-called "ultimate questions".

A textbook example of Dunning-Kruger in action. The less folk know about brain function, the more they feel confident the Hard Problem is a slam dunk. — apokrisis

I find it amazing that people cannot see that the so-called "Hard Problem" only arises when a third person account (science) is expected to be able somehow to capture the qualitative reality that is first person experience. It's simply a category error; a conflation of different arenas of sense.

So you don't experience a sense of self. You can only experience a sense of the self as being "other" to the world. — apokrisis

I don't agree with that. I think the sense of self is the most immediately given experience of all. Other than that I don't disagree with what you've written in that post, but I don't see its relevance to anything I've said.

Like philosophy , Science isn't one thing. — Joshs

True, it has many fields, each one of which deals with investigating the empirical. Of course there are disciplines which cannot be unequivocally counted as sciences. like psychology and economics; and those are not what I have in mind. Anyway different notions of science are not a matter of science, in the sense that they are not investigated by scientists; they are matters for philosophy.

So, no I don't think it is at all

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!’ — Joshs

That said, a Kantian can do good Kantian philosophy, a Hegelian Hegelian philosophy and so on, much like a physicist can do good physics, but not geology, and so on. I'm sure you get the picture by now.

The sense of self is an example of consciousness. It seems to me that the sense of self cannot be epiphenomenal, since it most certainly has real world effects. You might say there is a neural correlate to the sense of self, but, as experienced, the sense of self is not a neural correlate.

My understanding of phenomenology is that it is concerned with describing and gaining a better understanding of the "as experienced". Science cannot do this because the " as experienced" is given subjectively. Is it so hard to understand that there are different kinds of investigations, each with their own methodologies, and each valid within their own ambits?

Science is concerned with the features of perceptible objects which are publicly available to observation and which are measurable. That is what I mean by "third person". The fact that, for example, Dennett's neurophenomenology incorporates first person reports, making it a kind of hybrid, does not change the fact that most of the so-called "hard sciences" are as I described.

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. — Joshs

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.

Do we want to "describe" or do we want to model the causality?

And which do you think has the better hope of engaging with the causality? — apokrisis

We want to do both; I would say and it seems trivially obvious that modeling the causality has "the better hope of engaging the causality", since phenomenological description is not concerned with that.

And don't actual neuroscientists on the whole only claim to be studying brain function or cognition - as "consciousness" is such a vague term loaded with cultural baggage? — apokrisis

Right, and that is precisely why I've been pointing out that neuroscience studies only brain function and has no substantive warrant to make dogmatic claims (as opposed to educated conjectures) about the origins of consciousness. Neuroscience studies cognition only insofar as it takes account of first person reports and correlates those with observations of brain function which are taken to be correlated.

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. — Joshs

Sure, but 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.

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. — Joshs

Science takes its objects as they present themselves to our investigations. "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.

I don't agree with you about science being concerned with identity over time. For example when geologists study rock strata, they observe and describe what they find, compare that with past observations, and then hypothesize about the imaginable causes that gave rise to the observed strata.

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. — Joshs

The existence of objects, as they present themselves to us, is taken for granted, sure, but no metaphysical assumptions concerning their absolute or independent existence are necessary in order to do science. We mathematize objects because we can; the implications of that ability is a philosophical, not a scientific matter. This is not to say that no scientists are concerned with such questions, but they are not empirical questions, and so are not necessary to the practice of science.

Perhaps, 'describing conscious experience'? — Wayfarer

Right, consciousness per se is a kind of abstraction because actual consciousnesses is always consciousness of something; that is, conscious experience. So yes, it can only be described in terms of its ways of being conscious of its objects.