What's pre-understood? If I catch your drift, you seem to be saying something to the effect that we already comprehend/know the world; all that's needed is to become conscious/aware of it. If it's remembering then we're in rationalist territory (innate ideas). :chin: Fascinating! — Agent Smith

No, no; not that at all.

It's a long, long story. And it is far more fascinating than I could possibly say here. But if you take a given perceptual event of any kind at all, you have to ask questions about how the event itself is constructed is constructed AS an event, just like a scientist would observe a blade of grass or a star spectrum. It is always description first, then the impressive mathematizing and all the, call it paradigmatic work, begins. Phenomenology treats things before us AS things before us, and gives a descriptive account. A thing is in time, e.g., and time is past, present and future, and the agency that witnesses the event is also in time, but this is not quite right already because we are using a scientist's model of things: this object, this agency, this event arenot so much in IN time--- they ARE time, that is, time is an essential feature of their Being. This past, present and future is part of the analysis of the object itself, so when we ask what is it? IT is a past, present and future. Then this analysis turns to time. In our encounter with the object, how is time presented? Here there is history, and just think about Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions, how the present theories about the object are built our of the past, not transcending the past, constructed from the ages of thought, and on a personal level, constructed out of your own persona' history, your time in school and daily familiarities.

That which stands before you is an amalgam, and phenomenology is not interested in all the knowledge claims of all the disciplines that give us the historical dimension of an object; it is interested in the "how is stands here as it IS now. Its Being is historical, but then, this is arguable. Time is far more general, for it qualifies the Being of all possible worlds and everything inaginable. Their must be a more primordial analysis of time.
And so on more hundreds and hundreds of pages. This is, roughly in the extreme, and introduction to what Being and TIme by Heidegger is about. Husserl is before him underlies it, as do Kierkegaard, Hegel, Kant and so on.
Trouble with Dennett and his ilk is they are scientists, and they do not think out of this box. The thinking here really requires a different set of values of inquiry. You have to want to know what it is that is presupposed by science. This is Heidegger and Husserl et al. This is philosophy.

I often wonder with phenomenology is conducting epoché readily achievable? How feasible is it to pretend you don't know what you are looking at (bracketing and 'blocking off' all assumptions and biases) in order to see something on its own terms?

I often wonder with phenomenology is conducting epoché readily achievable? How feasible is it to pretend you don't know what you are looking at (bracketing and 'blocking off' all assumptions and biases) in order to see something on its own terms? — Tom Storm

I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it.

And please, no gratuitous, unargued Dennett bashing. — Janus

I would ask Dennett and his ilk Rorty's question: how does anything out there get in here? Of course, the "in here' part is the brain, and Dennett thinks the brain is simply this organ, like a liver or a kidney, that produces consciousness, but answer Rorty's question and you end up with the very troublesome conclusion that consciousness is PRESUPPOSED by talk about brains.
This is where Dennett's thinking turns tail and runs.

I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it. — Joshs

Yes, I though the word pretend might not pass muster. Fair enough. I'm aware of the history from Greek philosophy. But I wonder what philosophers might say about our capacity to accomplish it. Can it be done to better or worse effect, for instance? I wonder how achievable it is not to attend to something and abstract away from it?

I think philosophies have been bracketing conventional
assumptions for centuries. The idea isnt to pretend that you dont know what you know, but to abstract away from it, to leave it in the background, not attend to it. — Joshs

This runs into Derrida: in even the simplest utterance, the most primordial, the meaning issues what is not uttered. There is no "true" affirmation at all, just this web of signification that has an emergent singularity. And this itself would go under erasure (like Wittgenstein "erasing" his own Tractatus).

The only way to take Husserl seriously is to actually perform this method of reduction, which means standing there confronting the this house, this tree, and, well, not-thinking. When Sartre's Roquentin in Nausea does this reduction he has...errrr, visions of the superfluity of existence. But forget about Sartre's hellish imagination. I think when a perceptual event is consciously set apart from all the assumptions that would otherwise claim it, in time, because this method takes practice, there is something transformational in this, as if one is brought to the threshold of a revelation, but no further. Going further one would have to meditate, which is, the ultimate reductive act.


Dennett, by contrast, thinks, rather smugly, that the enlightening transformation involves disillusionment in favor of a rigorous common sense, and he is irredeemably dogmatic on this.

But I wonder what philosophers might say about our capacity to accomplish it. Can it be done to better or worse effect, for instance? I wonder how achievable it is not to attend to something and abstract away from it? — Tom Storm

Ok, here’s my take. You can’t abstract away from presuppositions without already having an alternative in mind. In other words, I believe that Husserl’s method of epoche came after he already discovered his more primordial grounding for philosophy. I also want to add that although in the face of it the epoche is a reducing, eliminating , setting aside of phenomena, in a more fundamental sense it is an enriching of experience. For instance, once we have performed the epoche on predicative logic and discover the pre-predicative strata of intentional constitution that predicational logic is built from, we are in a position to append these more originary processes to what we already knew about predicational logic. So the epoche gives us a richer understanding of the phenomena that we bracket not by eliminating them but by showing us what we were missing.

“If I abstained as I was free to do and as I did
and still abstain from every believing involved in or founded on sensuous experiencing, so that the being of the experienced world remains unaccepted by me, still this abstaining is what it is; and it exists, together with the whole stream of my experi­encing life. Moreover, this life is continually there for me. Con­tinually, in respect of a field of the present, it is given to consciousness perceptually, with the most originary originality, as it itself.

Meanwhile the world experienced in this reflectively grasped life goes on being for me (in a certain manner) "experienced" as before, and with just the content it has at any particular time. It goes on appearing, as it appeared before ; the only difference is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect (no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved in experiencing the world though that believing too is still there and grasped by my noticing regard.”

“ This- universal depriving of acceptance, this "inhibiting" or "putting out of play" of all positions taken toward the already­given Objective world and, in the first place, all existential positions (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being likely, probable, etc.), or, as it is also called, this "phenome­nological epochd" and "parenthesizing" of the Objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contra­ry we gain possession of something by it ; and what we (or, to
speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them.”

Thanks Joshs - appreciated.

but now we're distinguishing ourselves not just from machines but from animals that don't have language. Lacking our higher mental capacities, their behavior is, insofar as it is instinctive, mechanical.

But I think that's wrong. — Srap Tasmaner

Right, I do too. It seems to me our difference from machines is one of kind, whereas our differences from the other animals are differences of degrees.

For everything living, food matters, threats, shelter, offspring, and thus these things have meaning, and there is the potential for their environment to be a meaningful world, something that could be understood. — Srap Tasmaner

Yes, I'm always nonplussed by the claim that the fact/ value distinction is ontologically robust; the way I view it is that it is only when take an artificially distanced, abstracted view of the world that it could appear as devoid of value and meaning. Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. Human exceptionalism seems to be a curse—for the other animals, but for humans as well.

There's plainly an 'affinity' between natural science and the mechanical, as an object of knowledge, which might not quite define the limits of possible science. Don't care. I think there's a similar 'affinity' between philosophy and the meaningful. Whether it's possible for them to meet in the middle is not my concern; I'll be arriving from the meaning side. — Srap Tasmaner

Nicely put: I relate strongly to that disposition. We don't have, for fear of disgracing ourselves by proposing anything which would appear to be nonsense from that science-driven point of view, to confine our intellectual lives to what accords with the kind of third person views of ourselves that science enables, .

Sure, the idea of mind is how we conceive of what we take to be the faculty doing the thinking and experiencing. It doesn't seem necessary to hold to any particular conception of mind in order to have an understanding of what we take to be the workings of the world.

You are taking it as read that we 'have' "subjective contents"; that is the default understanding, based on the intuitive analogy of the mind as a kind of container, but is it the best way to understand the mind. Wouldn't we need to consider all the other conceivable alternatives before deciding? — Janus

The idea that the mind is working memory is a way of understanding the mind as both the faculty doing the thinking (working) and as a kind of a container (memory). It seems to me that memory is a required concept for understanding mind, as information in the mind persists through time and there is only so much information that the mind can work with and recall at any moment.

I don't think the 'container' analogy is really a good way of understanding memory. Thinking of memory as consisting in traces or patterns. like marks left in the sand, seems more apt to me.

I don't think the 'container' analogy is really a good way of understanding memory. — Janus

Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information?

Thinking of memory as consisting in traces or patterns. like marks left in the sand, seems more apt to me. — Janus

You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory.

Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information? — Harry Hindu

Not as I understand it.

You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory. — Harry Hindu

I think memory, in one sense, just is the totality of "inscriptions", In another sense we could say it is the faculty of being able to recall those "inscriptions" to consciousness. No "container" to be found or required.

I would ask Dennett and his ilk Rorty's question: how does anything out there get in here? Of course, the "in here' part is the brain, and Dennett thinks the brain is simply this organ, like a liver or a kidney, that produces consciousness, but answer Rorty's question and you end up with the very troublesome conclusion that consciousness is PRESUPPOSED by talk about brains.
This is where Dennett's thinking turns tail and runs. — Astrophel

I don't see that consciousness being presupposed, as it might be said to be by all human discourse, would be a problem for Dennett, since he doesn't deny its existence.

I don't think the 'container' analogy is really a good way of understanding memory.
— Janus
Sure it is. Is not memory a container of information?

Thinking of memory as consisting in traces or patterns. like marks left in the sand, seems more apt to me.
— Janus
You're confusing data (inscriptions in memory) with memory. — Harry Hindu

First generation cognitive science used the metaphor of computer to model the mind as an input output device that processes , represents and stores data. That metaphor has been replaced by the biological notion of self-organizing system. Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process.

Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process. — Joshs

Right, that makes sense: so memories are reconstructed from traces, which do not remain unchanged in the process of reconstruction.

I don't see that consciousness being presupposed, as it might be said to be by all human discourse, would be a problem for Dennett, since he doesn't deny its existence. — Janus

As I see it: If conscious events are reducible to physical events (Dennett), and physical events are only accessible in conscious observations, then physicality becomes a question begged. Only a phenomenon can be "behind" a phenomenon. Hence hermeneutics.

I don't see a problem for those who believe consciousness is physical in the fact that the physical events are experienced.

My own view is that 'physical' and 'mental' are mutually incommensurable bases of explanation. I don't see any reason to posit a transcendent "realm".

Animals' environments are as replete with meanings for them as ours are for us. Our meanings are no doubt more elaborate, on account of our ability to symbolize, but perhaps they are less vital, more attenuated, for that. — Janus

There must be something different about us, and the smart money says it’s to do with language or something about us that shows itself most clearly in language. It would also make sense for our world or worlds to be different from the worlds of non-linguistic animals (again, whether that’s because of language itself, or because of whatever underwrites language), but I’m inclined to agree that the difference will not be that only in ours do things mean something, only in ours do things matter.

Margaret Wise Brown was a fine phenomenologist:

The important thing about rain is
that it is wet.
It falls out of the sky,
and it sounds like rain,
and makes things shiny,
and it does not taste like anything,
and is the color of air.
But the important thing about rain is
that it is wet. — The Important Book

I can only agree! Liked the poem; I'll have to check out the 'important Book'.

↪Astrophel I don't see a problem for those who believe consciousness is physical in the fact that the physical events are experienced.

My own view is that 'physical' and 'mental' are mutually incommensurable bases of explanation. I don't see any reason to posit a transcendent "realm". — Janus

First, calling something physical, material, is, in itself, simply vacuous. When scientists and everyday talk refer to some material object, it is just a general term that has no content at all because it is not a particular thing and hence has no properties, so it has no predicative possibilities. Kites and balloons are red, but material substance cannot be. It is just a stand in term for the unseen substratum of all things.
So when a scientist insists the thoughts in our heads are really just a form of material substance, she is really just talking out of her hat, as if there were some meaning to the term. There isn't: there is no ontology of material substance. You can try Descartes' wax metaphor, but, as Wittgenstein tells us, metaphors have to have a referent on both sides. I say my friend is a real tiger when angered, there is my friend, and there is the borrowed tiger qualities. In Descartes' wax example, the wax has the alternative states, solid and liquid. But to say these must have the abiding material existence "behind" this is to have a one sided metaphor, for the other, the "existence" is not there to be observed so that the metaphor can be complete. Nonsense is the result.

Metal fares no better, for if material is nonsense (not saying the term has no application at all. But as stand alone ontology, it is nonsense), then the mental loses its meaning, for what is an ontology of the mental if there is no physical for contrast? It is an up without a down.

so if you want to call it all physical, then you are not referring to some ontological substrate of al things; rather, you are contextualizing ontology to what scientists say and think. And on the other side, there is idealism, and this meets the same fate: calling everything idea is an exclusive contextualization if, well, brain events or the like.

This is why the term phenomenon is superior, for it does not refer to some invisible substrate. It is simply what is present, there in the world before you. Transcendental realms just fall away, though it is not as if the term 'transcendental' has no meaning.

Second, assume the world is Dennett's, and this is the assumption of the empirical scientist, and these guys don't really do ontology, so they feel very comfortable talking about physical this and material that. IN the scientist's world of assumptions, how is it that anything out there gets in my brain thing? This is a very clear question, and the answer should be easy: Here is my brain, there is my lamp, I know it is there on the desk. Now, how does this work, this knowledge relationship? Or better: how is that something like a brain that is about as opaque an object as one can imagine, "receive" the object, and think of this as transparency being a 10 and opacity being a 0, the former a kind of mirror representation, the latter, absolute opacity, like a rock or a fence post.

The point should be clear, very clear: something as opaque as a brain, a three and a half pound grey mass, should have no intimation at all regarding that lamp. Zero. Consider: all one has ever experienced is experience, therefore material substance is NECESSARLY a mental phenomenon, for in order for it to what is "out there" to be other than a mental phenomenon, we would have to first leave mental phenomenal experience to affirm this physical Other, and this is nonsense. Recall Wittgenstein and logic: we can never get at logic's generative source because it would take logic to conceive it, encounter it, at all. Same here.

So this last paragraph is what happens when we take Dennett's side. It all falls apart at the level of basic questions. Dennett gets away with this because he rejects basic questions. He really isn't a philosopher at all. Just, and I am reading his Consciousness Explained as I write, a kind of con man; no seriously: he belittles his opposition; note the language he uses. His is a rhetorical argument working throughout, and his common sense approach is just that: common.

First, calling something physical, material, is, in itself, simply vacuous. When scientists and everyday talk refer to some material object, it is just a general term that has no content at all because it is not a particular thing and hence has no properties, so it has no predicative possibilities — Astrophel

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology.

Husserl characterizes the physical, material thing in terms of a particular stratum of intentional constitution:

Now once the" sense-thing" is itself constituted, and so is, founded with it, the real-causal thing at the level of genuine experience, sense experience, then a new constitution of a higher level results in regard to the relativity of this "thing" with respect to the Corporeality constituted in a similar fashion. It is this relativity which demands the constitution of a physicalistic thing manifesting itself in the intuitively given thing. But in this
relativity the geometrical determinations and the specifically "sensuous qualities" play quite different roles (both taken, in their own constitutive sphere, as "themselves, " as optimal). The geometrical determinations pertain to the physicalistic Object
itself; what is geometrical belongs to physicalistic nature in itself. But this is not true of the sensuous qualities, which thoroughly belong in the sphere of the appearances of nature.

“ "Physicalistic nature," to which we have now advanced,
presents itself in the following way in accord with our
expositions: the thing itself in itself consists of a continuously or discretely filled space in states of motion, states which are called energy forms. That which fills space lends itself to certain groups of differential equations and corresponds to certain fundamental laws of physics. But there are no sense qualities here. And that means there are no qualities here whatever. For
the quality of what fills space is sense quality.”(Ideas II)

I think memory, in one sense, just is the totality of "inscriptions", In another sense we could say it is the faculty of being able to recall those "inscriptions" to consciousness. No "container" to be found or required. — Janus

The finite medium where these inscriptions are (stored)? Maybe your confusing memories with memory. Recalled from where?

First generation cognitive science used the metaphor of computer to model the mind as an input output device that processes , represents and stores data. That metaphor has been replaced by the biological notion of self-organizing system. Memory is no longer thought of as storage but instead as reconstructive process. — Joshs

Right, that makes sense: so memories are reconstructed from traces, which do not remain unchanged in the process of reconstruction. — Janus

Any links regarding this? How is a process REconstructive without access to the original construction? What does it mean to be self-organizing when natural selection is an external process that has selected, over a very long time, the attributes that enable a neural system to produce behaviors (outputs) given certain sensory information (inputs)? In a sense, natural selection has programmed organisms to handle (store and interpret) sensory data in specific ways to survive.

Any links regarding this? How is a process REconstructive without access to the original construction? — Harry Hindu

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325338682_Reconceiving_representation-hungry_cognition_an_ecological-enactive_proposal/fulltext/5b06bbbda6fdcc8c25236705/Reconceiving-representation-hungry-cognition-an-ecological-enactive-proposal.pdf?_sg%5B0%5D=Bl1E3jxcYWRHIITqvgsTmQnmAC399k-pE1htXeiQc1A9vPCLYB5oX8brlZr79My7iIkUU9B7prpoWO7C55pm-g.F6rCwA95kvyQu8tR-r1HLonWMCFye1xth34ubi-gbPcBjBUP6oigbgNPTPlWdB7_Bj5VDuzOyNES3BCwv8SEAw.95WbrQ2tQ-V4sV2HSAI2euKn5WjqEVKYNLh3hs1fNazI-sgHcXH5ozkdIXNSMKWF85zLthZXrin3dDkX6O0Blg&_sg%5B1%5D=Apcpaln1xB46Ama9Ej_QuKH20lWQHIBn9okkyL2AShvXPWWmnK6UUkWVBBnH2FQgFjlRYD8y3k1KBcINCrQbUKV5_1Bzp6zwcfif5Q6Rlz7R.F6rCwA95kvyQu8tR-r1HLonWMCFye1xth34ubi-gbPcBjBUP6oigbgNPTPlWdB7_Bj5VDuzOyNES3BCwv8SEAw.95WbrQ2tQ-V4sV2HSAI2euKn5WjqEVKYNLh3hs1fNazI-sgHcXH5ozkdIXNSMKWF85zLthZXrin3dDkX6O0Blg&_iepl=

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology. — Joshs

I'd have to read about it. I found The Embodied Mind, revised edition: Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Varela, Thompson and Rosch. Is this a good source?

How would you differentiate between materiality and physicalism, on the one hand, and naturalism on the other? I have in mind attempts( Varela and Thompson, Gallagher) to naturalize phenomenology.

Husserl characterizes the physical thing in terms of a particular stratum of intentional constitution:

Now once the" sense-thing" is itself constituted, and so is, founded with it, the real-causal thing at the level of genuine experience, sense experience, then a new constitution of a higher level results in regard to the relativity of this "thing" with respect to the Corporeality constituted in a similar fashion. It is this relativity which demands the constitution of a physicalistic thing manifesting itself in the intuitively given thing. But in this
relativity the geometrical determinations and the specifically "sensuous qualities" play quite different roles (both taken, in their own constitutive sphere, as "themselves, " as optimal). The geometrical determinations pertain to the physicalistic Object
itself; what is geometrical belongs to physicalistic nature in itself. But this is not true of the sensuous qualities, which thoroughly belong in the sphere of the appearances of nature.

“ "Physicalistic nature," to which we have now advanced,
presents itself in the following way in accord with our
expositions: the thing itself in itself consists of a continuously or discretely filled space in states of motion, states which are called energy forms. That which fills space lends itself to certain groups of differential equations and corresponds to certain fundamental laws of physics. But there are no sense qualities here. And that means there are no qualities here whatever. For
the quality of what fills space is sense quality.”(Ideas II) — Joshs

Reading The Embodied Mind. I'll get back to you when I have something to say. BTW, thanks for Varela, Thompson and Rosch.

Reading The Embodied Mind. I'll get back to you when I have something to say. BTW, thanks for Varela, Thompson and Rosch. — Astrophel

Good choice. That’s the bible of embodied cognition.

The finite medium where these inscriptions are (stored)? Maybe your confusing memories with memory. Recalled from where? — Harry Hindu

If neuroscience shows that memories consist in neural structures, which are not static, but dynamic and changing, then, as @Joshs said, memory is a matter of bringing what is encoded in those structures to consciousness. But since they are dynamic, the process would seem to be, at least to some degree, reconstructive.

Then what's the difference between imagining and remembering - neurologically and phenomelogically?

...the difference between imagining and remembering ... — Harry Hindu

@Janus The latter 'reconstruction' is involuntary (neurological) and the former voluntary (phenomenal), no?