Is there a particular question you'd like to focus on from the OP?

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? — Janus

Both Husserl and Heidegger make a radical claim that is hard for most to swallow: Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. One doesn’t have to accept their claims about consciousness or Being in order to embrace their rethinking of the basis of empirical science, causality and objectivity away from physicalism.

I found the paper and read it. Here's a relevant quote:

"This preliminary argument is considered by some phenomenologists (Henry, 2001) as sufficient to declare that naturalism is faulty from the outset. The fact that some scientists finally relinquish their naturalist dogma when they have carefully pondered about this argument could be taken as a further reason to stop the enquiry at this point. But, in view of the remarkable development of natural science and of the implicit adoption of naturalism that goes along with it for a vast majority of scientists, we cannot content ourselves with an argument completely external to science."

Bitbol does not argue that consciousness is ontologically primary, but rather that it is methodologically primary. i.e. any objective description arises as an invariant structural pattern for subjects endowed with conscious experience. He advocates for a phenomenologically-informed approach that acknowledges the irreducible role of conscious experience in all knowledge.

So how would this influence the advance of a scientific understanding of mental processes? SOME paradigm is needed - that's foundational to knowledge, so It seems to me that it entails being open to new paradigms.

Here's a new paradigm I recently read about: On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism. This one isn't phenomenologically informed, per se, other than the fact that it reflects openness to a somewhat fresh start.

It wasn't my intention to sneer at all, and I may have misunderstood your point. — bert1

Sorry, I misunderstood. :yikes:

Welcome back! And many thanks for the well written summary of Bitbol's essay. I've been aware of Bitbol for some time but have never had the chance to directly engage with his work until now.

I've been reading through Is Consciousness Primary and am enjoying it very much. I think your summary is generally very faithful to Bitbol’s thesis, but I do feel that you sometimes slide into an ontological register that Bitbol himself would resist. Here are some examples:

This asymmetry leads to Bitbol’s central claim: the attempt to derive consciousness from material processes reverses the real order of priority. Whatever is presumed to exist in the physical world already presupposes consciousness as the field in which such ascriptions occur. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

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 all. (emphasis mine) — Wayfarer

Bitbol makes it fairly clear that it’s not his intention to make any positive pronouncements regarding the ontological relationship between mind and world, whereas I feel that your interpretive comments are a bit more ambiguous on this point:

It turns out that any attempt at proving that conscious experience is ontologically secondary to material objects both fails and brings out its methodological and existential primacy. No alternative metaphysical view is espoused... (emphasis mine) — Bitbol (Is Consciousness Primary? (2008))

So, asserting that consciousness is “existentially primary” was no metaphysical doctrine. Asserting the existential primacy of consciousness was no idealist, property dualist (Chalmers, 1996), or panpsychist (Strawson, 2007) doctrine of the ontological primacy of consciousness to be contrasted with a doctrine of the ontological primacy of matter…we refrain from any such doctrine. (emphasis mine) — Bitbol and Luisi (Science and the Self-Referentiality of Consciousness (2011))

So while Bitbol’s answer to the question “Is Consciousness Primary” is “yes”, he’s not thereby positing an ontological dependence between mind and world, only a methodological dependence (as others on the thread have also noticed). He’s willing to say what he thinks the ontological relationship between mind and world is not, but he entirely refrains from proposing any positive account of that relationship.

Personally, I find this dissatisfying. While I think Bitbol is right to reject reductive materialism, right to expose the limits of objectification, and right to insist on the primacy of lived experience, I don’t think Bitbol is successful in dissolving the ontological question and, therefore, simply ends up leaving it unanswered. In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree with my interpretation of Bitbol, or am I getting him wrong, and how does this criticism relate to your own view?

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

But you've been drunk.


(Indeed, perhaps you were when you wrote that...)

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 (here the convergence with Kant is manifest). Any attempt to treat consciousness as derivative — as some thing that “comes from” matter — therefore reverses the real order of dependence. — Wayfarer

The function of a biological structure is not “nothing” – and consciousness may be considered as the function of neural processes arising from the material of the brain. Consciousness is an emergent property, and is created in steps:

Awareness/perception > neural integration > analysis > thought-making

Treating consciousness as “derivative” is merely recognizing this order of its production, how information goes in, consciousness happens, and thoughts go out.

let me see if I understand what you mean by "ineliminable" — J

it means, can't be eliminated from the reckoning. The salient point is again that in pursuit of objectivity, the presence or contribution of the subject is sought to be deprecated or 'bracketed out' so as to arrive at an ostensible 'view from nowhere', which is purportedly independent of any act of mind, existing 'in itself', so to speak.

We can imagine a world without any living things too, even though only a living thing can do any imagining at all. Unless one is a panpsychist, there was no consciousness in the early universe. — J

Of course we can imagine it. It can be modelled with high degrees of precision. But as I said in the mind-created world OP, that still requires or implies a perspective. If you take away all perspective, so that no point in the panorama is nearer or further, so that there is no scale, and then you take away all sense of duration, so that there are no units of time, and no distinction between past, present and future - then what remains to be imagined?

Hence Kant 'take away the thinking subject and the whole world must vanish'. Not because it has become suddenly non-existent, where previously it was existent, but because it is outside any conception of existence or non-existence. The mind provides that scale and perspective even to imagine a world with no concsious being in it. But we don't see it, of course, because we're looking through it, not at it. Hence the 'change of stance' that is required by phenomenology.

Hence:

Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. — Joshs

“The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes pre-sorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.

The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world, the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being — Excerpt from The Blind Spot - Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Evan Thompson

Is there a particular question you'd like to focus on from the OP? — bert1

Nothing in particular. Just the basic stance of phenomenology, as outlined in the various quotes and references and the questions that have come up.

So how would this influence the advance of a scientific understanding of mental processes? SOME paradigm is needed - that's foundational to knowledge, so It seems to me that it entails being open to new paradigms. — Relativist

Good question! The emerging paradigms of enactive or embodied cognition draw heavily on it. The key book in that genre is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, revised edition, 2015. But phenomenology generally is nowadays considered in the social sciences and psychology (as per some links provided above.) Constructivism, which is related, is influential in philosophy, psychology and education, see constructivist.info for example. There's also QBism in quantum physics, which dovetails nicely with phenomenology. (The next in this series is Bitbol's philosophy of QM.)

So while Bitbol’s answer to the question “Is Consciousness Primary” is “yes”, he’s not thereby positing an ontological dependence between mind and world, only a methodological dependence (as others on the thread have also noticed). He’s willing to say what he thinks the ontological relationship between mind and world is not, but he entirely refrains from proposing any positive account of that relationship. — Esse Quam Videri

I see what you mean about possible tendentiousness on my part, but I don't know if it is warranted; I don't think I'm reading something into Bitbol that he doesn't say.

But notice Bitbol says that consciousness has existential and methodological primacy - not ontological primacy. He's not positing a 'cosmic mind' or 'universal consciousness' that is temporally prior to matter. He says what is required is a change of stance:

In line with Francisco Varela, I will rather advocate a radical change of stance regarding objectivity and subjectivity.

In my opinion, this results from a refusal to move from phenomenological critique to a positive, critically grounded account of being and truth. It mistakes the dissolution of bad metaphysics for the end of metaphysics itself. — Esse Quam Videri

That is a profound observation, and it exposes a very deep question. This is also why Bitbol finds the Buddhist philosophy of Nāgārjuna congenial (subject of the third essay). As noted in the preamble, Bitbol has studied Sanskrit so as to have a better grasp of Buddhist principles, and Buddhism is an essential component of the Embodied Mind book mentioned above.

So, to really unpack that would require a deep dive into Buddhist philosophy. Suffice to say, Buddhism has never posited a creator God nor ultimate substance (in the philosophical sense of that term). This leads many critics (for example the Buddha's Brahmin opponents) to accuse Buddhism of nihilism. But the Buddha doesn't say that 'nothing exists' or that 'everything is unreal'.

Nāgārjuna’s analysis is subtler: it is the rejection of the inherent existence (svabhāva) of particulars, not of their existence tout courte. Phenomena are real, but relationally and dependently — not as self-grounding entities possessing inherent reality. In that sense, Madhyamaka doesn’t abolish metaphysics so much as reframe it, replacing substance-based ontology with an analysis of conditions, relations, and modes of appearing. A key point is that there is nothing to grasp or posit as a first principle or ultimate cause. The causality Buddhism is concerned with is the cause of dukkha — the suffering and unsatisfactoriness of existence. And Buddhism refrains from positing views of what is ultimately real, as it has to be seen and understood, rather than posited, which leads to 'dogmatic views'. Nāgārjuna is well known for saying that he has no doctrine of his own.

consciousness may be considered as the function of neural processes arising from the material of the brain — Questioner

The linked paper provides six detailed arguments against the materialist view.

consciousness happens — Questioner

If only I'd thought of that!

The linked paper provides six detailed arguments against the materialist view. — Wayfarer

I am sorry you did not chose to reply to me in your own words, but instead link a 21-page paper. Nevertheless, I did scan through it and couldn't find anything that contradicts the current scientific investigations into consciousness, and the vast amount of evidence linking consciousness to brain activity.

If only I'd thought of that! — bert1

Are you mocking me, sir?

Let the electrochemical activity play out, and let's see what we come up with

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. — Wayfarer

We've been down this path before. Your and my understandings of what metaphysics is are not compatible.

subjectivity is not a possible object of perception, as it is that to which or whom experience occurs. — Wayfarer

I can take a picture of my camera. I can see my eye reflected in a still puddle of water. I can think about your and my minds. I don't understand why people see this as difficult.

Are you mocking me, sir? — Questioner

Only a little, your position is that of the majority I suspect. Emergentists, it seems to me, often use many more obscure words to say exactly what you refreshingly did in two: 'consciousness happens'. How does it happen exactly? is the question, and Why there? Not that the OP is offering a theory of the generation of consciousness, nor does it seem to be asserting a temporal priority to consciousness, nor is there a position on where consciousness is in the world. Not sure if an ontological priority is asserted, or if it is just epistemelogical or methodological priority. Perhaps it's bollockological priority. I'm not a scholar of historical phenomenology I'm afraid.

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. — Janus

This lays the issue out well. I would add one thing--there is no incoherence or inconsistency in thinking that the physical world did not exist prior to the advent of consciousness. That is the essence of the Taoist way of thinking as I understand it. There is no reason both those ways of thinking may not be useful depending on the context.

I think you're projecting bert. No doubt everyone has a purpose here, even if it is only entertainment, or an interest in exploring ideas in order to decide which ones seem the more plausible or a desire to find out what is true or whatever. I don't believe everyone here is motivated primarily by confirmation bias. I also don't believe everyone here or even many of us, could be reasonably classed as mentally ill. You say we don't need to talk about these things, but ironically it is you doing the talking about them.

Both Husserl and Heidegger make a radical claim that is hard for most to swallow: Husserl argues that transcendental consciousness does not emerge at some point in the empirical history of the world along with living things. It doesnt precede the world either. Rather, it is co-determinative of history. Heidegger makes a similar argument about Being. One doesn’t have to accept their claims about consciousness or Being in order to embrace their rethinking of the basis of empirical science, causality and objectivity away from physicalism. — Joshs

What do they mean by "history" though? History as constructed and understood by humans or history meaning the actual unfolding of events going right back to the Big Bang (assuming provisionally that the current cosmological accounts are accurate)?

This lays the issue out well. I would add one thing--there is no incoherence or inconsistency in thinking that the physical world did not exist prior to the advent of consciousness. That is the essence of the Taoist way of thinking as I understand it. There is no reason both those ways of thinking may not be useful depending on the context. — T Clark

I think that's true if you mean by 'incoherence' and 'inconsistency', "logical incoherence and inconsistency". In other words it is a logical possibility that the physical world did not exist prior to the advent of consciousness. On the other hand the idea that the world did not exist piroir to consciousness does not cohere with, and is inconsistent in relation to, all of our science. And I think that alone should give us pause. I think it should be taken into account that Taoist thought is of a time prior to any understanding of the world that we could class as scientific. That said, does Taoism explicitly declare that the world did not exist prior to consciousness?

Anyway even if it does explicitly say that I don't think that should detract from its poetical and spiritual import.

Here's a new paradigm I recently read about: On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism. This one isn't phenomenologically informed, per se, other than the fact that it reflects openness to a somewhat fresh start. — Relativist

Thanks. Seems interesting. I sent the article to Kindle and I'll take a look.

let me see if I understand what you mean by "ineliminable"
— J

it means, can't be eliminated from the reckoning. — Wayfarer

So it's just about human reckoning? I was wanting you to make a bigger claim: I asked, "If there could somehow be a view-from-nowhere perspective on what there is, that perspective would "discover" consciousness. And the question that must follow is, Would the discovery be first-personal, even from the viewpoint of the view from nowhere?" I thought you wanted to say "Yes, the discovery is, ineliminably, from a perspective." I was then going to ask, "Is this perspective identical with consciousness?" I think a lot of the thrust of a view-from-nowhere argument concerns whether perspective, viewpoint, stance, et al., are referring to exactly the same thing that "being conscious" or "being a subject" refers to. In the scenario you describe, where we try to imagine a perspectiveless description of the early universe, it seems true that there is nothing left to imagine. Does that mean that we cannot imagine it (referring to consciousness) or that there is nothing to be imagined (referring to the lack of perspective)? Or are they one and the same? Sorry if this is muddy; it's hard to find the right way to express the problem.

No doubt everyone has a purpose here, even if it is only entertainment, or an interest in exploring ideas in order to decide which ones seem the more plausible or a desire to find out what is true or whatever. — Janus

It's a pet niggle of mine - accusing people of purposes, biases etc derails discussions. But complaining about it doesn't help, so I should probably shut up.

I disagree―I think discussion benefits from bringing unacknowledged assumptions and premises to light.

Sorry if this is muddy; it's hard to find the right way to express the problem. — J

I think there’s an inherent contradiction in the question you’re wanting to pose.

At issue was the discussion between Janus and myself, regarding ‘material conditions’ and in what sense the universe existed before human consciousness of it. (See the Merleau Ponty quotation in above).

The basic contention of phenomenology and also of transcendental idealism, is that the concept of ‘the world before humans existed’ is still a concept. So, on the empirical level, it is of course true that the universe pre-exists humans, there is abundant evidence of that. But the interpretation of the evidence into a coherent idea is still something that can only be done by a mind. Accordingly, we are not really seeing the world as it is (or would be) without any consciousness of it. Put another way, we are not seeing it as it is (or was) in itself, but as it appears to us. That does not make it an illusion, but it qualifies the sense in which it can be considered real.

Now I’ve been pressing this point in one form or another for years on this forum, and it often comes down to: ‘so, you’re saying “the mind is immaterial”? That is the question I was asked by Janus. It comes from the fact that I question scientific materialism as capable of providing a holistic account of the nature of existence. So if you question science, then you must believe that ‘the mind is immaterial’! And with that, goes the presumption that you probably believe in an afterlife:

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

This is why I said that this question originates from the sense we all have (not unique to Janus), of the ‘real physical world described by science’, on the one hand, and the ‘mental picture of the world’, private and subjective, on the other. That is like a ‘master construct’, if you like, and very much a consequence of the Cartesian division between matter and mind. It is part of our ‘cultural grammar’, the subject-object division that lies at a deep level of our own self-understanding.

So I’m saying that the question comes out of ‘cultural conditioning’, and this is what happens when it is challenged.

The basic contention of phenomenology and also of transcendental idealism, is that the concept of ‘the world before humans existed’ is still a concept. — Wayfarer

But again this is a mere truism and/ or a conflation―of course a concept of "the world before humans existed" is a concept. However the world before humans existed is (or was, if you like) not a concept. This is so self-evident I cannot understand why you apparently fail to grasp this.

Accordingly, we are not really seeing the world as it is (or would be) without any consciousness of it. Put another way, we are not seeing it as it is (or was) in itself, but as it appears to us. That does not make it an illusion, but it qualifies the sense in which it can be considered real. — Wayfarer

As you should know, I don't deny that we see and understand the world only as it appears to us, and that this is not, by any stretch, the whole of the world. We can never know the world in its entirety. There are also countless other creatures that presumably see and understand the world more or less differently than we do. And it seems obvious that the totality of that animal experience does not even come close to exhausting the nature of the world.

As you also should know, I favour a process metaphysics, so I see the world as fundamentally relational, but I don't see relationailty as confined to us or even to animals, or plants or even cells or molecules. On the other hand the world as it appears to us is as much a part of the world as any other of its relations or processes. As such it is not an illusion―the world (of which we are an integral part) reveals itself to us truly. That said, dualistic thinking can move us away from that primary participatory knowing.

You say that the fact that we don't see the world as it is unperceived qualifies the sense in which the perceived world can be considered real. I think that unless you mean that the perceived world cannot be considered to be the whole of reality, then what you say is a kind of nonsense. Our experience of the perceived world tells us that our perceptions are not the world, but on the other hand all we can directly know is the perceived world. Regarding how the unperceiveable aspects of the world might be, we can only surmise based on our perceptual experience, so it can never be perceptually real for us, even though we know it must be real in itself.

This is why I said that this question originates from the sense we all have (not unique to Janus), of the ‘real physical world described by science’, on the one hand, and the ‘mental picture of the world’, private and subjective, on the other. That is like a ‘master construct’, if you like, and very much a consequence of the Cartesian division between matter and mind. It is part of our ‘cultural grammar’, the subject-object division that lies at a deep level of our own self-understanding.

So I’m saying that the question comes out of ‘cultural conditioning’, and this is what happens when this is challenged. — Wayfarer

It is not only the real physical world as described by science but the real physical world as revealed by perceptual experience and our feelings of embodiment (our bodies obviously being part of that world). I don't think in terms of "mental pictures of the world" at all, although I acknowledge that we work with models of the world whenever we think discursively (i.e. dualistically) but that is not what our primary experience of the world is at all―that is it is not an experience of "mental pictures".

Your saying it is a "master construct" is just another just-so story for me. Humans are diverse, and the ideas of each should be addressed on their own terms, not shoe-horned into some psychologistic narrative about "cultural conditioning" or dismissed by categorization. The "subject-object" division is just another distinction made possible by dialectical, discursive thought or logic, if you like.

Your last sentence, for me, seeks to dismiss any disagreement with your ideas as being merely a product of cultural conditioning. If you want to challenge or refute what others say, you should, in my view, have enough good faith to believe they are just as capable of thinking for themselves as you think you are, and then if you disagree address their arguments in their own terms by cogent counterarguments, or if you cannot find such counterarguments, then admit as much.

However the world before humans existed is (or was, if you like) not a concept. This is so self-evident I cannot understand why you apparently fail to grasp this. — Janus

On the contrary, you’re already imagining yourself able to make the distinction between the world as it appears, and how it truly is, when that is the issue in question. That is what is not being grasped.

Your last sentence, for me, seeks to dismiss any disagreement with your ideas as being merely a product of cultural conditioning. — Janus

Not at all. I put that forward as to why you made the demand to ‘reveal my agenda’ and the insistence that ‘I must believe in an afterlife’ - when none of that is the least relevant to anything that I’ve said in this thread. I’m saying that these demands arise from particular mindset.

it seems to me, often use many more obscure words to say exactly what you refreshingly did in two: 'consciousness happens'. How does it happen exactly? is the question, — bert1

At its most fundamental, consciousness is produced by the functioning of neurons in the brain. (Structure produces/complements function is a central idea of biology)

But – a crucial element of this function is the intimate interaction between the brain and the outside world. Consciousness does not exist in isolation, but is produced through an autopoietic process – a process I hinted at when I posted earlier:

Information in > consciousness happens > information out

This represents a part of the causal cycle involved in the formation of consciousness – part of a continual loop of lived experience –

… world > body + brain > world > body + brain > world > body + brain …. and so on….

How does this happen? Short answer: By the electrochemical functioning of neurons.

And I don’t think that reduces the wonder of consciousness, but rather enlarges it. I am totally in awe that we can detect and perceive information that is not a part of us, take it in, analyze and synthesize, and then respond appropriately.

We know the source, the properties, and the characteristics, of human consciousness. Discovering the exact mechanisms is still a work in progress.

and Why there? — bert1

Well, this seems to be asking why we evolved the way we did. I can answer by saying the brain is best positioned at the top of the organism, and the major sense organs are best positioned on the head, but I don't think that is what you are asking.