Excellent post, thankyou.

Philosophers have called this minimal “I” a 'pure witness' or a 'transcendental ego,' — plaque flag

Which philosophers in particular? Any particular examples in mind?

I do understand why Husserl speaks of a transcendental ego rather than something neutral, something prior to such articulation. — plaque flag

Your presentation of the matter is somewhat idiosyncratic. According to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods). It is the "observing self" that remains when we bracket out or set aside all our beliefs about the world, including our own existence in it. This bracketing process, which Husserl termed "phenomenological reduction," allows for the focus on consciousness as such and its structures without becoming entangled in empirical or naturalistic assumptions. For Husserl, the transcendental ego is the source and condition for the constitution of all meaning and objectivity. Objects appear as meaningful and objective only within the intentional acts of the transcendental ego. This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. (It is in this last where one can trace the influence of Kant although of course Husserl also departs from Kant in many important ways.)

This doesn't so much 'dissolve the sensing and thinking subject', as dissolving acts of sensing and thinking so as to lay bare the transcendental subject.

But, do carry on. All grist for the mill, and a splendid mill it is.

Which philosophers in particular? — Wayfarer

To name a few: Kant, Husserl, Wilbur. But the idea, under various names, is at the center of modern philosophy. Wittgenstein is admirably focused on exactly the right issue.

This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. — Wayfarer

In my view, es gibt. The world worlds and being 'streams.' We might say also that time times. As Mach saw, there are lots of causal relationships we can postulate / trace between clumps of neutral elements we call selves and clumps of neutral elements we call cups or X-rays. But I think it's best to interpret 'actively constituted by conscious acts' as the egoic structure of the being stream.

Objects exist in a meaningful context structured by care.

We can’t give a successful or reliable meaning to talk of a non-perspectival 'unexperienceable reality.'

My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff ‘pure experience,’ the knowing can easily be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. — W. James, Does Consciousness Exist?

“Pure experience” is good, but it’ll tempt some to think of an experiencer as primary (or primary in the wrong way, as more than a structural tendency of the stream). “Pure experience” drags the history of its development behind it. Such experience is 'pure' because it is no longer representation. It is not something between a subject and a hidden real world. It is just that which is.

It is a beingstream that includes embedded entities that are for practical reasons often sorted into thoughts and objects, and so on. But these embedded entities are connected like the threads of a blanket. They are semantically interdependent.

A “worldstreaming” is the world given dynamically and perspectively to a subject, which is no longer really a subject but just the being of the world as grasped by a living human being (given perspectively, in the context of motive and memory, etc.)

I share an analogy that might help.

ontological cubism

Anyone else ever play GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 ? It was the supreme first-person shooter of its day.

4 players could each get a 4th of the screen as their POV on the world they shared with the other 3 players. Now this world only existed for those evolving ('moving') points of view.

In the same way, I think our world only exists for or through our own 'split screen' perspectival 'experience.' At least, it's all that we seem to be able to talk about with sense and confidence.


Also this:

This connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.

And as the same town, looked at from various sides, appears quite different and becomes as it were numerous in aspects [perspectivement]; even so, as a result of the infinite number of simple substances, it is as if there were so many different universes, which, nevertheless are nothing but aspects [perspectives] of a single universe, according to the special point of view of each Monad.

And by this means there is obtained as great variety as possible, along with the greatest possible order; that is to say, it is the way to get as much perfection as possible. — link, section 56

https://plato-philosophy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/The-Monadology-1714-by-Gottfried-Wilhelm-LEIBNIZ-1646-1716.pdf

The town only exists through and for the monads.

The idea of a transcendental subject or ego sounds like dualism to me and not a fundamental idea. For a fundamental theory the subject and and the ego would have to be reduced. For transcendental idealism both would not really exist. The subject-object duality would be, in Sartre's words, of a functional order only, and the ego would be a fantasy. (As your title seems to suggest}.

The phrase 'natural phenomenalism' is intriguing. I'm struggling to figure out what it might mean. Does it refer to particular theory or approach?

.

For a fundamental theory the subject and and the ego would have to be reduced. — FrancisRay

:up:

The subject-object duality would be, in Sartre's words, of a functional order only, and the ego would be a fantasy. — FrancisRay

I think my view is pretty close to Sartre's. I'm a fan of his work.

Does it refer to particular theory or approach? — FrancisRay

My influences are blurring together in the phrase, but I'd say that 'neutral monism' and 'phenomenalism' are raw ingredients. I think 'my' view is even part of the tradition, going back at least to Leibniz. It could also be called perspectivism.

'I don't see the world differently. Or this is still not strong and clear enough. I am the world from a different perspective. The world [so far as we can know or even make sense of ] only exists perspectively. '

Here's a description of the obvious that is nevertheless ontologically significant.

Each I finds itself as a middle point, so to speak a zero-point of a system of coordinates, in reference to which the I considers, arranges, and cognizes all things of the world, the already known or the unknown. But each I apprehends this middle point as something relative. For example, the I changes bodily its place in space, and while it continues to say “here” it knows that “here” in each case is spatially different....

The same holds for things. Each person has around himself the same world and perhaps several see the same thing, the same segment of the world. But each has his thing-appearance: The same thing appears for each in a different way in accordance with the different place in space. The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties. — Husserl : Basic Problems Lecture (available free online )

Who has ever experience the world differently ? And can I even make sense of one who claims to not see perspectively, not find themselves at the center of space ? This is the world as we know it, where to be is to be perceived or at least perceivable. That's the being we can make sense of. So the issue is largely semantic. We move on to the ego.

Each of us knows himself as an I. Now, being in that attitude where each of us finds himself present as an I, what does each of us find present in himself and in connection with himself ? We began thus with a description of the kind that everyone had to say “I,” and it was to this that everything else was tied. It is best to speak here in the singular first person and to continue thus: I posit myself as being and as being this here, as being with this and that determinate content. I posit me as experiencing this and that; I have such and such dispositions and acts. But I do not posit me as a disposition or an act; I do not come upon me as a disposition or an act.

Further, I posit me and find me not only present as an experiencing subject but also as a subject of personal properties, as a person with a certain character, as having certain intellectual and moral dispositions, etc. This I find to be present, of course, in a completely different way than I find my experiences to be present.

Further, I find me and what is mine as having duration in time, as changing or not changing during their duration, and I distinguish the flowing Now and the still given “just past” in retention. Further, in recollection I come upon myself as being the very same one who existed earlier, as still perduring now, s the one who perdured earlier on, who experienced such and such things in succession, etc.
Further, I have, as I find this, a lived body; and the lived body is a thing among other things that I likewise come upon. I also find this in time: In the Now, the existing lived body as my body; in the just past, the lived body which has just been; in recollection, the recollected body — the lived body belongs to me at all times.

This can be framed in terms of a worldstreaming centered on ('in') a 'lived body' which is embedded in a conceptual culture. But of course I manage my persona, my mask. I am caught up as an 'I' in something like Brandom's normative inferential semantics. My 'I' exists in various layers in the world. But (I claim) the deepest 'I' (Wittgenstein's, etc.) is no longer an 'I' except in the most minimal sense --as the being of a world which is given with a reliably perspectival form. Granted that the stream of experience changes, are their general structures which are relatively constant ? I think Husserl and Heidegger and others have tried to sketch that relatively constant structure. If being is a river, it has a shape. (?)

The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the
time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers. And this I is connected to, in a spatial-temporal way, the lived body, upon whose functioning the psychical states and acts (which, once again, are ordered within objective time) are dependent, dependent in their objective, i.e., their spatial–temporal existence and condition. Everything psychical is spatial–temporal. Even if one holds it to be an absurdity, and perhaps justifiably so, that the psychical I itself (along with its experiences) has extension and place, it does have an existence in space, namely as the I of the respective lived body, which has its objective place in space. And therefore each person says naturally and rightly : I am now here and later there. — Husserl

I'll end by referring back to GoldenEye (video games given only via first-person perspectives) and ontological cubism.

'I don't see the world differently. Or this is still not strong and clear enough. I am the world from a different perspective. The world [so far as we can know or even make sense of ] only exists perspectively. ' — plaque flag

For the world of time and space this is the case. But what Sartre is saying, and also Kant,and the Perennial philosophy, is that by reduction all perspectives can be reduced and for a fundamental analysis would not really exist. All Kantian phenomenon would be empty of substance and illusory, and this would include the ego and the individual 'I'. .

I misread your word 'neutral' as 'natural; - sorry about that.

In what sense do you call it neutral? . .

For the world of time and space this is the case. — FrancisRay

:up:

In what sense do you call it neutral? — FrancisRay

It is neutral as being neither mind or nor matter, prior to both.

I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether. It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles. Those who still cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumor left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy. During the past year, I have read a number of articles whose authors seemed just on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness,[1] and substituting for it that of an absolute experience not due to two factors. But they were not quite radical enough, not quite daring enough in their negations. For twenty years past I have mistrusted ‘consciousness’ as an entity; for seven or eight years past I have suggested its non-existence to my students, and tried to give them its pragmatic equivalent in realities of experience. It seems to me that the hour is ripe for it to be openly and universally discarded.

To deny plumply that ‘consciousness’ exists seems so absurd on the face of it – for undeniably ‘thoughts’ do exist – that I fear some readers will follow me no farther. Let me then immediately explain that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an entity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/james1.htm

I'd say that people are conscious of (aware of) the world. The world only exists in this way, or so I suggest, but we have to include the whole horizonal lifeworld and J . S . Mill's permanent possibilities of perception. We have to accept that daydreams and prime numbers exist just like lobsters and contracts, differently yes but in the same logical-inferential nexus.

I speculate that the problem has been so difficult for philosophy because methodological solipsism gets the perspectival form of the world right but typically fails to integrate the equally important insight into the profound and even foundational sociality of reason. I credit Feuerbach for his clarity on their relationship.

Unlike sense experience, thought is essentially communicable. Thinking is not an activity performed by the individual person qua individual. It is the activity of spirit, to which Hegel famously referred in the Phenomenology as “‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’” (Hegel [1807] 1977: 110).

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ludwig-feuerbach/

Culture is softwhere running on the crowd. No particular individual is needed, but the absense of all flesh (all hardware) would be the end of the game. We might also think of a flame jumping from melting candle to melting candle, or of data moving from storage device to storage device.

ccording to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods). It is the "observing self" that remains when we bracket out or set aside all our beliefs about the world, including our own existence in it. This bracketing process, which Husserl termed "phenomenological reduction," allows for the focus on consciousness as such and its structures without becoming entangled in empirical or naturalistic assumptions. For Husserl, the transcendental ego is the source and condition for the constitution of all meaning and objectivity. Objects appear as meaningful and objective only within the intentional acts of the transcendental ego. This means that the world's objectivity and our knowledge of it are not simply "given," but are actively constituted by conscious acts. (It is in this last where one can trace the influence of Kant although of course Husserl also departs from Kant in many important ways.)

This doesn't so much 'dissolve the sensing and thinking subject', as dissolving acts of sensing and thinking so as to lay bare the transcendental subject. — Wayfarer

The reduction doesn’t dissolve acts of sensing, that is, acts of constituting and objectivating, and certainly not acts of feeling. It dissolves the products of these acts ( real spatial objects and empirical facts) in order to lay bare the irreducible structure of synthetic constitution itself.

“In no way do we accept what any empirical act presents to us as being. Instead of living in its achievement, and instead of clinging naıvely to its positing with its sense after its achievement, we rather turn to the act itself and make it itself, plus what in it may present itself to us,
an object.

The transcendental ego is not an observer, it is a synthesizer and product of synthesis, continually generating new senses of meaning. The transcendent ego is not a subject as opposed to an object. It is a synthetic structure composed of a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) pole. It is only abstractively that we can think of these poles separately from each other. This subject-object structure is only what it as through its acts, as the flowing repetition of temporal syntheses (retention-presencing-protention).

“The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all embracing consciousness of internal time.”

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

“In my ego there is formed, from out of the 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)

The transcendental reduction does not remove empirical
contents, it leaves them as they are but does not attend to them in their specific relativity and contingency. Rather, it uses them as examples in order to extract from them what is universal to any and all particular data of consciousness, the fact that what an object is is a function of its mode of givenness within intentional constitution.

Granted that the stream of experience changes, are their general structures which are relatively constant ? I think Husserl and Heidegger and others have tried to sketch that relatively constant structure. If being is a river, it has a shape. (?)

The psychological I belongs to objective time, the same time to which the spatial world belongs, to the time that is measured by clocks and other chronometers… The thing has its front and back, above and below. And what is my front of the thing is for the other perhaps its back, and so on. But it is the same thing with the same properties — plaque flag

What you’re quoting is an analysis of how we perceive our relation to things within the natural attitude. You realize of course that Husserl goes on to ‘deconstruct’ the idealizations of the natural attitude and its objective time as derivative of subjective time. When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. Through the reduction we can come to see that it is not the same empirical thing we all see from our own vantage, any more than the aspectual features unfolding in our apprehension of a spatial object belong to the ‘same’ object.

When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. — Joshs

Sounds like an important point. I can guess at the answer, but for you, as a long time student of phenomenology, what is the significance of this point for how humans live with each other? Can it be applied in a practical way?

Sounds like an important point. I can guess at the answer, but for you, as a long time student of phenomenology, what is the significance of this point for how humans live with each other? Can it be applied in a practical way? — Tom Storm

A misinterpretation of the significance of scientific results can result in the marginalizing and excluding of those who deviate from the norms out of which the scientific facts are generated. I was watching a youtube presentation by the popular physicist Shaun Carroll He was charming his college audience with his confident and humor-laden assertions about the superiority of the scientific method over claims from religious traditions. The ignorance he displayed concerning the basis of his own field in unprovable presuppositions turned my stomach. Phenomenology gives us a way to identity and protect the unique perspectives of all participants in a community even when their views deviate from the dominant scientific conventions.

Thank you. Yes, Carroll seems fairly smug at times.

Phenomenology gives us a way to identity and protect the unique perspectives of all participants in a community even when their views deviate from the dominant scientific conventions. — Joshs

Maybe not for this thread, but what would a culture look like which did this well - I am assuming the notion of a mainstream or dominant culture would dissolve or go. I can't imagine how humans would organize themselves according to this and I wonder what protection of unique perspectives would look like. Do you think we will get there?

The transcendent ego is not a subject as opposed to an object. It is a synthetic structure composed of a subjective (noetic) and objective (noematic) pole. It is only abstractively that we can think of these poles separately from each other. — Joshs

It seems we basically agree on this issue. The more radically we take subjectivity, the less it remains subject as opposed to object. We move to the undifferentiated unity of both, toward a streaming flux of becoming.

“The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all embracing consciousness of internal time.” — Joshs

The issue is whether it should still be called 'consciousness.' There's an original eruption of flowing presence, the 'stream' of consciousness or experience or sentience. But what is this experience made of ? If not the world ? So the world is 'given' (is there) so that (for instance) its visual aspect largely determined by the turning of a creatures neck. The lived body's centrality suggests calling it consciousness, but this lived body is itself in the world.

When Husserl says that through empirical knowledge we come to see our perception of a thing as only our subjective perspective on the ‘same’ thing that others see, he means that it is the peculiar function of empirical objectivity to give the impression , through apperceptive idealization, of a unity where there is only similarity. Through the reduction we can come to see that it is not the same empirical thing we all see from our own vantage, any more than the aspectual features unfolding in our apprehension of a spatial object belong to the ‘same’ object. — Joshs

I claim that we see the same object differently. Even I, by myself, see the same object differently as I walk around it or shine my flashlight on it. The object transcends and unifies its adumbrations.

Our perspectively given 'worlds' are glued together with our language and our profoundly empathetic/social intentions. I (usually) intend precisely the practical-shared-worldly object. I can't even begin to do philosophy without talking about, intending, our world. So we don't have a plurality of worlds but a plurality of perspectives on the same world. Different people can step in the same river, though it's never given (experienced) in the same way twice.

Speaking quite universally, the surrounding world is not a world "in itself" but is rather a world "for me," precisely the surrounding world of its Ego-subject, a world experienced by the subject or grasped consciously in some other way and posited by the subject in his intentional lived experiences with the sense-content of the moment. As such, the surrounding world is in a certain way always in the process of becoming, constantly producing itself by means of transformations of sense and ever new formations of sense along with the concomitant positings and annullings.
...
To begin with, the world is, in its core, a world appearing to the senses and characterized as "on hand," a world given in straightforward empirical intuitions and perhaps grasped actively. The Ego then finds itself related to this empirical world in new acts, e.g., in acts of valuing or in acts of pleasure and displeasure. In these acts, the object is brought to consciousness as valuable, pleasant, beautiful, etc., and indeed this happens in various ways, e.g., in original givenness. In that case, there is
built, upon the substratum of mere intuitive representing, an evaluating which, if we presuppose it, plays, in the immediacy of its lively motivation, the role of a value-"perception" (in our terms, a value-reception) in which the value character itself is given in original intuition. — Husserl

Note this part: the value character itself is given in original intuition. This is the stream before it's been analyzed or divided into its subjective and objective components. This value dimension in the worldstream is probably, more than anything, what gives it an teleologically egoic structure. I am the there itself, and yet the there tends to flow so that my belly stays full.

I claim that we see the same object differently. Even I, by myself, see the same object differently as I walk around it or shine my flashlight on it. The object transcends and unifies its adumbrations. — plaque flag

For Husserl the object transcends its adumbrations because it is not an actual substance but only an idealization, the noetic striving toward the fulfillment of the idea of a unified, singular object, which can never be completely attained. The unified object is the subjective (noetic) interest in or attitude toward the adumbrated elements we constitute. This ‘intentional effect’ forces us to think the similar in terms of the same. Nothing in our experience of the world ever gives us the justification to claim that what we see is the ‘same’ object, except in a relative way.

“The consciousness of its [the object's] existence is here a belief in act; by virtue of the accord in which the perceptive appearances flow off in original presentation, retention, and protention, an accord of continuous self-affirmation, belief is continuous certainty of belief, which has its certainty in this originality of the object in its living being-present.”

The object is “a unity which “appears” continually in the change of the modes of its givenness and which belongs to the essential structure of a specific act of the ego.” “The "object" of consciousness, the object as having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective process, does not come into the process from outside; on the contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis of consciousness.

“…only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjec­tively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about. But idealism was always too quick with its theories and for the most part could not free itself from hidden objectivistic presuppositions…”(Basic Problems)

I find your approach odd. That the ultimate is not mind or matter is the claim of the Perennial philosophy, and I wonder why you don't consider this a solution to the problem.

It is a neutral metaphysical theory for which consciousness is fundamental and there are no philosophical problems.

The trouble with phenomenology is that it is effectively naive realism and can never produce a fundamental theory. . . .

….

According to various textbooks, the 'transcendental ego' refers to 'subjective consciousness devoid of empirical content', namely anything that pertains to the external world or to the ego's psychological states (e.g. feelings or moods) — Wayfarer

These textbooks are not explaining transcendental idealism. The phrase 'transcendental ego' is an oxymoron since the ego would be an illusion, and the ultimate state of consciousness would not be subjective. If we reify the ego as a subjective phenomenon then we are not going to be able to solve any problems since the idea doesn't make metaphysical sense. It would be subjective idealism, which has to be abandoned for transcendental idealism.

. . .

Does the hard problem vanish or rather find itself replaced ?

I don't think so. The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you.

Phenomenology might help us find an answer to the hard problem, or it might tell us that the answer we want is unattainable, but it can't answer the problem because the problem is about explaining the subjective elements of consciousness in the same sort of language/model that we use for explaining how a car works.

This seems more akin to the answer of eliminitivism, an attempt to dismiss the grounds for the question. Now, maybe the question is unanswerable, or maybe it is asked in the wrong way, but it seems to me to be a fairly reasonable question, so I don't think the difficulties we experience with it can be reduced to "pseudo-problems."

Other types of answers might be valid, but they aren't the type of answer the hard problem is about. We want answer that would tell us something like "do x and y and then z is exactly the thing you'll experience." I'll allow that this is quite possibly a bad question because it is impossible to answer, but it does seem to be a coherent and fair question. "Explain my mind to me like my mechanic explains how my breaks work," is meaningful at least.

Plus, even for the type of answer it is, it leaves me wanting more. Why these sensations and not others? Why do they follow each other in such and such a way? How is it so easy for me to think through what my future sensations will be based on my past ones? If the subject is a limit on the world, why such limits? If the being stream has a beginning, why did it start streaming and why is the stream like it is? And these sorts of questions seem bound to lead us into the same sorts of questions where the traditional thorny problems of philosophy lie.

If the world is one and the thinking subject is illusory, then there doesn't seem like there should be any barrier to explaining the appearance of the thinking subject in the same terms we use for all sorts of things in the world (e.g. how a TV works). But then that is just the hard problem repackaged as an explanation of appearance.

The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you.

Phenomenology might help us find an answer to the hard problem, or it might tell us that the answer we want is unattainable, but it can't answer the problem because the problem is about explaining the subjective elements of consciousness in the same sort of language/model that we use for explaining how a car works — Count Timothy von Icarus

So by way of circular reasoning, if we define science as a conventionalized philosophical language, then the philosophical solution to the hard problem only becomes a scientific solution once we translate the former language into a more conventionalized form. Kind of like what enactivist psychology and neurophenomenology have done with phenomenology.

I don't think so. The "hard problem," is the problem of explaining how consciousness arises and how it produces its subjective qualities through a scientific theory that has the same rigor, comprehensiveness, and depth as any other of the major scientific theories we are familiar with (e.g., explanations of cellular reproduction.) If that's sort of answer you're looking for, this sort of framing isn't going to help you. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But if consciousness is the being of the world, we have what's maybe even a deeper problem.

Just to be clear, I'm not in the 'nothing to see here' camp. Basically Madonna was right that life is a mystery. You give some good examples of us always being able to ask why. As far as I can tell, there 'must' be brute fact, just given the structure of our cognition.

I've gone back and forth on the p-zombie issue. But at the moment I think Husserl is right. It's something like empathy that convinces us of the reality of others. It's automatic. A sufficiently sophisticated android could make us fall in love with it, give our lives to save it from danger. I don't know if/when we'll get there technologically. But there is a kind of privacy to pain and pleasure, despite their undeniable social aspect, which (as Wittgenstein and others point out) makes talking about them possible. Nevertheless, I 'am' a perspective on the world. And I trust that so are you.

Can scientific methods tell an ideal p-zombie from the real thing ? What does this mean exactly ? If consciousness is the being of the world from a strangely private perspective,...?

All I can imagine is finding causal relationships and so on between thinks that get taken as conscious. But a public criterion for consciousness 'has' to include androids of a certain quality. The hard problem either looks so hard that 'problem' feels like the wrong word or it melts into something tractable but no longer so exciting ---a mere branch of AI perhaps, at least implicitly.

Nothing in our experience of the world ever gives us the justification to claim that what we see is the ‘same’ object, except in a relative way. — Joshs

:up:
Perhaps you don't see that I see that part very well. The object-for-me is not, in an important sense, the object-for-you. But it's the essence of conceptuality to make the unequal equal. We must tame the chaos, lump things together. I think Lakoff and Hofstadter and right that we are deeply metaphorical, analogical beings, reusing a pattern grasped here also over there. Philosophy is nonfiction poetry. We speak of the stream of consciousness or the streaming of time. We float an anemic mythology. We speak of radicality and basis, still dirtworshipppers pointing at roots and soil.

To me phenomenology is largely about making the transparent opaque. We look right through the glass of our subjectivity. If I turn my head, I 'know' its not the whole world twisting. If I close my eyes, I know the lights didn't just go off.

When a crowd of people all observe a rocket bursting, they will ignore whatever there is reason to think peculiar and personal in their experience, and will not realize without an effort that there is any private element in what they see. But they can, if necessary, become aware of these elements. One part of the crowd sees the rocket on the right, one on the left, and so on. Thus when each person's perception is studied in its fullness, and not in the abstract form which is most convenient for conveying information about the outside world, the perception becomes a datum for psychology phenomenology. — Russell. --- I changed the last word

You might not find this fancy or difficult enough (I'm joking with you), but I think Russell is doing a pretty good job of pointing out the natural attitude, for which subjectivity is conveniently transparent.

The trouble with phenomenology is that it is effectively naive realism and can never produce a fundamental theory. . . . — FrancisRay

We must have radically different conceptions of phenomenology. I'd say it's largely the opposite of naive realism. Though I will grant that it sometimes comes back around to a highly sophisticated direct realism.

“…only idealism, in all its forms, attempts to lay hold of subjectivity as subjectivity and to do justice to the fact that the world is never given to the subject and the communities of subjects in any other way than as the subjec­tively relative valid world with particular experiential content and as a world which, in and through subjectivity, takes on ever new transformations of meaning; and that even the apodictically persisting conviction of one and the same world, exhibiting itself subjectively in changing ways, is a conviction motivated purely within subjectivity, a conviction whose sense—the world itself, the actually existing world—never surpasses the subjectivity that brings it about.

There's much to like about this quote, but the world and the subject are interdependent. The subject 'is' the care-structured streaming of the world. Entangled, correlated.

The world is never the same 'twice,' and yet I am describing the world, as predictably infinitely novel. Concepts have a relative stability that makes our conversation possible. I 'know' that people never perfectly understand one another. It's fog and blur forever. But we try to find the least worst words for it all.

Right, but it isn't just translation. We'd need some sort of very good predictive capability. Something like, "I'm going to run this program on the Neurostim 8000, but first I'm going to describe in very fine detail what it is you'll experience and think. Then I'll run it and you'll find that my description was highly accurate."



I think if we had something like the technology mentioned above, something such that someone could control what you see, the emotions you feel, and even the words of your internal monologue by "playing your nervous system like a piano," then most people would say we've sufficiently grounded the causal underpinnings of experience to be able to tell when something is conscious at a human level versus just appearing so, even if we can't fully explain exactly where that consciousness emerges on the level from zygote to new born.

Is such technology possible? That's another question. But if it ever exists, I think many of the questions around the hard problem will be effectively solved.

I think if we had something like the technology mentioned above, something such that someone could control what you see, the emotions you feel, and even the words of your internal monologue by "playing" your nervous system like a piano, then most people would say we've sufficiently grounded the causal underpinnings of experience to be able to tell when something is conscious at a human level versus just appearing so, even if we can't fully explain exactly where that consciousness emerges on the level from zygote to new born. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still think you maybe aren't addressing the being issue ? Or, more likely, I'm being muddy in making my point.

First, there's the relatively boring consciousness, which is 'just' sufficiently sophisticated interactive behavior. It wouldn't actually be boring (we might fall in love), but it's a definite mundanization of the concept consciousness. It's more like intelligence or self-modelling. Turing test stuff, really. Can we imagine sapience without sentience ? I found a baby turtle in the woods today. Perhaps the best AI tech of 2085, which we'll call Charlie, will be much more sapient but not sentient at all. I may be able to learn from Charlie, but does Charlie 'have' the world ?

So the'exciting' kind of consciousness is of course the 'thereness' of the world 'for' sentience (a condition for the possibility of actually rather than merely seeming to give a damn). I think the world only exists perspectively. But I also can't make sense of sentience outside of a world. I'm a correlationist, I guess. But not an idealist, as if subjectivity could make sense except as the-world-for.