I would only add that the article itself does not claim to represent transcendental idealism but phenomenology. I am responsible for any equivocation between the two.

Understood. Everything I said about transcendental idealism specifically, applies to phenomenology in general. Having said that, phenomenology is not like a single animal, it's more like an ecosystem. There's a ton of variety to it. I myself prefer Hegel as a phenomenologist. I mean, if we're allowed to say that Kant did phenomenology, then surely we must be able to say that Hegel did phenomenology as well. That's not to say that phenomenology is all they ever did as intellectuals. I take it that Kant had other interests as well, the same goes for Hegel.

What phenomenology do I personally dislike? That's a tough question. I would say (and this is certainly controversial) that Husserl is the low hanging fruit of the phenomenology tree. At least what we know about his work. Personally, I'm not going to go through the thousands upon thousands of pages that make up the Husserliana. I don't think it would be necessary for me to do such a thing.

I agree Husserl, and German philosophy generally, is exceedingly verbose and often obtuse. That's why I admit to relying on secondary sources and synoptic accounts, although I own and have read fair amounts of the Crisis of the Western Sciences.

Phenomenology really came alive for me through the book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch. (Thompson is one of the authors of the Blind Spot.) Also Francisco Varela's interest in Buddhist abhidharma (philosophical psychology) really impacted me as I have an MA in Buddhist Studies and practiced vipassana for a long while. So the convergence between phenomenology and Buddhism is now a kind of genre in its own right. Another great exponent is the French philosopher of science, Michel Bitbol, whom I learned about here on this forum. I love his style.

What do you make of that? — Arcane Sandwich

The agnostic part makes sense. As someone with materialist leanings I acknowledge that I cannot be absolutely sure that idealism is not the case; that there is not a cosmic consciousness that holds every little invariant detail that we experience in place. Idealism just seems to me the less plausible of the options. But it is a part of intellectual integrity to admit the defeasible nature of all our theories, even scientific theories.

I don't buy the kinds of arguments like @Wayfarer makes; that we cannot coherently speak of things existing in the absence of percipients. I think such arguments are tendentious at best and profoundly mistaken at worst. I agree with Meillassoux that correlationism is incompatible with the conceptual coherence of thought about the Arche fossil, which is to say it undermines the coherence of paleontology and cosmology.

It's a long time since I read After Finitude, though. so it seems a bit vague to me now, and I never got the idea of the necessity of contingency.

I don't buy the kinds of arguments like Wayfarer makes; — Janus

Just as well I’m not selling, then.

You're trying to sell them, but their poor quality ensures that only the addicted are buying.

Can you see the convergence between cognitive science and idealism?

You can stipulate something like 'to exist is to stand out for a percipient' and of course on that definition nothing can exist absent percipients, which is basically what you are doing insisting: on your stipulated definition being the only "true" one. But that is a trivial tautology, and it is also not in accordance with the common usage of 'exist'. So, in Wittgenstein's terms, you are taking language on holiday. — Janus

As you mention Wittgenstein you might be interested in this snippet:

"Understanding a sentence," Wittgenstein says in Philosophical Investigations, "is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think." Understanding a sentence, too, requires participation in the form of life, the "language-game," to which it belongs. The reason computers have no understanding of the sentences they process is not that they lack sufficient neuronal complexity, but that they are not, and cannot be, participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.

All this may sound trivially true. Wittgenstein himself described his work as a "synopsis of trivialities." — Wittgenstein's Forgotten Lesson

'participants in the culture to which the sentences belong. A sentence does not acquire meaning through the correlation, one to one, of its words with objects in the world; it acquires meaning through the use that is made of it in the communal life of human beings.' Quite in keeping with the theme of the original post, I would have thought.

Husserl can't see the butterflies? — Banno

What he sees is similar but not identical to what every other observer of the ‘same’ butterflies see.

“If one attends to the distinction between things as "originally one's own" and as "empathized" from others, in respect to the how of the manners of appearance, and if one attends to the possibility of discrepancies between one's own and empathized views, then what one actually experiences originaliter as a perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a mere "representation of" ["Vorstellung von"], "appearance of/' the one objectively existing thing. From the synthesis these have taken on precisely the new sense "appearance of," and as such they are henceforth valid. 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen, since it is always in motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of changing experiences and experienced things, one's own and those of others.” (Crisis Of European Sciences)

Can you see the convergence between cognitive science and idealism? — Wayfarer

What do you mean by that, @Wayfarer? I can definitely see a convergence between them, but perhaps I would articulate it differently. Not that it matters, though, if I agree that there is a converge between them.

The essay on which the OP was based makes extensive reference to a recent cognitive science-philosophy book, Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. It is representative of a kind of genre which explores how the brain receives, organises and integrates sensory data to construct its world-picture. That’s where the convergence lies. Also subject of this video.

What he sees is similar but not identical to what every other observer of the ‘same’ butterflies see... " 'The" thing itself is actually that which no one experiences as really seen" — Joshs

If the butterflies-in-themselves are never seen, then he's probably right, and we can't say in which direction they fly. But we don't seem to need butterflies-in-themselves to have a simple chat about the direction in which butterflies fly.

That is, Husserl appears to be talking shite.

If the butterflies-in-themselves are never seen, then he's probably right, and we can't say in which direction they fly. But we don't seem to need butterflies-in-themselves to have a simple chat about the direction in which butterflies fly.

That is, Husserl appears to be talking shite. — Banno

Just read the man instead of working yourself up into a tizzy. Do you honestly think he’s stupid enough to claim that we can’t do what we obviously know we can? He’s not trying to take away from us a single scientific achievement, consensual fact or logical inference. He’s simply showing us how we manage these feats from a more fundament vantage than the how’s that the sciences take as their starting point.

Just read the man instead of working yourself up into a tizzy — Joshs

Cheers. It's not me who is worked up. I am unable to make sense of your notion of the thing in itself. It's obviously important to you, but to me is an example of Antigonish language.

It doesn't do anything.

As you mention Wittgenstein you might be interested in this snippet: — Wayfarer

Quite in keeping with the theme of the original post, I would have thought. — Wayfarer

I'm not seeing the relevance.

The self, as Wittgenstein understands it here, is a metaphysical subject, not a physical or psychological entity. This self is the necessary precondition for the world to appear but is not itself a part of the world. — Wayfarer

If you are going to cite, I'd suggest you would do better to cite the original source.

Anyway, I'll leave you to your interminable search for authority.

@Wayfarer Happy New Year. You seem like a lovely soul. Let me ask you an honest question. Does phenomenology have a blind spot? Here is what I would argue:

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.
2) If so, then: if science has a blind spot, then phenomenology has a blind spot.
3) Science has a blind spot.
4) So, phenomenology has a blind spot.

This is known in the literature as a "parity argument". Think of it like the Ying and the Yang. And you can transition, in a liminal way, from science to phenomenology.

It's a Dream-like level of awareness.

Happy New Year to you also, :party: and thanks for the kind words.

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology. — Arcane Sandwich

That's an assertion not an argument. How would you justify that? And what do you mean by 'ontologically significant'?

It might help to use this previously-quoted passage as a reference:

In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense… but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness. The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. For this reason, all natural science is naive about its point of departure, for Husserl. Since consciousness is presupposed in all science and knowledge, then the proper approach to the study of consciousness itself must be a transcendental one  -  one which… focuses on the conditions for the possibility of knowledge. — Source

1) There is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology. — Arcane Sandwich


That's an assertion not an argument. How would you justify that? And what do you mean by 'ontologically significant'? — Wayfarer

I can craft a new argument in support of it, like so:

5) If science can be compared to phenomenology but not to astrology in some sense, then there is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.
6) Science can be compared to phenomenology but not to astrology in some sense.
1) So, there is no ontologically significant difference between science and phenomenology.

In regards to what I mean by "ontologically significant", I'm alluding to the type of difference that would be a difference-maker when we compare science and phenomenology. Like, it's not apples and oranges, it's not that sort of debate. If science and phenomenology are not like apples and oranges, then they have something more important in common than being "just two fruits".

Cool synopsis. I’m all for reduction from the naturalist attitude, but that realm of “transcendental experience”…..that just felt weird coming out of my mouth. To just call it “reason”, of course, doesn’t advance the phenomenological program, so I get it.

Hello @Wayfarer,

How are you? Just writing to ask you politely if you've found the time to consider my latest argument, above.

All the best,
-Arcane Sandwich

P.S: Time flies and so do fruit flies.

I couldn’t make sense of your comparison.

Look at the passage above your post, specifically:

The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. — Source

Agree or disagree with that proposition? Why?

The difference in ontological stance between the natural sciences and phenomenology is that science is solely concerned with the objectively measurable. It doesn’t take into account the role of the observer in (for example) deciding what to observe or measure, what hypotheses to pursue and what not to, and so on.

This was made unavoidably obvious by the observer or measurement problem in quantum physics. Although that is a special case of a far wider issue, which is also a subject in philosophy of science.

This was made unavoidably obvious by the observer or measurement problem in quantum physics. Although that is a special case of a far wider issue, which is also a subject in philosophy of science. — Wayfarer

Firstly, in QM the so-called "observer problem" is not recognized uncontroversially as entailing that human consciousness is paradigmatically the observer.
Secondly, it is not at all controversial that science begins with observation. How else could it possibly begin? Seems like clutching at straws.

↪Arcane Sandwich
I couldn’t make sense of your comparison.

Look at the passage above your post, specifically:

The world is inconceivable apart from consciousness. Treating consciousness as part of the world, reifying consciousness, is precisely to ignore consciousness's foundational, disclosive role. — Source


Agree or disagree with that proposition? Why? — Wayfarer

I agree with it, of course. Why? Because consciousness is of the elements of subjectivity. And the world is what is not the subject: it is objectivity itself. So, of course, I am against the reification of consciousness. To reify is to commit the fallacy of treating a non-thing as if it were a thing. It is even worse if one believes that consciousness is indeed a real thing, such as the Cartesian res cogitans. Technically speaking, Descartes was speaking nonsense on that point. Literally. Consciousness is not a res to begin with, it is not a "thing". It is, instead, a series of physical processes occurring in the brain of every living creature on this planet that is endowed with a central nervous system. So yes, "the mind is what the brain does", so to speak. None of this means that I am necessarily right. It does mean, however, that I have the right to say it publicly, and to think it privately at the same time. That, is what I call "the Absolute", in the Hegelian sense. It just so happens that I don't believe in Dialectical Synthesis. Instead, I utilize "Dialectical Analysis", if you will, to achieve a sort of reverse-engineering of language itself, and that reveals many things, including the Nature of consciousness. It is a "situated phenomenology", if you will. And that grants it more dignity than pure, non-existential phenomenology.

That is what I believe. Again, I may have beliefs that are false, it just so happens that I am unaware that they are false.

. To reify is to commit the fallacy of treating a non-thing as if it were a thing. It is even worse if one believes that consciousness is indeed a real thing, such as the Cartesian res cogitans. Technically speaking, Descartes was speaking nonsense on that point. Literally. Consciousness is not a res to begin with, it is not a "thing". It is, instead, a series of physical processes occurring in the brain of every living creature on this planet that is endowed with a central nervous system. — Arcane Sandwich

Let's unpack that, there are elements I can go along with, others not so much.

That is indeed what reification means, and I agree that 'res cogitans', the 'thinking thing' is a highly problematic expression in some ways. Husserl himself says as much in Crisis of the European Sciences, where he says that, despite Descartes' genius in recognising the apodictic nature of conscious experience, he then makes the mistake of treating it in a quasi-objective way, 'a little tag end of the world', is how he puts it. Nevertheless Husserl recognises Descartes' genius as do I, so it is not simply a mistake. I think of Descartes' dualism of extensia and cogitans as more like a conceptual or economic model, than a scientific hypothesis in the modern sense.

The point I completely disagree with, however, is that consciousness is a physical process. What does it mean to say that? If it's physical, it ought to be describable, without residue, in terms of the principles of physics and chemistry. But I'm of the school of thought that as soon as living organisms form, no matter how rudimentary, there is already something about them that cannot be so described. It is not an element, a literal elan vital, some mysterious thing or substance, which is reification again. It is more like what Aristotle said in the first place - that they posses an organising principle. (I mean, look at the etymological link between 'organ', 'organic', and 'organisation'.) That manifests in the way that all of the components of organisms are self-organising in such a way as to form a single unified being. As Aristotle put it, organisms possess an intrinsic organisational purpose (as distinct from artifacts, who's purposes are extrinsic.) Stem cells, as is well known, are undifferentiated - which is what makes them so useful for medical purposes - but depending on where in the body they begin to develop, they acquire the specialised characteristics that make them liver cells or eye cells or what have you. That resists reduction to physical principles, although that is still a controversial matter. So I object to the way that you assume that life is known to be physical, as it if it is something already known to science, when in fact it is not. I know that many scientists and philosophers assume that it is so, but that is among the assumptions that I question, and that those I cite are inclined to reject. Not just because 'Aristotle says so' - there are many elements of his science that are completely superseded. But he was right about the model of self-organisation that distinguished organisms from minerals etc. That is something that has been picked up and refined by philosophy of biology.

That, is what I call "the Absolute", in the Hegelian sense. It just so happens that I don't believe in Dialectical Synthesis. Instead, I utilize "Dialectical Analysis", if you will, to achieve a sort of reverse-engineering of language itself, and that reveals many things, including the Nature of consciousness. It is a "situated phenomenology", if you will. And that grants it more dignity than pure, non-existential phenomenology. — Arcane Sandwich

Sorry, not buying. I've learning things here including about an emerging discipline called biosemiotics. As far as 'situated phenomenology' is concerned, one of the key texts is The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, which as the title says, is about embodied cognition. Evan Thompson is one of the co-authors of that book and the OP we're discussing.

Firstly, in QM the so-called "observer problem" is not recognized uncontroversially as entailing that human consciousness is paradigmatically the observer. — Janus

Agree. The essay puts it as follows:

Today, interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about what matter is, and what our role is with respect to it. These differences concern the so-called ‘measurement problem’: how the wave function of the electron reduces from a superposition of several states to a single state upon observation. For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.

According to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device. Other approaches, such as the ‘many worlds’ and ‘hidden variables’ interpretations, seek to preserve an observer-independent status for the wave function. But this comes at the cost of adding features such as unobservable parallel universes. A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. In other words, making a measurement is like making a bet on the world’s behaviour, and once the measurement is made, updating one’s knowledge. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world. From this viewpoint, the equations of quantum physics don’t refer just to the observed atom but also to the observer and the atom taken as a whole in a kind of ‘observer-participancy’.

Participatory realism is controversial. But it’s precisely this plurality of interpretations, with a variety of philosophical implications, that undermines the sober certainty of the materialist and reductionist position on nature. In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world. — The Blind Spot

Put another way, the very fact of the controversy counts against a materialist explanation.