“Life” and “now” may not be separated, if you are alive, then it is now!

I haven't read the entire book, but I have read "through" it and about it, and it is clear to me that he is an iconoclast to the scientific community, but what is striking is that he brings in Heidegger and Husserl, so he might be worth looking into. I say this because Husserl was famous for keeping science at bay in philosophical discussions, for science does not ask basic questions or go into the presuppositions of empirical research. It doesn't ask, what is a concept? How can we describe the experience that delivers the world to us? How is what we have before us as objects in the world actually constituted as "what we have before us"? An object is given in time, so what is the temporal structure of giveness?

Questions like these are ignored by science, which is why I don't go to the scientist for philosophical insight. They don't deal in basic questions, foundational questions. They often think they do, but they don't. — Constance

That depends what area of science you’re looking into. The idea that all science is empirical is outdated by at least a century. The scientific method itself begins with these basic, foundational questions, before formulating hypotheses. But the language of philosophy has often been deliberately unhelpful to scientists for some time now, and science has also avoided the complication of interpreting what they’ve discovered in relation to reality in general. These strategies are self-protection more than anything, if you ask me.

The problem is that most working scientists are happy to have their hypotheses formulated for them, rather than face the questions themselves. They leave that to philosophers. The reason Rovelli gets the attention he does in the scientific community and beyond is that he’s not afraid to face these questions. He speaks to the scientist and the philosopher. That he approaches these questions from the other side, from the point where empirical science fails us, and attempts to restructure ‘what we have before us’ in a way that makes sense in both a scientific and philosophical discourse, is where he has my attention. It’s what’s often missing from science.

I’m certainly not suggesting that Rovelli has all the answers. Far from it. But the questions he asks, and where he is willing to take theoretical physics, both in relation to the structure of time and in relation to information theory, is worth exploring. Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept?

I’m just saying don’t write science off just yet. I have a feeling they’ll come around eventually, and the more that philosophers are informed by - and strive to inform - the frontiers of theoretical science, the faster this may happen.

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. — D.S.

Sorry but, with all due respect, that's fatuous nonsense. It's like saying ... 'before Mt. Sinai the long wandering ancient Hebrew tribes stayed together "by the grace of" goober without already having had prohibited Murder, Adultery, Lying & Theft'. Even if so, that wouldn't explain every other large human grouping for the prior one hundred or so millennia at minimum prohibiting the same modes of social violence without "divine permission" and yet still function more or less as cohesive peoples like the Egyptians behind the Hebrews at Sinai and the Canaanites ahead of them. "Faith" and "grace" have meaning in the context of the rest of my previous post (pace Kierkegaard), particularly, but not only, with respect to 'seven generations thinking'.

Humans are this-worldly, eusocial, creatures (for whom the consequences of present actions provide for (or steal from) their descendents' futures) and not other-worldly, Kierkegaardian subjects ("knights of faith" always on standby passionately ready to "teleologically suspend the ethical" who "take therefore no thought for the morrow" like cave-dwelling, flagellant ascetics or virgin-seeking suicide bombers). I, however, affirm (in the Spinozist sense of immanence) that time is "grace" (kairos) and agency is "faith" (ethos) as my other quotes indicate, and that therefore

"No eternal reward
will forgive us now
for wasting the dawn"
~JDM

:death: :flower:

the ethical/aesthetic dimension of it, the searing pain that issues forth, registers unmediated. Experience is permeated by value, but what intrigues me is the metavalue of value, that elusive "Good" or "Bad" that attends value, making the presence of pain exceed the factual. — Constance

This is a longstanding presupposition in philosophy, the idea that feeling is somehow immediate and non-intentional.

There is no "redness" as such; this is just an abstraction from the fullness of experience, which is always in or of value. Anticipations are inherently "caring" anticipations. And this points directly to value, and puts the fate of the discussion of presence and existence in the hands of a metaethical, metaaesthetic analysis. I.e., what is value? What is the ethical/aesthetic good and bad? — Constance

Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’.

Here’s a snippet from a recent paper of mine. I think Zahavi’s and Henry’s positions are similar to yours.


“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)

To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense.

Zahavi(1999)approvingly cites the phenomenonologist Michel Henry's view:

“When we are in pain, anxious, embarrassed, stubborn or happy, we do not feel it through the intervention of a (inner) sense organ or an intentional act, but are immediately aware of it. There is no distance or separation between the feeling of pain or happiness and our awareness of it, since it is given in and through itself. According to Henry, something similar holds for all of our conscious experiences. To make use of a terminology taken from analytical philosophy of mind, Henry would claim that all conscious experiences are essentially characterized by having a subjective ‘feel' to them, that is, a certain quality of ‘what it is like'”.

I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception.

For George Kelly, these dichotomous features: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as belonging to interacting states of being; they are instead the inseparable features of a unitary differential structure of transition, otherwise known as a construct. In personal construct theory, there are no self-inhering entities, neither in the guise of affects nor intended objects. In the place of Zahavi's three-part structure of subjective feeling, relational bond and intentional object, Kelly proposes a two-part structure manifested by the bi-polar construct. For Kelly subjective affect and objective intention are equi-primordial features of a construct's referential differential hinge. Put differently, every construed event is already both feeling and object of sense. This being the case, there is no synthetic relational connector needed to tie subject and object together.

Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects.

From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “

It's Nietzsche for beginners. But it's mistaken. Human beings are imbued with a moral sense by evolution, and in fact - religious values are expressions of that innate moral sense; adopted when hunter gatherer tribes joined together - to forge a social group under a common belief system. — counterpunch

Sorry but that is not it. I mean, I'm not saying things you say here an there are all not true, but that this has nothing to do with what Kierkegaard is saying. Case in point: what do you think he means by "heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept"?

And God still remains a mystery — TaySan

Begs questions. God??? Mystery?? Remains??

“Life” and “now” may not be separated, if you are alive, then it is now! — Present awareness

This implies that an analysis of what it means to have life reveals the nature of what it is to be now. Explain, pls.

Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept? — Possibility

Energy distribution? Neuroscience and psychology? But what is it about this that is not outdated by a century? Not regarding specific content, but regarding it NOT being empirical in nature. Rovelli does not take the matter to its foundational level if he is still talking like this. Tell me, how does Husserl figure into this?

I think the obligation is upon you to say what you think the passage means, if you assert it is something other than what I say it means.

Explain, such that I understand how this is not, as it seems - powerfully evocative of Nietzsche, 20 years before Nietzsche. Nietzsche didn't just fall from the clear blue sky. This was the character of the thought of his age.

. One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins). — Constance

It is about a rational concept of time, as opposed to theological concepts of time. Is it not? Then what is it about?

Where Rovelli falls short, Lisa Feldman Barrett fills in more of the puzzle for me - with a theoretical approach to emotion, awareness and energy distribution, based on empirical research in neuroscience and psychology, which (probably quite unintentionally) draws intriguing parallels with Rovelli’s restructuring of reality as consisting of energy-based events rather than objects, and explores in depth the question of what is a concept?

I’m just saying don’t write science off just yet. I have a feeling they’ll come around eventually, and the more that philosophers are informed by - and strive to inform - the frontiers of theoretical science, the faster this may happen. — Possibility

I agree that science has made progress in catching up with where philosophy has arrived( and why not? I don’t think there are any hard and fast distinctions between what constitutes the boundaries of a science and a philosophy).

I have read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities).

Friston's free energy model posits minimization of surprise(disorder) in pursuit of homeostasis as the normative aim of a living system in a non-equilibrium steady state, and defines autonomy on the basis of a markov blanket distinguishing between internal and external states, but these are weak notions of autonomy and normativity, in contrast to many enactivist versions. It's not surprising, then, that Friston chooses Freud's realist model ( Friston's characterization of schizophrenic disturbance as ‘false belief' indicates his realist bent) as a good realization of his neuroscientific project, given that Freud, like Friston, turns autonomy and normativity into a conglomeration of external pushes and internal pulls on a weakly integrated system. This is posited as an ‘internal' environment indirectly exposed to an outside, in classic Cartesian fashion, as Barrett express here: “ Like those ancient, mummified Egyptian pharaohs, the brain spends eternity entombed in a dark, silent box. It cannot get out and enjoy the world's marvels directly; it learns what is going on in the world only indirectly via scraps of information from the light, vibrations, and chemicals that become sights, sounds, smells, and so on.”” From your brain's point of view, locked inside the skull, your body is just another part of the world that it must explain.”

There are more philosophically progressively psychological models to be found in enactivist embodied approaches influenced by phenomenology , which reject representationalist computationalist realism in general.

Sorry but, with all due respect, that's fatuous nonsense. It's like saying ... 'before Mt. Sinai the long wandering ancient Hebrew tribes stayed together "by the grace of" goober without already having had prohibited Murder, Adultery, Lying & Theft'. Even if so, that wouldn't explain every other large human grouping for the prior one hundred or so millennia at minimum prohibiting the same modes of social violence without "divine permission" and yet still function more or less as cohesive peoples like the Egyptians behind the Hebrews at Sinai and the Canaanites ahead of them. "Faith" and "grace" have meaning in the context of the rest of my previous post (pace Kierkegaard), particularly, but not only, with respect to 'seven generations thinking'. — 180 Proof

I reviewed what you said earlier, and it is not wrong, just not really to the point. You are being asked to look at time as a structure of experience. Consider the various things you object to to be extraneous. It's really not about Goober at all, though Kierkegaard did think this mysterious eternal present was a dramatic break from typical thinking and di call it God and the soul, but then, it isn't a bunch of Bible beating references to Biblical passages. The analysis doesn't depend on these. Take it more as an analysis of the "event" of our Being here, and an observation that in a given event, any one will do for the content is incidental, we are moving along in a Heraclitean river of experience, if you will, but the flow of events from past through present on to the future is an essential ontological feature. We are this "flow" into the future. Kierkegaard;s thinking is that this temporal movement is encompassed by the present, the only actuality that is ever really there. After all, the past is conceived and the future is conceived, always, already, if you like, in the present.

You are being asked to look at time as a structure of experience. — Constance

Ok. I think it's more than that, Constance. Time is the structure of co-existence, or the commons, and I've sketched that. My response deliberately calls mere "experience" into question which you don't seem willing to consider. Look what idealism – yes, (proto)existentialism is idealism-in-action – has done to the secular West in the last century or so as it's dovetailed into "doing me" "my truth" "not real until I experience it" consumerism. "The leap of faith" is now nothing but the faith in leaping. Is Kierkegaard's 'subjective time' remotely relevant today? I could be way off-base but I don't think so.

Energy distribution? Neuroscience and psychology? But what is it about this that is not outdated by a century? Not regarding specific content, but regarding it NOT being empirical in nature. Rovelli does not take the matter to its foundational level if he is still talking like this. Tell me, how does Husserl figure into this? — Constance

I’m not going to pretend that I have read much on Husserl, or that I can discuss phenomenological description with any academic confidence. But the way I see it, both Rovelli and Barrett recognise that the base unit common to both empirical science and phenomenology is not the ‘object’ but the ‘event’. In my view, this changes how we look at phenomenological descriptions of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. The notion of the ‘intentional object’ is no longer necessary - we simply don’t need to reduce this far to make the connections between human thought and behaviour. In fact, to do so is to ‘overshoot’ the relational structure of consciousness.

But I’ll leave it there until I have looked more into Husserl in particular.

“Life” and “now” may not be separated, if you are alive, then it is now!
— Present awareness

This implies that an analysis of what it means to have life reveals the nature of what it is to be now. Explain, pls. — Constance

The past is just a measurement taken from “now” to as far back as one wants to go and the future is a measurement forward. However, life itself, does not exist in the past or future, but only in the “now”.

Well christendom, the new testament has given the revelation that God or Allah is love. But since most of humanity cannot accept this simple fact I choose to say God is a mystery.
Because philosophers want to discuss God and love. And worshippers want to idolize God and love.
And atheists want to deny God and love. And politicians want to regulate God and love. And artists want to paint God and love. I just go with the flow

By thinking about the future, which is done in the present. Is there REALLY a past or future AT ALL? No. — Constance

Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/

Think about having a 'religious experience' or a revelation of sorts while doing something, and the feelings associated with that exerience including the perception of time stopping. At that Maslonian moment as it were, there is no anxiety, no anxiousness, no worry, no anticipation, no nothing. Everything stops, presumably, like the feelings/perceptions in Eternity (Kierk alludes to this...) . Yet, everything constantly changes, even during the simple act of cognizing about those experiences themselves.

Quite paradoxical indeed. Eternity doesn't really exist, in this temporal world we find ourselves in... . However, it does exist through what we know about Einstein's theory of Relativity.

And too, as Possibility alluded, perhaps the present doesn't really exist. Just thinking about time is paradoxical (think about the concept of time zones viz. what it means to live in the present moment):

Actually Kierk argued the opposite here in this short read: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/18/kierkegaard-concept-of-anxiety-time/

This one was so interesting to read. Time and all of the interpretations are one of the things I like the most inside philosophy.

I have read carefully a number of writings by Clark , Friston and Barrett, and I can say with confidence that their thinking is squarely within the realist tradition( not naive realism, as Barrett points out, but a more sophisticated neo-Kantian version which distinguishes between real sense data and constructed human realities). — Joshs

I agree - that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. It’s the similarities in relational structure that interest me here, especially when you take away Husserl’s struggle with references to an intentional object.

“I see coal as heating material; I recognise it and recognise it as useful and as used for heating, as appropriate for and as destined to produce warmth. [...] I can use [a combustible object] as fuel; it has a value for me as a possible source of heat. That is, it has value for me with respect to the fact that with it I can produce the heating of a room and thereby pleasant sensations of warmth for myself and others.[...] Others also apprehend it in the same way, and it acquires an intersubjective use-value and in a social context is appreciated and is valuable as serving such and such a purpose, as useful to man, etc.” (Husserliana, vol. IV, pp. 186f; Husserl 1989, pp. 196f) — SEP, Edmund Husserl

When you categorise, you might feel like you’re merely observing the world and finding similarities in objects and events, but that cannot be the case. Purely mental, goal-based concepts such as ‘Things That Can Protect You from Stinging Insects’ reveal that categorisation cannot be so simple and static. A flyswatter and a house have no perceptual similarities. Goal-based concepts therefore free you from the shackles of physical appearance. When you walk into an entirely new situation, you don’t experience it based solely on how things look, sound or smell. You experience it based on your goal.
So what’s happening in your brain when you categorise? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. When your brain needs a concept, it constructs one on the fly, mixing and matching from a population of instances from your past experience, to best fit your goals in a particular situation. — Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘How Emotions Are Made’

It may be that I haven’t really come down firmly on either side of the realist-idealist debate at this stage. I do consider myself to be an ontic structural realist to some extent, but that’s a relatively new development. FWIW, I can see realist structures echoed in Husserl, and phenomenological structures in Barrett and Rovelli, so I’m intrigued by the overlap.

that doesn’t mean they can’t inform or be informed by phenomenological idealism. — Possibility

Contrary to many misinterpretations, Husserlian phenomenology is not an idealism but a radical subject-object interactionism.

Husserl says the following is the incorrect ,Cartesian way of interpreting the Transcendental Ego:

“ But is it not a piece of foolishness to suppose that world has being because of some performance
of mine? Clearly, I must make my formulation more precise. In my Ego there is formed, from out
of mthe proper sources of transcendental passivity and activity, my “representation of the world, ” my “picture of the world, ” whereas outside of me, naturally enough, there is the world itself. But is this really a good way of putting it? Does this talk about outer and inner, if it makes any sense at all, receive its meaning from anywhere else than from my formation and my preservation of meaning?”(Phenomenology and Anthropology)

So what’s happening in your brain when you categorise? You are not finding similarities in the world but creating them. — Lisa Feldman Barrett, ‘How Emotions Are Made’

What this quote from Barrett illustrates is the fact that idealism and realism are two sides of the same coin. Barrett’s cognitive system is a relation. between a ‘real’ independent external world and ideal internal
representations.

Merleau -Ponty echoes Husserl on idealism and empiricism:

“We must now show that its intellectualist [idealist] antithesis is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it. This may be shown by studying the history of the concept of attention.”

“...in a consciousness which constitutes everything, or rather which eternally possesses the intelligible structure of all its objects, just as in empiricist consciousness which constitutes nothing at all, attention remains an abstract and ineffective power, because it has no work to perform. Consciousness is no less intimately linked with objects of which it is unheeding than with those which interest it, and the additional clearness brought by the act of attention does not herald any new relationship. It therefore becomes once more a light which does not change its character with the various objects which it shines upon, and once more empty acts of attention are brought in, in place of ‘the modes and specific directions of intention'.(Cassirir)

Value is a differential, as is intention. It is not the subjective side of intentionality but both sides. There is in fact no subject and no object in the way you are conceiving them as somehow split off from each other. Value is how we find ourselves in the world and this ‘now’ is a becoming, not an immediate presence to self but transformation. The ethical/ aesthetic good and bad is a function of the ongoing organizational integrity of the process of experiential change, not a self-inhering content that hoves above or beyond or underneath ‘facts’. — Joshs

So, I'll field these as I see fit, though I may be a bit on the outside of the issues.
As to immediate presence, I see no alternative to thinking of the self as transformative, or an event, rather than a presence simpliciter. But calling it an event, a process, a becoming, does not make the reduction to presence any less, well, present: Presence is a place holder term for what is otherwise impossible to conceive, and so it is delivered from all characterization. Becoming and Being, these are ancient terms. What I will call the extended reduction takes the matter asymptotically toward the impossible (you know where I get this; it is Jean Luc Marion. Not his words, but he thinks like this), and language falls away.

As to the split: I claim that value cannot be conceived without an agency that receives it. I think that a perception of the color red simpliciter doesn't require a transcendental agency to receive it. There is "myness" there that brings all things under the synthetic inclusiveness of my encountering them but this does not implicate anything beyond this, and so an efficient phenomenology would have no grounds for positing a transcendental I. But then there is metaethics, the good and the bad of experience is an altogether different matter. I hold this for good reasons, but that would take another argument. Metaethics changes everything in ontology: not so much about Being as it is about value-in-Being.

“Dan Zahavi posits that my awareness of myself cannot fundamentally be comparable to my experience of an object. For one thing, if it were mediated in this same way it would lead to an infinite regress. The I that views my subjectivity implies another I that experiences this I, and so on. Even more damaging to the claim that self-awareness is the intending of an object is that it presupposes what it is designed to explain. ”..a mental state cannot be imbued with for-me-ness simply as a result of being the object of a further mental state. Rather, if awareness of awareness is to give rise to for-me-ness, “the first order state” must already be “imbued with some phenomenally apparent quality of mine-ness” (Howell and Thompson 2017)

To avoid the specter of an infinite regress, the subjective pole of intentional awareness must be of a qualitatively different nature than the object pole, goes Zahavi's argument. He explains that the pre-reflective self-awareness that opposes, but is at the same time inseparably connected with intended objects, is a peculiar sort of experience, something of the order of a feeling rather than an objective sense. — Joshs

Perhaps. I find this argument the kind of thing analytic philosophers take seriously, thinking of those Third Man arguments about Plato's forms. Regressions

For me, I have to go no further than the palpable experience joy and suffering, pleasure and pain. The hammer smashes my thumb and I take a hard, direct look at this pain as pain and ask, what is this? I conclude as Moore did: it is a nonnatural property, but then, so what. I am acutely aware of the way language disguises reality, brings such things to heel, reduces what is Other to what is the Same, to talk like Levinas.

I want to take note of the fact that Zahavi treats both the subjective and the objective sides of intentionality as self-inhering interiorities, states, identities, before they are poles of a relation. Because he makes self-inhering content do most of the work of establishing the awareness of the affectively felt and objectively perceived sides of the bond between the subject and the world, the relation between subject and object becomes a mostly empty middle term, a neutral copula added onto the two opposing sides of the binary. In settling on feeling as a special sort of entity that does the work of generating immediate self-awareness , Zahavi is harking back to a long-standing Western tradition connecting affect, feeling and emotion with movement , action, dynamism, motivation and change. Affect is supposedly instantaneous, non-mediated experience. It has been said that ‘raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, qualitative, passive, a surge, glow, twinge, energy, spark, something we are overcome by. Opposed to such ‘bodily', dynamical events are seemingly flat, static entities referred to by such terms as mentation , rationality, theorization, propositionality, objectivity, calculation, cognition, conceptualization and perception. — Joshs

This is an interesting paragraph. Note that in the following there is casual appropriations from those I read. From what I have read and thought of the issue, it is the "understanding" that not just steps between the perceiver and her object, but is part of the constitution of all affairs, cognition, affect, raw terror or blankly gazing outward as what informs the event as "that which is" in the same way that walking down the street possesses no explicit reference to streets, walking, trees and sky, yet all of these are "proximal" and such proximity in the moment constitutes what we call reality in the everyday sense: I see a cloud and having seen many clouds I can safely anticipate what will follow, and this anticipation normalizes the world; when we ask what reality is, the "sense" of normal anticipation is what is behind the question. Thus all events are mediated, pragmatically mediated, if the pragmatists have it right, and I think they do.
And yet, there is it, palpable value. Ouch! and Wow! (trying very hard NOT to trivialize experiences with mere reference language). When Kierkegaard attacks rationalists for forgetting we exist, this is what he was talking about, I would argue. The question that strikes at the heart of this is, how is it that I can understand things that are not in the interpretative functions of pragmatically apprehending objects? We don't understand them, would be the answer, but we are merely familiar with them, and we reify this familiarity, but then, this reification is exactly of this pragmatic anticipatory apprehension. I see no way to avoid this. The hyletic feels are of a piece with the interpretation.

But on the radical other hand, there is metavalue. Ouch! is bad, and this is has a very special status epistemological status as, while it is understood in the usual way, entangled in one's complex affairs, Pain qua pain is not, as you put it, differential.

I think I also claim (a thought in progress) that reality IS value, knowing full well that this sounds absurd. One has to take that Husserlian suspension of natural science very seriously.

Heidegger's approach complements Kelly's. He critiques Western notions of propositional relation as external bond, tracing it back to Aristotle. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating.” Instead, taking something as something means transforming what one apprehends in the very act of apprehension. This integral structure of self-temporalization implies equi-primordially and inseparably affective (Befindlichkeit) and intentional-cognitive aspects. — Joshs

Joined at the hip, or, of a piece, this taking AS transforming its object. One of the many things I have to thank Heidegger for is this. For me, this completely reconceives priorities when it comes to foundational questions. Material substance, e.g., is not a false theoretical idea, it simply is now considered equiprimordial with other context bound, taken AS, regions of interpreting the world. What rises to the fore is meaning, not so much Frege's "sense" (but then, not not this either. I am reading Ricoeur for the first time now on how narrative and metaphor make novel meanings that evolve into novel interpretative possibilities) but aesthetics and its affect. Heidegger thought poetry was an instrument of meaning making, as I've read. The question I ask is a timeless one: Is the secular taking the world AS sufficient to span the distance of nihilism.
I am sure it is not.

From Kelly's and Heidegger's perspectives, Zahavi's concerns about an infinite regress is a byproduct of the way the issue of subjectivity is being formulated, and Zahavi s solution only reaffirms the problem, which is that the affective and cognate aspects of events are artificially split into separated entities, and then have to be pieced together again in an interaction . To ground experience in radical temporality is to abandon the concept of subject and world in states of interaction, in favor of a self-world referential-differential in continuous self-transforming movement.The functioning of a construct within a hierarchical system allows Kelly to maintain along with Zahavi that one is intrinsically self-aware in every construal, whether that construction is specifically directed toward the self or an event in the world. But unlike for Zahavi, the self component of awareness is not a self-inhering feeling state. Rather, the ‘for-meness' aspect of a construed event is the contribution my construct system as a unified whole makes to the discernment of a new event in terms of likeness and difference with respect to my previous experience. In other words, the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense. As discussed earlier in this paper, Kelly's organization corollary indicates that the system is functionally integral, which I interpret to mean that one's superordinate outlook is implicit in all construals. “ — Joshs

But this: the ‘background' (contrast pole) against which a new event emerges is not only a previously experienced subordinate element that the current event refers to, but it is more broadly the superordinate system as a whole that participates in the construal in an implicit sense brings things to what Kierkegaard is telling us: the past constructs the present as a movement toward the future, and the present here is freedom, a migrating freedom of the soul. Putting aside the religious talk, K is saying the "superordinate system" is the present, the past and future are subsumed by the present, and this is confirmed by ontological authority of "existence" in the palpable engagement in the world, and mediation, the taking AS, is part and parcel of the phenomena in a given encounter, making this superordinate system a complex present.

Thanks for that glorious bit of thoughtful and engaging writing, btw. The kind of thing that helps me understand what I am trying to say.

Yep. I think Keirk would agree with the aforementioned video. The question concerning the absurdity (lack of definitive logic) associated with Time relates to its common sense description, and ultimately, explanation of it. Thus the question (from Keirk and the video) how much sliver of present time is actually present? Human Beings require time for their existence, right? Seems, once again, paradoxical. This notion of Time, using logic, can't square the phenomenal circle. But for using sense data, yes.

Keirk, being the sensitive man that he apparently was (with his sentience), tries to parse the emotions associated with describing time. For example, if we try to, say, meditate on nothingness, we usually come to experience anxieties about the past or future motivational wants and needs (in our stream of consciousness).

So one question becomes (a popular form of modern day Mindfulness) how does one approach the present using logic? I say you can't a priori. However, you can a posteriori, through having the aforementioned experience or feeling or sensation of time stopping (peak experiences, religious experiences, euphoric experiences, love experiences, any intense experience doing something, so on and so forth).

And so just from that little example, you have the human body, requiring time for its existence, yet in your consciousness you experience timelessness, at times. But here on earth it cannot be. And that's because we cannot explain the nature of the present, as previously mentioned... .

Does that mean we should experience doing instead of just thinking? Can we get more out of life by doing? Or do we wear both hats... .

Keirk, being the sensitive man that he apparently was (with his sentience), tries to parse the emotions associated with describing time — 3017amen

He was right because time is always floating there around our lives and remembering us that our lives are limited. When I finish some experience that lasted some years randomly appears to me mind a weird sense of nostalgia because I think I will never live that period again in my life so I don’t how to explain this emotion... sadness or happinesses? It depends in the emotion and the memory we talk about.
Also in this context can appear the so called chronophobia that it means anxiety and uneasiness about time (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/chronophobia) which could be very serious mental problem...

Does that mean we should experience doing instead of just thinking? Can we get more out of life by doing? Or do we wear both hats... . — 3017amen

True! I guess I going to be more able to answer this questions from a Kierkegaard's point of view soon because I bought a book from him: the concept of anxiety

Cool! Let me know how that goes... .

In the meantime, maybe this sums up our musings:

Kierkegaard writes: Man … is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.

Perhaps in a Platonic vein, we experience timelessness when we do mathematical calculations ( a priori truth's tthat describe physical/non physical objects).


BTW, do you have that Chronophobia book?

Cool! Let me know how that goes... . — 3017amen

Sure I will :100: :up:

BTW, do you have that Chronophobia book? — 3017amen

No. Sorry I only have the brief analysis which appears in the link above

I think it is upon you to say what you think the passage means, if you assert it is something other than what I say it means.

Explain, such that I understand how this is not, as it seems - powerfully evocative of Nietzsche: — counterpunch

Okay. So here is the passage:

One can, quite generally, in defining the concepts of the past, the future, and the eternal, see how one has defined the instant. If there is no instant, then the eternal appears behind as the past. It is as when I imagine a man walking along a road but do not posit the pacing, and the road then appears behind him as the distance covered. If the instant is posited but merely as a discrimen [division], then the future is the eternal. If the instant is posited, so is the eternal, but also the future which reappears as the past. This is clearly to be seen in the Greek, the Jewish, and the Christian views. The concept on which everything turns in Christianity, that which made all things new,* is the fullness of time,† but the fullness of time is the instant as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past. If one doesn’t watch out for this, not a single concept can be saved from a heretical and treasonable admixture that annihilates the concept. One then gets the past not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the future (the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins).

Imagine there is no instant, that is, no "present moment" between past ad future, which is easy to do for all you have to think of is a smooth sailing of the past into the future, and is occurring now as I type. A seamless process, and one might conclude there is no present at all since to break away fromt his process, to suspend its continuity would require precisely in the suspending, that which you are trying to suspend; I mean the thought itself of a suspension is itself part of the flow. So positing a present seems a paradox.

K argues that if there is no instant/present, then actuality is lost, that is, the actual event of being there as a real agency where the past is literally unfolding before one as a process, a palpable affair. Clearly there is something to that smooth sailing, but just as clearly there is something to concrete experience that is NOT a past generating a future existence.
K argues, if there is posited a present, but the present is only a demarcation between past and future, then the future is just a replay of the past, out into an eternal vanishing point, the same as looking back at mere recollection, only into the future.
The only way to reconcile time is to bring all under the subsumption of an inclusive present; after all, it is this actuality where past and future have the possibility to be conceived at all. The actual is the present, and there are no temporal instantiations in the future or the past; or, the past is not conceived in the past, nor is the future, but both have their, say, evidential basis in the present.
Now, what Kierkegaard means by the heretical and treasonous mixture that annihilates the concept is clear: It is the positing of the past and the future as merely a running stream of events, an inviolable Heraclitean continuity with no way out. History, personal and world history, possesses no possibility for freedom and reality becomes an abstraction and the meaning of all things is trivialized. We become slaves of time.
And if you are a Christian, like K is, God, by this heretical mixture, becomes an impossible concept.

Ok. I think it's more than that, Constance. Time is the structure of co-existence, and I've sketched that. My response deliberately calls mere "experience" into question which you don't seem willing to consider. Look what idealism – yes, (proto)existentialism is idealism-in-action – has done to the secular West in the last century or so as it's dovetailed into "doing me" "my truth" "not real until I experience it" consumerism. "The leap of faith" is now nothing but the faith in leaping. Is Kierkegaard 'subjective time' remotely relevant today? I could be way off-base but I don't think so. — 180 Proof

But cultural relevance hardly matters here, and more than it would matter for quantum physics. Alas, if people take idealism seriously, something might happen, a loss of confidence in the the objective claims of science, or, an excessive concern about the self. In the end, a loss of Christian faith may be responsible for a degradation in human values. So is this a reason to argue for Jesus?
Not is it relevant? Rather, is it true?
But then, idealism NEVER has had this kind of power. The closest I can think of is in the 50's when beatniks actually tried to read Heidegger, sat around in cafes like Dharma Bums questioning existence.
And I certainly do not think consumerism can be tied to idealism, as if consumers could even begin to fathom the Copernican Revolution of Kant. But if you care to sketch out how you think this is the case, I would like to hear it.

But I’ll leave it there until I have looked more into Husserl in particular. — Possibility

Okay. I would genuinely like to know. Some of Husserl is very accessible, like Cartesian Meditations and others. Ideas get rather technical, but it is here I think you can see how phenomenology works. I haven't read Logical Investigations. On my list.

The past is just a measurement taken from “now” to as far back as one wants to go and the future is a measurement forward. However, life itself, does not exist in the past or future, but only in the “now”. — Present awareness

Well then, you sound like a Kierkegaardian. the trick is to become a knight of faith, which is to live in the present and embrace the past and the future in this lived present. I think Buddhists do this, or try to; I mean, if you meditate effectively, you find, on the one hand, you are still you and your constructed personality is still there informing you of the world and its details, but on the other, the past and the future anticipations the past imposes are all realized in the present, and you live both in the eternal present and in the world of daily affairs. You could be a butcher, an accountant, and no one would know that you have mastered the world and live in God's grace.
K thought this was beyond his abilities.

The book the passage is from - is about hereditary sin. It's not a physics book. It's not even philosophy. It's theology. K considers different concepts of time, not because he's trying to show how time works. His concern is:

the meaning of world history and the historical development of the individual thereby losing the concepts of conversion, atonement, and redemption). One gets the future not by itself, but in a simple continuity with the present (the concepts of resurrection and judgment being thereby laid in ruins). — Constance

...because of different concepts of time. The reason concepts of time were at issue around 1859 is that Darwin published Origin of Species that year, in turn based on a geological concept of time - that proposed a hugely ancient origin of the earth and lifeforms fossilized in rock layers.

Well christendom, the new testament has given the revelation that God or Allah is love. But since most of humanity cannot accept this simple fact I choose to say God is a mystery.
Because philosophers want to discuss God and love. And worshippers want to idolize God and love.
And atheists want to deny God and love. And politicians want to regulate God and love. And artists want to paint God and love. I just go with the flow — TaySan

I don't know what that means until I know what you think the flow is.