as predicted you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible. — Janus

I see it like this: you are still very much under the sway of post-Cartesian dualism. Accordingly you habitually interpret what I write, and what Bitbol is saying, against that perspective. The world, for you, remains divided between res extensa, measurable by science, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Bitbol doesn't make any metaphysical posits about 'immaterial mind' or anything of the kind. But you will think that to question one is to assert the other. Hence the assertion of an 'immaterial or disembodied consciousness', which is the only possibility this schema allows. Whereas, the point of phenomenology is to call this apparent division into question at its very root. But again, you will say this is a dodge or a non-answering of the question.

this was the point of our walk through the mountains toward the sea — Banno

A conversation which clearly indicated that you didn't grasp the point with which you intended to take issue.

A conversation which clearly indicated that you didn't grasp the point with which you intended to take issue. — Wayfarer

Ok, so have another go at explaining it to me.

'cause I think I do, and everyone else is still sleeping off their Christmas.

Here was the original exchange. If you wish to recapitulate it, perhaps it belongs in that thread.

And indeed
"...so there is something more here than just perspective. Something explains this agreement. Sure, there are minds that make the sentences, and sing the songs, but there is more than just mind here".

There is something more than just perspective, but without perspective, there is no thing.

No more than anyone else. The correspondence observed between brain function in humans and what those humans experience is compatible with all positions on consciousness, even substance dualism. — bert1

My criticism was going to Wayfarer's assessment of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach, not a position on the nature of consciousness. But I did note your sneer. Merry Christmas.

Chemical treatments for mental illness seem to show that consciousness is not primary. Though I think the issue really comes down to the way we talk rather than what we know about the world.

Yep!

Right, instead of answering the question you instead talk about me and where you (erroneously) think I'm coming from.
More politics than philosophy.

We live in a material world, and all our propositional knowledge is material knowledge. All our feelings are bodily feelings. All our coherent thoughts are thoughts about things we have, as embied material beings, experienced. What is the point of saying that consciousness is not material, if not to say it is immaterial..to say that it is something beyond the material world?

Do you think consciousness is mortal, confined to mortal beings, or is it something beyond this temporal world? You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is?

, that chat seem'd to end here:

'If the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of the senses in general, be removed, the whole constitution and all the relations of objects in space and time, nay space and time themselves, would vanish; and as appearances, they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us.'
— Wayfarer

This... is Waif's strong doctrine. If you press it's logic, he will deny it, stepping back to some merely transcendental reality. — Banno

But no, as I said, carry on.

Chemical treatments for mental illness seem to show that consciousness is not primary. — frank

:100:

Be honest now and say whether you believe disembodied consciousness is possible. I'm betting you [@Wayfarer] won't answer that question. — Janus

:smirk:

My criticism was going to Wayfarer's assessment of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a philosophical approach, not a position on the nature of consciousness. — frank

I would hope that any thoroughgoing philosophy would stake a position on the nature of consciousness, and phenomenology as introduced by Husserl certainly does that.

as predicted you didn't answer the question I posed re whether you believe that immaterial or disembodied consciousness is possible.
— Janus

I see it like this: you are still very much under the sway of post-Cartesian dualism. Accordingly you habitually interpret what I write, and what Bitbol is saying, against that perspective. The world, for you, remains divided between res extensa, measurable by science, and res cogitans, thinking substance. Bitbol doesn't make any metaphysical posits about 'immaterial mind' or anything of the kind. But you will think that to question one is to assert the other. Hence the assertion of an 'immaterial or disembodied consciousness', which is the only possibility this schema allows. Whereas, the point of phenomenology is to call this apparent division into question at its very root. But again, you will say this is a dodge or a non-answering of the question. — Wayfarer

I think you did a great job of articulating the divide between your approach to consciousness and the distinctions Janus is relying on. Before one can decide which position is preferable, yours or his, it is necessary to be able to effectively summarize each position from within its own logic. You have done a reasonable job of representing the Cartesian position as pitting external, objectively causal stuff against inner subjective feeling. Janus, by contrast, is imposing that same logic onto his representation of your position rather than capturing how the logic differs.

Bitbol’s alternative is not a metaphysical theory but a reframing: a return to the primacy of lived experience as the ground of all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Far from undermining science, this reorientation clarifies its proper domain. Physics, biology, and neuroscience describe the structural, relational, and functional aspects of the world-as-object; they do not, and need not, account for the presence of the world-as-experienced. As such, consciousness is not something over and above the world, nor something inside it. It is the condition for there being a world at — Wayfarer

This summary of phenomenology is general enough to accommodate the different varieties offered by the likes of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (but not Heidegger). Having said that, I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. Like Henry, Bitbol’s focus is on consciousness in Kantian terms as immanent structural conditions of possibility for an individual subject, whereas for Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and enactivists like Varela and Thompson exposure to intersubjectivity is equi-primordial with subjectivity. Bitbol treats social influences as secondary to the transcendental or structural conditions of intelligibility, whereas Husserl treats intersubjectivity as co-original with subjectivity. The transcendental ego is always already a transcendental-collective ego, insofar as the world it constitutes is already populated by others and the meaning of objects is co-constituted through shared experience.

Before one can decide which position is preferable, yours or his, it is necessary to be able to effectively summarize each position from within its own logic. — Joshs

An ability which seems surprisingly rare.

... I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. Like Henry, Bitbol’s focus is on consciousness in Kantian terms as immanent structural conditions of possibility for an individual subject, whereas for Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and enactivists like Varela and Thompson exposure to intersubjectivity is equi-primordial with subjectivity. — Joshs

I was wondering what the difference might be (and its influences).

Bitbol treats social influences as secondary to the transcendental or structural conditions of intelligibility, whereas Husserl treats intersubjectivity as co-original with subjectivity. The transcendental ego is always already a transcendental-collective ego, insofar as the world it constitutes is already populated by others and the meaning of objects is co-constituted through shared experience. — Joshs

Cool. Are you more partial to Husserl's approach?

↪Banno
Chemical treatments for mental illness seem to show that consciousness is not primary. Though I think the issue really comes down to the way we talk rather than what we know about the world. — frank

The fact that chemical treatments are far from guaranteed to work, and work differently in different persons, indicates that objective materiality abstracted away from the interaction of the world with subjectivity is also not primary. What is primary is the indissociable interaction between the subjective and objective poles of experience, and this is the lesson phenomenology is trying to teach.

Are you more partial to Husserl's approach? — Tom Storm

Yes, for Husserl every fact we know about ourselves and the world is the product of social construction, and therefore contingent and relative, except for the tripartite structure of time consciousness itself (retention-impression-protention).

Yes, for Husserl every fact we know about ourselves and the world is the product of social construction — Joshs

Is that also considered to be a social construction?

would hope that any thoroughgoing philosophy would stake a position on the nature of consciousness, and phenomenology as introduced by Husserl certainly does that. — Joshs

Chomsky is pretty thorough-going, but he is a mysterian.

Anyway, I was calling out Wayfarer's assessment of phenomenology. It does not start with the primacy of the subject. That is an intellectual conclusion, not a product of experience.

The fact that chemical treatments are far from guaranteed to work, and work differently in different persons, indicates that objective materiality abstracted away from the interaction of the world with subjectivity is also not primary. What is primary is the indissociable interaction between the subjective and objective poles of experience, and this is the lesson phenomenology is trying to teach. — Joshs

I'm partial to phenomenology. The OP is not accurately describing it.

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus

And you say I'm putting words in your mouth :rofl:

This summary of phenomenology is general enough to accommodate the different varieties offered by the likes of Husserl, Scheler, Henry, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (but not Heidegger). Having said that, I think Bitbol’s interpretation of phenomenology owes more to Michel Henry than to Husserl. — Joshs

Thank you, I value your opinion.

This is, as said, an introduction - as much for me as for the reader, as I'm exploring the subject by researching and writing about it. As it happens, I first encountered Bitbol on this forum, some time back, when he was mentioned by @Pierre-Normand. I've subsequently read and listened to quite few of his talks. I find him a marvellously congenial presence. I was also introduced to Dan Zahavi, by you, as it happens. Overall I'm very much taken by their philosophical stance. Oh, and am also reading Michel Henry. His 'Barbarism' is quite an accurate diagnosis of eliminative materialism.

Incidentally the article on which the OP was based can be found here Is Consciousness Primary? (.pdf) A representative passage:

Any objective descriptions arises, in history and on a dayto-day basis as well, as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience (Bitbol, 2002).

Now, the problem is that the very success of this procedure of extracting invariants yields a sort of amnesia. The creators of objective knowledge become so impressed by its efficacy that they tend to forget or to minimize that conscious experience is its starting point and its permanent requirement. They tend to forget or to minimize the long historical process by which contents of experience have been carefully selected, differenciated, and impoverished, so as to discard their personal or parochial components and to distillate their universal fraction as a structure. They finally turn the whole procedure upside down, by claiming that experience can be explained by one of its structural residues. Husserl severely criticized this forgetfulness and this inversion of priorities, that he saw as the major cause of what he called the “crisis” of modern science (Husserl, 1970). According to him, it is in principle absurd to think that one can account for subjective conscious experience by way of certain objects of science, since objectivity has sprung precisely from what he calls the “life-world” of conscious experience. — Michel Bitbol, Is Consciousness Primary?

At the heart of my understanding of how things work is the conviction that the foundation of philosophical thought is introspection and self-awareness. Believing that, an attraction to phenomenology would seem natural, but I've always been sceptical. The way phenomenology is discussed here on the forum and what I've read makes it seem a bit like new age spirituality wrapped up in philosophical jargon. At the same time, I've come to see that my own understanding of the relationship between humanity and the cosmos needs to be clarified. I have work to do. I'll try to be fair minded with what you've written.

Bitbol’s alternative is not a metaphysical theory — Wayfarer

This is one of my big problems with your presentation of what Bitbol believes--As I understand it, it is exactly a metaphysical claim. A valid and useful one, but still metaphysics. A failure to recognize that makes what you've written seem dogmatic and rigid, much as the philosophy of reductionist physics is. You have to have both. What brought me to my interest in Taoism, which is related to this question, is an understanding that reality is one half human. But there is another half. Writing that off as a delusion of some sort undermines the argument.

Phenomenology begins from a simple but far-reaching insight: the reality of first-person consciousness is ineliminable, and any account of the world must ultimately be grounded in the structures of experience as they appear to the subject. — Wayfarer

I would have no problem with this if it meant that both our internal experience and some sort of external reality are considered equally fundamental. I get the impression that's not the case, which leaves us with something close to solipsism.

At its core, phenomenology is the disciplined study of conscious experience from the first-person perspective...consciousness is not an object among objects, nor a property waiting to be discovered by neuroscience. It is not among the phenomena given to examination by sense–data or empirical observation. ... — Wayfarer

This is another problem for me. As I see it, conscious experience is not a metaphysical entity, it exists in the world of apples and pogo sticks--an object among objects. Ultimately, we can only know it empirically while acknowledging the special difficulties associated with limited access. This is where any possible compromise between positions seems to fall apart. Neither of us can understand why the other can't see what seems self-evident to us.

If we know what consciousness is, it is because we ourselves are conscious beings, not because it is something we encounter in the natural world. (We may infer that other sentient beings are conscious, but only our own consciousness is immediately given to us.) — Wayfarer

Here's one of the things I don't get. In what sense is our experience not part of the natural world? Why is there any problem with us learning about consciousness in others through inference? Much of scientific knowledge is gathered indirectly and without direct observation. Why is this situation any different? Speaking personally, I don't see that conscious experience is all that special. It's just one more thing for us to learn about. One more thing we encounter as we live our lives.

Bitbol considers consciousness to be “self-evidentially absolute” — Wayfarer

This is presumptuous. I'm a pretty smart guy. If it isn't evident to me, it probably isn't self-evident at all. Language I might be willing to accept in it's place would be "It is my understanding that considering consciousness absolute is the best way for us to gain a useful understanding of it's principles." That's not all that different from the position I find most useful.

From this perspective, the materialist project of locating consciousness in the brain or in neural processes is not just incomplete; it is conceptually incoherent. Like any empirical analysis, it rests on the presumption that what is real is what can be objectively measured and assessed. (Here I am referring specifically to the empirical sciences — physics, neuroscience, and biology — which construct their claims through measurement and intersubjective verification.)

However, the very notion of the objective world described by the empirical sciences is itself a product of selective abstraction — what Bitbol calls the end-product of the procedure of objectification. Why? Because science methodically brackets out the subjective pole of observation so as to arrive at an intersubjective consensus about the observer-independent attributes of the object. But when this methodology is applied to the question of the nature of consciousness, it turns around and tries to explain conscious experience in terms of that consensus. — Wayfarer

I don't understand the problem with applying tools and procedures developed by the mind on the mind itself. What's wrong with a little self-reference. Measurements of distance I made with a ruler in the good old days ultimately depended on comparing the ruler with the length of a bar of platinum in storage somewhere. One ruler measuring another. Calibration. Whatever problems there are with this are methodological, not fundamental.

The result is not only circular but, he says, will always culminate in the notorious “hard problem”: consciousness treated as if it were something that emerges from structural relations in objectively–existing matter, when in reality it is the precondition for identifying those relations in the first place. — Wayfarer

As I noted, it's not circular in any kind of problematic way. And the hard problem is only notorious to Bitbol et. al. To many of us here on the other side, it feels like a made up problem that seems to arise from an understanding that is spiritual. Spirituality, as I understand it, is focused self examination with the goal of improving self-awareness—another valid mode of knowledge. And this is where a failure to see Bitbol’s alternative as metaphysical runs us into a wall, because both the scientific approach and Bitbol’s approach are metaphysical. They’re not mutually exclusive. If you’ve paid any attention to the things I’ve written over the years you’ve seen I see self-awareness as essential to our understanding of the universe. That doesn’t tell us anything about whether standard scientific practices can contribute to our understanding of consciousness.

This is one of my big problems with your presentation of what Bitbol believes--As I understand it, it is exactly a metaphysical claim. A valid and useful one, but still metaphysics. — T Clark

What 'metaphysical claim' do you think is being made?

As I see it, conscious experience is not a metaphysical entity, it exists in the world of apples and pogo sticks--an object among objects. — T Clark

There's a categorical distinction you seem to be missing. Where in the world of apples and pogo sticks is your experience? You can't locate it in some place, or distinguish it as an object. Your awareness of the fact of your own existence is categorically different to your awareness of the objects of perception. You could be in a sensory deprivation tank, or under the influence of a powerful sedative that blocks out all sensory perception, and provided you were conscious, you would know that you were conscious. That awareness would not be dependent on anything external.

What 'metaphysical claim' do you think is being made? — Wayfarer

The following passage from your OP describes the metaphysical positions, claims of both the scientific and phenomenological approaches.

For Bitbol, phenomenology is the real starting point in the quest to understand consciousness, because it reveals something that scientific objectification systematically brackets out or ignores — namely the observer, the scientist, the one who makes observations, draws conclusions, and decides on the questions to be asked. Yet the point runs deeper than methodological oversight. Scientific objectivity does not merely forget the observer; it presupposes the observer as the one for whom objects appear, measurements make sense, and evidence is meaningful in the first place. Before there can be data, models, or theories, there must be a lived field of experience in which anything like a “fact” can show up at all. Phenomenology begins from this pre-objective dimension, revealing the conditions that make scientific inquiry possible but that science itself cannot capture because they are already assumed in every act of objectification. — Wayfarer

There's a categorical distinction you seem to be missing. Where in the world of apples and pogo sticks is your experience? — Wayfarer

Where are electrons? Where is dark matter? Where are the thoughts going on in your mind to me? Bitbol wrote consciousness is “not a something, but not a nothing either.” Does that mean consciousness does not exist, isn’t real?

You believe there is an afterlife, right? Why not be honest about what you believe and what your actual agenda is? — Janus


And you say I'm putting words in your mouth :rofl: — Wayfarer

If you read it with enough care you would have seen it was a question, not a statement. A question you refuse to answer for what would seem to be obvious reasons.

I think you did a great job of articulating the divide between your approach to consciousness and the distinctions Janus is relying on. Before one can decide which position is preferable, yours or his, it is necessary to be able to effectively summarize each position from within its own logic. You have done a reasonable job of representing the Cartesian position as pitting external, objectively causal stuff against inner subjective feeling. Janus, by contrast, is imposing that same logic onto his representation of your position rather than capturing how the logic differs. — Joshs

What distinctions do you think I'm relying on? You seem to be suggesting that you agree with Wayfarer that my position is some kind of Cartesian dualism. If so, you are mistaken. I do see language itself, as opposed to the world, as inherently dualistic. My main point was that there is no incoherence or inconsistency in thinking that the physical world existed prior to the advent of consciousness. Science informs us that it did. The fact that such judgement is only possible where there is consciousness (and language for that matter) I see as a mere truism. What do you think?

The following passage from your OP describes the metaphysical positions — T Clark

I don't think the passage you're citing does present a 'metaphysical position'. Looking at it part by part:

'For Bitbol, phenomenology is the real starting point in the quest to understand consciousness, because it reveals something that scientific objectification systematically brackets out or ignores — namely the observer, the scientist, the one who makes observations, draws conclusions, and decides on the questions to be asked.'

I don’t see that passage as advancing a metaphysical position. It doesn’t make claims about what exists in itself, but about what scientific objectification leaves out by design. That’s a methodological and epistemological point about the conditions under which scientific knowledge is produced, not a thesis about the ultimate nature of reality.

'Yet the point runs deeper than methodological oversight. Scientific objectivity does not merely forget the observer; it presupposes the observer as the one for whom objects appear, measurements make sense, and evidence is meaningful in the first place. Before there can be data, models, or theories, there must be a lived field of experience in which anything like a “fact” can show up at all.'

Again - no metaphysics here. It is a fact that there must be an observer for whom the facts of observation and measurement show up. To say that 'facts require an observer' is not to say that reality depends on minds, but that facts are not the same as un-interpreted events.

Analogously, the distinction is made between 'data' and 'information'. The data are the recorded events or observations, but they are not considered information until they are assimilated and understood.

Bitbol wrote consciousness is “not a something, but not a nothing either.” Does that mean consciousness does not exist, isn’t real? — T Clark

Isn't that what this point is about?

On the one hand, consciousness cannot be treated as an object — something manipulable, measurable, or existing independently of the subject. This is because objects are by definition other to us, and are given only through the sense-data profiles which... are open to correction by further experience.

But if consciousness is not a “something,” it is also not a “nothing.” It is neither a useful fiction, nor a byproduct of neural processes, nor a ghostly residue awaiting physical explanation. Instead, says Bitbol, it is the self-evidential medium within which all knowledge about objects, laws, and physical reality arise. — Wayfarer

Put another way, the fact that T.Clark is able to know or sense anything, is because you are a sentient being and the subject of experience. But subjectivity is not a possible object of perception, as it is that to which or whom experience occurs. I think the fact you're having such difficulty grasping that distinction kind of reinforces the point at issue ;-)