Obviously, I meant that I'm familiar with his ouvre.

Obviously, I meant that I'm familiar with his ouvre.
1h — bongo fury

If you actually read his stuff and you're still this confused about what he's talking about, I don't know what to tell you. You may have something akin to aphantasia so that you have no frame of reference for understanding qualia.

I've heard some pretty sycophantic stuff on this thread, but this one takes the biscuit.

"If you disagree with Chalmers you must have brain damage"

If you disagree with Chalmers you must have brain damage — Isaac

We can't get to the question of whether Chalmers' view is true or false because there's no agreement about what his view is.

See, I told you that without resorting to insults, so I'm the better man. Obviously.

there's no agreement about what his view is. — frank

....is not the same as...

If you actually read his stuff and you're still this confused about what he's talking about ... You may have something akin to aphantasia — frank

Although I'd say that if you're still confused about the difference the only explanation I can think of is that you have some damage to your posterior medial frontal cortex, which has been shown to regulate the degree to which we take opposing viewpoints seriously.

It's either agree with me, or pop off to your nearest quack, I'm afraid.

Go Somalia! :rofl:

I don't see any paradox here. Can you explain? — SophistiCat

If you accept the brain as the generative source of consciousness and its phenomena, you are also a brain doing the accepting, so the question goes to where the authority of the accepting lies, for one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena. Or: How can consciousness position itself to "see" consciousness in order to discuss what it is? It's like explaining logic: explanations are inherently logical. This is a complaint waged toward Kant: "pure reason" is itself constructed of, if you will, the impurities of conceiving and naming it. Also against Husserl: there can be no reasonable talk about "pure phenomena" unless you can escape the language used to talk about it, which is no more pure than anything else.

If you accept the brain as the generative source of consciousness and its phenomena, you are also a brain doing the accepting, so the question goes to where the authority of the accepting lies, for one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena. — Constance

I am not following your argument. I am stuck at "one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena." Can you expand on this?

Is it that you are committed to the idea that "everything is a phenomenon," and therefore there is no such "thing" as a brain? If so, then you are merely denying the premise. The only contradiction here is between the premise "the brain is the generative source of consciousness" and your commitment to phenomenology.

Or: How can consciousness position itself to "see" consciousness in order to discuss what it is?

I don't see a problem here. Is it self-reference that is giving you difficulty? Self-reference is not necessarily paradoxical.

There's a big difference between saying that introspection is potentially a valid form of evidence, and having actually accepted any incidences of introspection as valid evidence. — Metaphysician Undercover

Much of what I know about how the mind works is based on paying attention to how my mind works. I think introspection is the source of a lot of psychology and probably most of philosophy of mind.

You may have something akin to aphantasia so that you have no frame of reference for understanding qualia. — frank

I have a friend who has, as she puts it, no minds eye. That doesn't mean she doesn't have visual experience, i.e. qualia. She sees things the way we do but can't create visual images in her memory or imagination.

I said "kin to." That means similar to, but not the same as.

By the way, people with aphantasia have a statistically significant higher IQ. Weird, huh?

By the way, people with aphantasia have a statistically significant higher IQ. — frank

She is one of the smartest people I know.

She is one of the smartest people I know. — T Clark

Sounds right. Ask her about how she found out she has aphantasia and her surprise at discovering that anybody has a "mind's eye."

This is an obstacle to creating a theory of consciousness: we're not all the same. Cognition can vary radically from one human to the next.

I think it's a real possibility that people who favor Dennett's view really are different somehow.

We just 'classify' those particular states and momentums as 'audio' and 'video'. — Isaac

Your brain classifies all sorts of things. But you are only aware of a few. That is proof that awareness involves something more, or other, than just classification.

You can build a simple neural network that classifies images of glyphs into the symbols they represent. Is such a system aware of the symbols?

This is an obstacle to creating a theory of consciousness: we're not all the same. Cognition can vary radically from one human to the next.

I think it's a real possibility that people who favor Dennett's view really are different somehow. — frank

This is an excellent point. Not only is it different, but everyone presumes that their own cognitive makeup is universal. Which leads to some incredibly frustrating discussions on consciousness.

I thought Hagel said becoming is primal and being and nothing emerge from it on analysis. — frank

I think it is important to see that he is called a rational realist for a good reason: What is determinative as to being is the semantic embeddedness of conflict in concepts. I think of Hegel, then I think of Derrida, argued that there is no singularity of a concept as in some direct reference to a thing. Rather, terms are inherently other that what they "are", meaning a cup on the table is, as a cup, deeply contextual, such that one thinks of the cup and there is, always, already there, what is not a cup. Husserl referred to regions of ideas that gather when something is brought up, like when you observe a man on the street, implicit to this singularity is latent, associated thoughts about people, streets, and so on. There is a lot that implicitly "attends" seeing the man on the street, and this is part of the structure of the seeing.

Being and nothingness have to understood like this, is my understanding. On the one hand look at the world as palpable existence that is present, and you really get none of this, says Kierkegaard. But look at it as a rational real, like Hegel, and concepts are now real, and meaning is real, and meanings are, like the cup above, not singular, but possess inherent "self sublations" that are divergent, agreeing, contradicting, preserving, and so on. Becoming is this inner dialectic of self sublating meaning.

I did have to look this up for the details. I see how becoming can be primal in that we are in our current historical setting, all we can conceive of is "of" becoming because we are, after all, in the middle of this dialectical sublation. Becoming, being and nothing are a unity, the "beginning" of which is not historical, but real/conceptual (though, of course, historical processes are the dialectical becoming, crudely put, I guess). Slavog Zizek is a Hegelian, and he puts it sort of like this, defending Hegel as one who cannot be held accountable for all he says because he is saying it IN a cultural historical frame, which is becoming, and therefore indeterminate. One can see from this where Heidegger gets his concept of historicity. Then Derrida comes along and says these contexts of historical constructs, they never really leave the "text". Derrida takes the stuffing out of metaphysics, but in doing so, makes the whole damn thing metaphysics, I think.

Still, as ever, working on this. Derrida is a very interesting way to consummate this Hegel-Heidegger evolvement of thought.

A footnote on "phenomena" - in classical philosophy "phenomena" was part of a pair, the other term being "noumena", "Phenomena" referring to "how things appear" or the domain of appearances.

The meaning of "noumena" is complex, especially because it is now generally associated with Kant's usage, which was very much his own. Schopenhauer accused Kant of appopriating the term for his purposes without proper regard to its prior meaning for Greek and Scholastic philosophy (ref, and a criticism which I think is justified). The original meaning of "noumenal" was derived from the root "nous" (intellect) - hence "the noumenal" was an "object of intellect" - something directly grasped by reason, as distinct from by sensory apprehension. It ultimately goes back to the supposed "higher" reality of the intelligible Forms in Platonism.

In traditional philosophy, this manifested as the distinction between "how things truly are", which was discernable by the intellect, and "how they appear". This was the major subject of idealist philosophy (e.g. F. H. Bradley's famous Appearance and Reality). In this context, "appearance" was invariably deprecated as "the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave".

The emphasis on "phenomena" in phenomenology begins with the focus on the lived experience of the subject as distinct from the conceptual abstractions and emphasis on the object which was typical of scientific analysis and positivism. "Phenomenology is...a particular approach which was adopted and subsequently modified by writers, beginning with Husserl, who wanted to reaffirm and describe their ‘being in the world’ as an alternative way to human knowledge, rather than objectification of so-called positivist science. Paul Ricoeur referred to phenomenological research as “the descriptive study of the essential features of experience taken as a whole” and a little later, stated that it “has always been an investigation into the structures of experience which precede connected expression in language. (ref)”

This emphasis on the subject (not on "subjectivity"!) eventually gives rise to Heidegger's 'dasein' and to the school of embodied cognition and enactivism which is still very prominent. You could paraphrase it as "naturalism is the study of what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is a study of you looking out the window."

@Constance - in respect of the 'reflexive paradox' you might have a look at It Is Never Known but it is the Knower (.pdf) by Michel Bitbol. He is also French but his work is much more relevant to 'the hard problem of consciousness' than Jacques Derrida in my opinion. ;-)

I am not following your argument. I am stuck at "one simply can't get beyond the brain-itself-as-phenomenon, for to affirm a brain as not a phenomenon, one would have to stand apart from a phenomena." Can you expand on this? — SophistiCat

I thought the analogy of logic clear. Tell me, what is logic? Note that whatever you say is going to have its meaning framed in logic. It would be question begging: if your conclusion is a logical entity, then you have simply assumed to be true, statements about the nature of logic, the very thing your are inquiring about. Of course, there is the alternative that you are simply accepting logic as what it is, and see, as, say, Rorty did, that there is no "outside" of this matrix of logic that can be conceived, and therefore one has to pass over this in silence, and I qualifiedly agree. But one would have to get by Heidegger: logic is a term, a taking up the world "as", and as such it faces foundational indeterminacy, which is what I defend. This is metaphysics.

[/quote] Is it that you are committed to the idea that "everything is a phenomenon," and therefore there is no such "thing" as a brain? If so, then you are merely denying the premise. The only contradiction here is between the premise "the brain is the generative source of consciousness" and your commitment to phenomenology.[/quote]

I don't see how, at the level of basic questions, anything can be posited that is not phenomena. How does one step out of, in a broad sense of the term, experience? Tell me this, and perhaps I will change my mind.

[/quote]Or: How can consciousness position itself to "see" consciousness in order to discuss what it is?

I don't see a problem here. Is it self-reference that is giving you difficulty? Self-reference is not necessarily paradoxical.[/quote]

Not self referencing, but a brain setting of self referencing. Phenomenology simply notes that all there is to refer to is phenomena, that referring, believing, anticipating, wondering, and the rest are all phenomenologically encountered. That encountering is phenomenological. What isn't? And don't get me wrong, I really want to know how this works.

I did rather ?!@#$ up the quotes. Thought it would work, but it didn't.

You put a / in the opening bracket. You can amend that.

I don't see how, at the level of basic questions, anything can be posited that is not phenomena. — Constance

Simple arithmetic would do. That doesn't belong in the phenomenal domain.

Still, as ever, working on this. Derrida is a very interesting way to consummate this Hegel-Heidegger evolvement of thought. — Constance

That a concept is a package of opposites goes back to Plato. It shows up in a lot of philosophy including Schopenhauer and Kant. Good stuff.

This is an excellent point. Not only is it different, but everyone presumes that their own cognitive makeup is universal. Which leads to some incredibly frustrating discussions on consciousness. — hypericin

Exactly. People flat out won't believe it until they see proof. Note that some of the posters in this thread thought they were being insulted.

Simple arithmetic would do. That doesn't belong in the phenomenal domain. — Wayfarer

Doesn't it? Not clear. Why not?

Doesn't it? Not clear. Why not? — Constance

Because it doesn't belong to the domain of appearance. When you perform an arithmetical calculation, you're not utilising the senses through which you grasp appearances. Again, the phenomenal domain is 'what appears' as per this post.

The original meaning of "noumenal" was derived from the root "nous" (intellect) - hence "the noumenal" was an "object of intellect" - something directly grasped by reason, as distinct from by sensory apprehension. It ultimately goes back to the supposed "higher" reality of the intelligible Forms in Platonism. — Wayfarer

I believe that the principal difference between Kant and Plato on this matter is that Plato believed that the human mind could have direct unmediated access to these independent intelligible objects (what Kant calls noumena), but Kant denied that the human mind could have any direct knowledge of the noumena. So for Kant all knowledge of the independent Forms is necessarily mediated through the sense appearances, phenomena, while Plato thought that the human mind could know the independent Forms directly.

Thanks for the David Loy reconmendation. :up:

Well, I'm a physicist so I'm going to be biased toward the physicalist/materialist PoVs. I tend to think that property dualism explains things reasonably well, though.

:up: My pleasure, amigo, I hope you find him as insightful as I have.

You could paraphrase it as "naturalism is the study of what you see looking out the window. Phenomenology is a study of you looking out the window." — Wayfarer

Philosophical naturalism is the study of the window.

:cool: