You interpret him as 'arguing against the view that conscious experience derives from a material basis.' He doesn't say that put it in those terms. You interpret it in those terms because of the framework in which you interpret it.

Would you say the term participatory realist still describes him? Bitbol clearly identifies that scientific knowledge depends on the conditions of participation of observers in the manner of phenomenology. Would we say he is something of a transcendental idealist?

Bitbol isn’t saying that our experience is random but shaped or perhaps constrained by a reality we simultaneously co-create as we experience it. Or something like this.

I’d be interested in whether you employ a working conceptual definition of “reality” I’m assuming you would found it in experience. I am sympathetic to the notion that experience is irreducible but it still leaves the question, what is expedience? Experience seems to be an interaction - do we ever have it without a relationship with an other of some kind?

As Bitbol argues in “Is Consciousness Primary?* 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. 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.

yes this much I get. But:

Experience seems to be an interaction - do we ever have it without a relationship with an other of some kind? — Tom Storm

Can we ever say we experience experience? Isn’t consciousness always in relationship to something else?

Not always. Of course we are always in a relationship of 'otherness' in respect of our regular social existence. But I think the contemplative aspect of philosophy is intended to foster awareness of consciousness as it is in itself. This is the meaning of the Sanskrit term 'nirvikalpa' which means 'without discriminative awareness'. It is true that this kind of insight is not discussed or recognised in much analytical philosophy. But I think the phenomenological school approaches it, with its practice of 'epochē' - which is not a term denoting a concept, but denoting a state of awareness, 'suspending judgement about what is not evident'.

In ordinary thought, we are constantly naming and so objectifying whatever we experience - 'this is X, it means Y' and so on. This happens at a subliminal level of awareness because we're enculturated to think this way. We constantly classify, divide and define - that is the work of discursive reason. So becoming aware of that process requires a metacognitive insight. In my view, that is an important task of philosophy.

We may say that there's 'the spiritual' and 'the physical', and that these somehow have to be re-united. But what I'm suggesting is more radical than that. We have to retrace our steps to where this 'mind-body' divide was made in the first place instead of trying to re-unite what perhaps ought not to have been divided in the first place. That's the subject of another essay on Michel Bitbol, Phenomenology Meets Buddhism.