Are you saying that you interpret Heidegger as believing in a notion of self as an isolated subject-thing? — Joshs

I said above what I'm saying, no need to repeat it.
Regarding your question of H.'s self, I'm not a big fan of H., I actually do not rely at all on his descriptions of consciousness or the self because he did just that, description of their kind of properties he did not define it.
Heidegger is like a good piece of classical music, it is great to read it, to get into his world of concepts where it looks like he is about to grasp something super interesting about the being but once you have finished reading and studying him you are left with a great and enjoyable intellectual experience, but nothing else, very modest epistemological value.

uman emotions are hormonal effects that produce the feelings we crudely categorize as happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger. — Gnomon

You're almost there but I think Damasio is more successful describing emotions and feelings (they re not the same thing).

motivating forms of physical Energy — Gnomon

Ufff... here you lost me.

Generic Information or EnFormAction — Gnomon

Lost again, your theory of consciousness is too long to digest but I'm curious on what you think about the Phi of Tononi and his IIT. Thanks.

This kind of misunderstanding is very prevalent and is a real hindrance to understanding both brains and AI — fishfry

I agree it is not working the same way, the hardware-software architecture and the biology are different. But in terms of how information is treated (you see an eye, I tell you it is an eye so you recalibrate your networks to get closer to the recognition of the eye) it is very similar.
And when you look at what happened inside a CNN after it has learned you see that inside the CNN there have emerged similar "concepts" to the ones we have in our brains for visual recognition (i.e. group of neurons that activate for vertical or diagonal lines, then higher level groups of neurons for higher level concepts like nose, eye...).
There is something fundamentally similar between AI and how our brain works.

We don't even know how brains work — fishfry

But we're getting very very close...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSy685vNqYk&ab_channel=PeterWallInstituteforAdvancedStudies

artificial dumbness — Olivier5

:lol:

Honestly speaking, I don't think your interpretation is right. It is quite clear when he says... "transposing an isolated subject-thing", then it says "itself before itself".
I gree H is sometimes very cryptic but in this passage he is for me quite clear.

determinist belief systems because they are popular and mainstream — Jack Cummins

Right, and we can say the opposite as well. That religious and spiritual beliefs (impregnated of dualism and metaphysics) are much more popular and mainstream and have been used and are still being used to manipulate the mass. And it is quite obvious that certain countries with low-education standards and high poverty rates are much more religious than rich and developed countries.
The scientific world is much more complex to understand and usually its teachings not easy to accept as scientific discoveries can be a revolution against mainstream ideas and main-culture assumptions (we know consequences in history of people being killed because of showing scientific facts) but once we understand them and its implications we can never go back :wink: We cannot elude them.

It is a matter of what our feeling is focused on. — Janus

:up:

As inauthentic interaction Dasein is flattened into the normativity of Das Man. As authentic interaction, Dasein is its ‘point of view’. — Joshs

Let me add to your hermeneutics of H. building at the sametime on Janus "focused feeling" :smile:

Let's focus on the anxiety-feeling produced by certain "loneliness". The anxiety is triggered when one finds oneself alone drowning within this sweet infinite ocean, with no worldly supports for one’s existence. Dasein encounters then itself as an individual, ultimately alone. In Heidegger’s words: “Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’”

I think investigation of entanglement and quantum coherence will fundamentally change our image of what subatomic particles do within atoms and elsewhere. Modeling quantum mechanisms may make our assumptions about electron orbitals obsolete and completely revise comprehension of their temporal properties. Maybe absolute parameters of temporality exist, but I'm not aware that we've even come close to reaching them yet. — Enrique

Exactly, only science can give us an answer. All the rest is pure solipsist speculation.

All definitions are tautologously circular, — Enrique

Not really, at least in mathematics and within science definitions frame categories and are not tautologously circular but they create linearity towards progress in understanding and knowing.

ridiculous things about time being relative — Bartricks

General relativity is ridiculous? all the technologies built thanks to relativity like internet and the computer you're using are ridiculous?
I think they show a factual, successful and trascendental understanding of time.

this seems to me like a comprehensive definition of time — Enrique

If you want to define time you have to contextualize it.
You can find in here a great and serious work that summarizes how we humans deal with the definition of time:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/#TimePhys

here is a whole new world waiting for our analysis in the world of feelings — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

I read, studied and forgot and then studied again, etc. continental philosophy and phenomenology but I came to the conclusion that analytical was more powerful and then, when I got in touch with Quine and then with naturalist cognitivism I couldn't go back :-)
As I understand we have different positions on how we "are on the world" (never ending story within history of philosophy :-) ) let's try to build from statements where I think we agree. Little by little so that we can understand where the fundamental divergence is.

The divide I mentioned occurs where reason seeks to subsume the actualities of the world. Nonsense. the world's actualities are not categorial. — Constance

Right!
Then, if we stick to this idea for a moment, if the world's actualities are not categorical, don't you think that the tool (language) and the method (rely on reason) of continental philosophy is not appropriate by itself?
Symbols and categories are the food of reason but they represent a way of being in the world, not the world itself. If I'm in a world where the Earth is assumed flat, I would wonder what is there beyond the oceans? where does the Earth ends? because the category Earth for me is represented by certain properties, being flat. This simple assumption would generate a world of ideas (illusive monsters at the end of the oceans).
If I stay within my house and just spend my time on survival activities I will never get to know that I'm fundamentally wrong. Only by observing the sun and the shadows and by creating technologies that allow me to observe the stars and measure certain movements I could at the end, as Copernicus (and others before him) did, get to know that my flat-Earth world makes no sense. This man that got out of his "house" and experienced the world in a richer way was able to create new categories and new technologies that allowed him to better understand the world.

If you agree with this principle, wouldn't you agree that it is more likely that neuroscience gives you the right tools and categories to better understand what Husserl called phenomenology?
You can say that technology is the way of being modern human's (Heidegger) but isn't language itself a contingent technology that emerged from a very successful nervous system? Instead of relying on the categories "meaning" and "sense" as used and understood by Heidegger and Dreyfus, shouldn't we open the black-box?, the brain, and analyze it using the new senses we have created (EEG,  MEG, fMRI, photon migration tomography, transcranial magnetic simulation, etc.). Don't they have something new to show us related to the categories we create?Shouldn't we give a chance to the transcendence of heterophenomenology? Traditional phenomenology accepts the subject's self-reports as being authoritative. In contrast, heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them. It does not dismiss the first-person perspective, but rather brackets it so that it can be intersubjectively verified by empirical means, allowing it to be submitted as scientific evidence.I guess you see this more a risk to fall into reductionism?

Aside from the pertinence of religions to answer the question, would you agree that depending on how "you" is defined and understood the question itself dissolves and loses all the sense?

:up:

This is why Kierkegaard is considered a father of existentialism: he said there is this qualitative divide between what is there and what can be said about it. — Constance

Are you then supporting what Kierkegaard said? the core of his statement is the word "qualitative divide". Kierkegaard "qualitative divide" is full of dualism, full of God.
Are you saying you agree on Kierkegaard's divine moral?

Wittgenstein said ethics is transcendental. — Constance

Now I'm more confused. Before you mention Kierkegaard, now you mention Wittgenstein, are you saying the meaning of transcendence for Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are the same? I would disagree to this, it appears you're mixing up things here.
For example Wittgenstein said as well that : "..."And it is clear that a world in which there is only dead matter is neither good not evil; therefore, the world of living beings can in itself be neither good nor evil." and then from here he concludes the "nonsense" of the world and sense being contingent

Once the facts have been suspended, — Constance

Facts suspended? Looks like you're building a play of a movie you imagine within your speculations but studying emotions and feelings like pain (Damasio) and seeing how they work I would say that "suspending" an emotion makes no sense. Do you mean to suspend the conscious phenomena of the pain? Well we know this is a construct of our unconscious, we know our brain unconsciously decides about what to do with this "pain" around 200ms before we become conscious of it (Libet). It can become conscious or maybe not.
This is to say again that the "local" fact of a pain is not something you can suspend. it doesn't work that way.

we do the final reduction and consider this event as a qualia — Constance

We, who? Well I guess Chalmers and metaphysical thinkers. As you can guess me and many other contemporary philosophers do not agree this "qualia", the way you explain it This dualist qualia is not needed to explain pain in a satisfactory way. Emotions and feelings are "incarnated", we have to work with the concept of an extended brain to understand them. Well I guess you know Damasio. Emotions do not need of consciousness to exists, etc. etc. This is the contemporary concept of emotions, again no need qualia... emotions and feeling can artificially be triggered as we know very well how they work. It can be done using electric signals in certains parts of our limbic system or inducing special conscious states with certain chemistry (drugs, psychotropic substances, etc.)

There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad". This clumsy sounding usage is unavoidable. — Constance

Well, I think you need to show us why it is unavoidable?
Let me elaborate a bit, if I'm able to manipulate your emotions and feelings with certain technology wouldn't you conclude that the mystery of how your emotions and feelings isv within the science of the technologies I used to manipulate you? If a tumor can change your personality and make you become a pedophile (google it and you will find several cases) wouldn't you think that your emotions and feelings rely on the chemistry and physiology of your brain and not on any metaphysical reality?

There is a residuum IN the torturous event that stands outside body of facts that announces itself in our word "bad" — Constance

Can you demonstrate it? In the meantime I would claim this residuum is not needed to explain the word "bad". You just need to put it in a context. If in this case you put it in the context of my finger burning is bad. Well, in this case, this forum is not the right place to explain it as it is not that short but here you can find a good source to understand how pain works and why it is associated to the word "bad". As anyone could expect, such a complex things requires a complex and very technical language but if you really want to understand it I'm sure you can find it accessible:
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/3/65/65ps1.full

I can understand that many people find it easier to speculate and build metaphysical worlds, but for them to become credible nowadays I think they first need to understand what science has to say about it.

Let's be humble to what the true dialogue with nature tells us about what we're and avoid falling into the temptation of solipsisms.

Very good points and very pertinent.
My 2 cents:
Of course virtue is in the middle and the right equilibrium between exploring the self and focusing on the outside as well, that said...
I think that christianity is much less selfish than oriental religions and cultures and is one of the keys of success of western societies vs oriental ones.
Oriental philosophies and religions have been too much oriented to the self and inner explorations while christianity has always been more oriented to the society, the good vs evil, help the others, etc.
This is not a black and white assertion but I think there is a lot of truth in it.

brain seems a bit limited — Jack Cummins

Agree the brain is limited in its own but if we look at the "brain in relationship with the world" it becomes very interesting :wink:
And let's keep the metaphysical discussions aside. Every philosopher after Aristotle has tried to create a metaphysical system of ideas with new "metaphysical concepts" trying to reinvent the wheel each time: Kant, Hegel, Camus... each of them trying to reinvent the metaphysics of the previous one. It is a clear symptom that it is not the right path to follow.
The "meta-anything" is an intellectual loop.
If Dennett looks too materialistic try for example cognitive naturalists like Daniel Andler or Sandro Nannini.

As I read you, dear thinkers, I get the impression we're all too anthropocentric here.
I recently got to know Georg Northoff and I think his idea of stop-using the term mind and focus more on the brain and its relation with the world is very successful.

http://www.georgnorthoff.com/

Don't you think "mind" is an extremely anthropocentric concept in most of the cultures (western and asiatic) (except true pantheists of course - not sure Spinoza's was true one :brow: )?
We're surrounded by what we call world, nature, univers, matter, etc. however we want to call it.We can deny it and speculate as much as we can but while our brains biology is the same than Plato's and Aristotle's or even Hegel's so that we still have many of their existential intuitions.... while we keep going in circles within many naif intuitions, the actual progress in understanding the world and in understanding human nature is coming from biology, neuroscience and physicists, in one word from science.
Philosophy should go hand-by-hand with science but I see here we talk too much speculative-philosophy only.
So the answer to the question "Is the material world the most absolute form of reality?" the net answer is yes, of course and keep moving. You can spend time defining the concepts within the stated question (world, material, absolute, reality, form) and you will get into Wittgenstein's linguistic turn and then Quine... but after this we should be talking about Stanislas Dehaene, Daniel Dennett, Georg Northoff maybe Metzinger as well, Antonio Damasio, and a long etc. of thinkers that are producing philosophy that has absorbed contemporary discoveries.
Those discoveries that come thanks to the new technologies, that are basically extensions of human humble senses. Technologies that are the only way to experience new worlds, new realities, learn more and speculate better :chin:
I do agree that philosophy is super powerful. I like it so much!! Reading the right philosopher at the right time of your life with the right mood is a mystic experience :-)
Plato's dialogues, Hegel's dialectic, the great positivists like Hume, our dear Hobbes... infinite list of great thinkers... should we include Derrida? Yes, why not (kidding).
But we have to recognize it is like listening to music, it doesn't help better understanding the world. It helps building a critical way of thinking, scrutinizing reality but not generating knowledge if it doesn't take into account scientific method and scientific language.
Contemporary technologies are the ones that shape our understanding of the world and how we experience it (biology and AI are challenging the foundations of our laws and ethics, as one example).

Material vs Immaterial fight: of course there are "things", "concepts", "values" that are abstract and part of the subjective human world that refer to human matters that exist thanks to humans and that will disappear with humans. Those "things" are anyway "material" in the sense that are coded in our minds through symbols embedded in our biology, within our brains and our brains manipulate them continuously, conscious and unconsciously (let's be humble again, mostly unconsciously), same way my brain is working right now to write this post.
So let's be honest, yes everything resides in the world, in the material or quantistic, or however you want to call it using this colloquial language but let's be humble and recognize we are just:
nature that thinks
nature that one day found itself in a mirror
and started to walk and explore to survive time
by walking and exploring it met a second mirror
and those 2 mirrors look at each other
and infinity was raised
we humans are drowning in that infinity
while nature continuous its time.

:up:

Wouldn't it be good to ask them if they feel oppressed?
What happened in Egypt when elections happened after the spring-revolution (today is the anniversary by the way)? Check out who won...

Maybe this is not the case anymore, but in the past parents used to force daughters to become nuns as well...

:up:

Zero time is the moment of transition existing outside of time. — synthesis

An astronomist would tell you Zero time is the moment right before the big bang and physicist would talk to you about light being in the border line between space and time.... but isn't it already implicit within the concept of "existing" that space-time is needed?

Nevertheless, as I say in my previous post this is a linguistic trap, you won't get anything out of this because you mix up categories in wrong context. It looks like the question makes sense but it doesn't unless you provide scientific definitions of each of the terms instead of "colloquial" meanings.
It is something like trying to answer what is the color of nothingness for a blind person :lol:

Linguistic aporia, linguistic trap! ... a need for some wittgensteinian linguistic turn? :-)

Here you go, Freedom Evolves from D. Dennett:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Evolves

Well, I respect you but I disagree, it is your reality, not mine . I don't think in 2 generations it will be the end of the world but agree we have to better protect our environment. There re many other challenges though.

First of all, thank you Mick for bringing this very interesting topic.
I don't think neuromorphic processors cross any ethical boundary that AI hadn't crossed already :-)
Von Neumann's architecture or neuromorphic hardware are part of those technologies that open the pandora-box of what means being human.They have transformed the way we understand what "thinking" means, and I agree with you, those technologies are able to create systems that learn and "think" towards a purpose or goal.
This video contains outstanding facts on how concepts emerge within convolutional networks for image recognition and there're solid reason to think this is how our brain works (don't miss min 7 onwards):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRhxdVk_sIs&t=7s&ab_channel=deeplizard

I think ethics, though, is not about the technology we use but more the "purpose" or "goals" we work on. The complexity is on the fact that working towards one very ethical purpose, like improving population's health, brings at the same time the opportunity to easily deviate towards risky fields like increasing the concentration of incredible amounts of power (ie., deep-mass-manipulation) within few private hands.

I agree our political institutions are at stake here and they have to react to be able to control, moderate and legislate on these topics. But it won't be easy as this requires cross-border, international, global institutions similar to the ones we created after WWII like the UN but with more powers. I'm optimistic and I rely on human moral sense like the one that has prevented the continuation of WWII after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I see very good signs like in Italy (my country of residence) where scientists and professors are creating very serious institutions to tackle just this, moral and ethics around AI. The European Union as well, as we can see from your post, is taking this very seriously and GDPR was a good step forward.

Are you asking me? Because as far as I'm concerned, neither of them are right. Science is right. It's true knowledge of reality - a reality that may have been Created by God. I don't know. What I can know is that science works. If you want to believe that there's a God, who am I to contradict you? I will harness scientific knowledge and limitless clean energy to secure a sustainable future. Al-Sisi can't do that and neither can Macron, so they're both wrong. — counterpunch

You say they're both wrong but they are the head of 2 countries, 2 major countries and they have to deal with reality and reality is that people are attached to their history and traditions and changing that takes a lot of time. History and traditions of Egypt are substantially different than ours. We cannot just impose our thinking like being the best unless you want to repeat the worst episodes of history (war, dictatorship, etc...)
I agree with you (if I read you right between the lines) that science, and mostly technology we made out of scientific discoveries, shape our lives. I agree that western societies rely more and more on science.
I would even go beyond that asserting that in western countries it is technology to govern us, and not us to govern technologies. This has been quite clear in the last decades where ethics and politics are deeply challenged by technology (social networks, genetics, electric cars, etc.)
But we have to deal with reality and there're countries that are still run differently. Where religion and state are still together. Maybe it is a matter of time... I'm optimist and I believe western society is making progress, history is not just randomness or repetitive cycles, there is progress towards something... a singularity? Who knows.
Note: I don't believe God is above anything, but science is and science says sooner or later the sun will destroy the Earth if we do not do it first... how should we deal with this?

One recent example, the recent interview between Macron and Al-Sisi. Al-Sisi says human rights are a human construct and for Egyptians that believe in God, God is above any human construct so above human rights, so they follow what their God says in the Quran. Macron responded in France they got the illuminism and at the center is the human individual. Completley opposite views,who is right?
And this is just one example on why science cannot be a party. Science is an instrument politicians use to govern but at the service of certain ideologies and powers.
When science will be so powerful that it can create a model of the values of the world and human behaviours and we can create the technology to manipulate and control populations to make them follow the mandate of that science then science will be a super powerful tool but always a tool used by humans, by stomachs.

we still have TV networks.
These technologies evolve, do not just disappear.
Think about books, for example, still there as well.
GAFAMs are something new a very powerful that is challenging our current politics, and accelerating change.

Politics is about dealing with humans, societies and its issues. We, humans, are mostly irrational, we think with our stomach, our emotions bias us continuously.
Why do you think sociology has never been able to become a science?
Scientific disciplines help us to dialogue with nature, our nature and it tell us we are complex and, again, not rational.

This is (among many other reasons like the survival principle, etc) why science party has and will never work to govern humans. It could maybe one day govern cyborgs.

Let me put another perspective.
I would say most of the times falseness, fakeness, invented theories or invented stories are much more beautiful than the truth.
It is demonstrated for example that fake news spread 6 times faster than truth within social networks.
Fiction is a very successful gendre in art expression (including cinema). Even when a movie tries to tell the truth it is always only based on a true story but not 100% true.

So, taking into account that as Grarth says above ...

Since these two are so completely and utterly different — Garth

it looks like beauty doesn't love truth very much.

:up:

As looks like there is not much interest, I will post one of the major conclusions on this topic that me and my "contertulios" agreed a few days ago: M. Friedman as, of course, Keynes, are deeply anachronistic today's mainly because the States, military and private powers are deeply collusive and the GAFAMs are the best example as they received a lot of money from USA government and department of defense.
Social powers are shifting to new forms that are not the traditional ones.
But we still vote right or left, dems or reps thinking our states have any power... th is is an illusion, they don't have a lot of power anymore. They re just instrumental to the actual powers... I leave it here.

Out thereness itself MUST be in here, point to my head. I know you want to affirm an scientist's world of the assumed understanding of an exteriority in the standard sense, but what good is this if it depends entirely on an assumption that cannot be explained at all, that in fact, on analysis, reveals exactly the opposite, for one can never conceive how a brain can "know" what is not a brain and phenomenology is the only recourse. — Constance

I think you use the words "thereness", "exteriority" with too much "continental philosophy" connotations. I would say here that the "wittgensteinien" linguistic turn could help analyzing and say whether their connotations are maybe just linguistic "fallacies". Continental philosophers didn't have the concept of "information" (and many others) that we have nowadays so they couldn't understand it but today it is possible. I do conceive how a brain can "know" because I understand knowing as informational correlates and at present you have a good example: artificial intelligence. The convolutional networks show you how integrated information in certain ways generate knowledge. If you put this together with theories like Tononi's Integrated Information Theory that measure the level of consciousness I think we have a good way to grisp new understanding of what "knowing" and "being "conscious" means.

if you are going to work with the common assumptions of empirical science — Constance

Well, the work of the "empirical science" as you call it is to transform the assumptions into something much more powerful, actual knowledge. Science is the only method demonstrated giving universal principles culture or religion agnostic. Science is not perfect as we re not, but is the best way to establish and honest dialogue with nature, with the world, with us.

t is not at all that there is "nothing out there" but rather what that IS cannot be said, realized, at all. This makes objects of the world very mysterious, transcendental, impossible! at the level of basic questions. — Constance

You raise many questions here. In this posts I would like to keep the focus on the "self".

it is not a conscious event, but is autonomic. — Constance

It is not "autonomic" it is "unconscious". Unconscious activity of the brain generates consciousness, and the self phenomena rises within a consciousness, not the other way around. We have to be clear on this. There're many evidences this is the way it works (one reference: Deahene works). The conscious state feedsback back into unconscious activity but the real power comes from the unconscious activity.
I emphasize this fact because unconscious activity is not necessarily "automatic", there is randomness and emergence of properties as any "physically complex system". Are you familiar with Conway's game of life and the spontaneous emergence of forms, shapes, movement and dynamics with complex systems? There is a lot of this in our brain, actually in nature, but let's focus on the brain and the self.

One has to read Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Levinas, back to Kant, — Constance

Why is our human "self" not the result of evolution as all the other features of our life? I don't think the self is different. You project metaphysical properties to the self, as most of the continental philosophy does. I do not agree. I've read, studied and forgot and studied again the authors you mention but they didn't have the linguistic tools and the technologies we have nowadays to experience and experiment the self. Heterophenomenology studies that "inner"world that you consider metaphysical and it is not. It is erratic and a creation of unconscious activities. Better to read Dennett, Dehaene, Damaio... more contemporary to better understand what is the "I". I can only say honestly that I have been were you are today, my studies were in continental philosophy but analytical philosophy, Witgenstaein, Quine... helped me jump into a new understanding that dissolves all your questions. Like when people were wondering where the Earth started and ended because they assumed it to be flat but Copernicus showed it is round so the questions automatically dissolve. We have a copernican revolution going on around the understanding of what we're but our langues is still full of connotations coming from false intuitions, too self-centric, too anthropocentric still.

not to be found in the theoretical paradigms — Constance

Why not? I think you're limiting yourself with a wrong assumption. Give new science (Dehaene, Nothoff, Tononi) an opportunity to revolutionize your understanding of how the brain works. Look at how we can manipulate your brain to change your self, your personality without you realizing it. We can induce and manipulate brains to make people more religious, and increase certain types of intelligence. This scientific progress delivers a successful explanation and not only that they do what you would expect when better knowing your brain and yourself: they deliver better cures to mental illness that now we better understand.

what givenness IS — Constance

The verb "TO BE" is a verb, nothing metaphysical, certainly an important one as it relates the subject and predicate in a unique way but I think understanding comes far before the verb "TO BE". Animals understand many things and do not have a language to explain it but they do understand because they manipulate their mental objects in a successful way, correlated with how nature works.

the most powerful argument for the self lies not in ontology, but in metaethics — Constance

I'm quite skeptical about anything with a "meta-something" as I consider it as a linguistic specious trap. For me there's nothing like metaethics, like there is no metaphysics (even Aristotle ever mentioned this word). Ethical sentences are neither emotive nor descriptive as they don’t
describe any indefinable property. They are evaluative they regulate our
individual and social values. In this sense some ethical principles function as regulative principles of our moral life which is purely practical. With the amount of relativism with ethics and moral values how could ever be any kind of superior abstract level for explaining the ontology of our moral values?

:up:

Do you agree that understanding something means being able to manipulate it?
The more we understand something the better we do manipulate it?
With this I mean that we don't even need to be able to explain something in words, translate it into language, invent new categories or refer to intuition. If we are able to manipulate, to control it, we do understand it.
Then we can be more or less successful to explain it, sooner or later we explain them, but many times this language-based-explanation takes a long time because the culture and social context do not have the categories or because it is too biased but cultural inheritances.
Why do I say this here?
Because if you agree somewhat with this principle and we look at recent works of neuroscience on consciousness and the self (by Georg Northoff, Stanilas Dehaene, Greg Gage, Antonio Damasio, Daniel Dennett, and a long long etc...) we realize we're capable to manipulate the brain in such a way that we can create well defined states of consciousness: slowly dissolve the self, change personality, increase and decrease certain types of intelligence, etc.I'm talking about heterophenomenology, making our subjective world an object of science.
This shows incredibly successful and powerful but it goes so fast that our language, our culture has not been able to absorb it yet.
(ANOTHER typical EXAMPLE: same as the quantum mechanics world... we use more and more words like entanglement, superposition of states, qubits, symplectic phase etc. ... hard to explain but scientists understand it because engineers are able to manipulate them and create new technologies out of it)

Not only the results of the manipulations of our brain are a hard proof of the progress and understanding in this discipline but the progress in Artificial Intelligence and deep learning. The features of convolution networks together with the discoveries of the people I mention above makes us realize that we're going beyond certain naif intuitions like the "easy/hard problem" of Chalmers.

For me the "easy/hard problem" approach has already been dissolved, it is dead.

Not sure what this external reality is meant to be. — Constance

This external reality is the world that interacts with our senses: the light that hits our eyes, the sounds that hit our ears, the feelings on our skin, etc... One of the capabilities of our brains is to reproduce/mirror that external reality so that he can then make models and simulations of the "future". Example: it creates a model of the room you're in and this is useful for you to move around, it creates a model of your friend's personality what helps your talk to him and understand each other...

how does epistemic affirmation occur? That is, how does a physical object like a brain, ever "know" an external object to affirm the out "thereness" of external reality? — Constance

Those are categories and concepts we develop as we grow, as our brain grows. We learn how to categorize physical objects as well as conceptual objects that are communicated by the social context we grow in. The relationships of those objects and our brain assigns value to them, cognitive value, emotional value to achieve its main goal: keep the homeostatic equilibrium.
The episteme, the knowing, happens when the internal objects and categories, ideas have a external correlate. There is a "symbiosis","correlation" between the cognitive objects and the external world. When the cognitive predictions (manipulations of the internal objects that represent the external world) correlate with reality. Example: if I tell my wife I love her she will react in certain way, if I eat an apple I'll like the taste, etc... Pure biological activity.

Unconscious experience? — Constance

Yes, there re experiments that show a person saying he doesn't see anything (consciously not seeing) but he behaves and moves avoiding obstacles. Search for "blindsight" in wikipedia.

If the pragmatists are right about knowledge, and what is known is pragmatically known, then ALL claims to knowing are relegated to the bin of unknowables. — Constance

Not all of them but many of them. Could you put some examples?

all the evolved self is, isentirely OTHER than these processes and have to be understood only in their manifest qualities. — Constance

Our Self shares many qualities with the self of primates for example. We have more capabilities mainly related to language that enable deeper reasoning and manipulation/simulation of realty for our evolutionary advantage. Evolution is about patterns that survive longer and adapt better. Our brain have created this capability of the "Self" that enables evolutionary advantages. At least for now. Why do you see it is entirely OTHER? There are no "new qualities" in our brain, just more powerful. I don't think our Self has a singularity.

there remains that elusive "middle" world of actuality where the self has its center. — Constance

Agree, and a good example si this "Seven Seconds memory" man you can find in youtube.

Science does not even pretend to be about the self; rather, it yields to the interpretative standards that have no regard for the actualities in the human self's world. — Constance

This is incorrect. Heterophenomenology deals with actualities in the human consciousness and the self (I'm thinking on Dennett and Dehaene works, you should not ignore them).The success of science studying the self is that it brings "the new" and "actual new" not based on speculation but on scientific dialogue with our brain and our subjective manifestations. Thanks to this we can today not only better understand our limits and how the brain creates the "illusions of the self" (distorted reality in order to make it useful for our survival, pleasure, ...). Thanks to this we have reached levels of manipulation never reached in the past (for the better and the worst).

Physicality? A meaningless term, ontologically. — Constance

The Self does have a physical correlation that is within the information flow of our cognition, as liquidity is a special property of the matter we could think about the Self in similar ways in terms of physical correlates.

You think all things reducible to the physical, yet, the concept itself is without predicative possibilities, — Constance

I think the other way around: not all the physical is reducible to things. The concept of Self does have predicative possibilities, at least the one corresponding to my manifesto.

If you read contemporary neuroscientists like Dehaene, Northoff, Tononi you will certainly change your mind.
We start to understand consciousness in ways we would have not guess 30 years ago.
Heterophenomenology and neuro imaging technics are showing us our hidden inner universe.
This brings us new powers, new dangers... but it is what it is... we will be able to manipulate and even create artificial consciousness sooner or later.

I like and support your answers very much!
I would add, our brains are always the same, our instincts, human condition and passions (underestimated by communism, overestimated by fascism) are the same but we have changed our relationship with our environment thanks to technological advances and education of large part of the population, we have made progress! what is not for granted.
Muy lesson learnt is, as Madalorian would say :-) : This is the way!

:up: