What you're interested in just seems outside of the scope of phenomenological analysis, so we'd need some other frame of reference. — Dawnstorm

That may well be right. I was alluding to that possibility when I speculated that "an account of brain development that will explain the emergence of our 'higher' capacities" might be incompatible with phenomenological method -- that the two approaches are mutually exclusive. To me, it remains an open question, but your point of view has a lot of merit.

As for Kant vs. Husserl, it's true that Husserl didn't feel the need to postulate any noumena. The reason I linked the two philosophers together in this context was that both seem to favor an account of subjective experience that lacks development; both noumena and the lifeworld are somehow "present to consciousness" (or deducible from it, if you prefer) whenever there is consciousness. This is questionable, I think.

I don't think he's formulating it radically enough. Yes, this is part of the hard problem, but even more basic is the question, Why do we experience the world at all? Why aren't we robots, or philosophical zombies? If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? — J

I think the point of the neural binding problem and its relationship to Chalmers’ paper is that it has a specific scope. It’s not a philosophical analysis of ‘why is there something and not nothing’. In that sense, it validates Chalmers’ argument. But it also validates the Aristotelian principle of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. That is the point I was really homing in on. The ‘principle of holism’, if you like - that all of the exquisitely orchestrated activity of the billions of cellular activities of the brain somehow gives rise to what is known in philosophy as ‘the subjective unity of experience’, by means stil unknown. No specific system can be identified which accounts for it. And it seems very much like an expression of the same principle which both differentiates and integrates the functionality of organic life right from the appearance of its most rudimentary forms. Hence the reference to enactivism in biology.

None of this standard phenomenological/Kantian picture can be said to obtain until a certain developmental point has been reached. James's "blooming buzzing confusion" has to give way to something like what Sokolowski is describing. — J

Isn’t that where Jean Piaget enters the picture? Developmental psychology? The point about human infants is that they come into the world only partially formed. Unlike a deer which has to hit the ground running and basically is born as a small adult, the human child has an 18 year period of extra-somatic learning to become adult. H.sapiens is unique among species in that regard.

you don't really need to make up your mind about the underlying reality before drawing conclusions. — Dawnstorm

For what it’s worth, my view is that the underlying reality neither does nor does not exist. To say of anything that ‘it exists’ is already to imbue it with some form of intelligibility - even if it exists as hot plasma immediately after the singularity. The ‘in itself’, what exists before or beyond or outside the scope of any cognitive and intellectual activity, is not anything of the kind. Hence, in my specific philosophical hermeneutic, the significance of unknowing. We can’t ’peer behind the curtain’ so to speak, but only be aware that knowledge is limited in this fundamental respect. (That shouldn’t be taken as positivism, by the way - we intuit levels of being beyond what can be empirically known.)

If all we want is "a plausible functional story," what would be wrong with organisms that just react to stimuli without experience? What we want to say about this, of course, is that it's impossible -- the idea of an organism "just reacting" without any form of subjectivity is offensive somehow. Or maybe we want to say that the very concept of "reacting" presupposes experience. But none of this is obvious; we can't just declare this picture it to be impossible. If it is, we need to know why -- back to the hard problem. — J

Further to this thought-provoking question - I have been considering the idea that the appearance of organisms just is the appearance of the rudimentary forms of intentionality. Not that primitive life forms have a meaningful form of consciousness, but that the key thing which differentiates an organism from a mineral is that it maintains in itself a distinction from the environment. Hans Jonas, in The Phenomenon of Life, makes a similar point, suggesting that the organism is not just matter in motion but something that cares about its own persistence, something for which its own being matters in a way that is absent in the purely physical realm.

the organism is not just matter in motion but something that cares about its own persistence — Wayfarer

Yes! But . . . no! For me, a good example of how inadequate our current concepts are for thinking about these questions. A microbe "cares"? Absurd! we say. And yet it certainly behaves as if it does. Well, it must just be a machine then, that "acts as if." But it's alive, and a machine is not . . .

(I'm deploring the paucity of our philosophical talk in general here, not targeting you own [always interesting] thoughts in particular.)

The image that comes to my mind is of a toddler trying to arrange blocks to her satisfaction, while adults look on at this charming stab at set theory. Some day, if the species survives, we will be the adults, looking back on our kiddy selves and saying, "So cute! They thought they could understand what they called 'life' and 'consciousness' with terms like 'care', 'behave', 'causality' . . . adorable!"

Perhaps 'cares' is the wrong word, but the organism persists, it heals from injury, and it reproduces. Something which minerals do not. The point being, even at this rudimentary stage, a form of intentionality is apparent.

Does Husserl believe in the existence of other minds in the literal sense of other?

I posed that question to Grok, which returned the following slop(?)

"Husserl didn’t deny the existence of other minds outright; rather, he approached the issue phenomenologically, focusing on how we experience and constitute the "other" within consciousness. He argued that we cannot directly access another person’s mind as we do our own—our own consciousness is given to us immediately through self-awareness. However, he posited that we encounter others indirectly through their bodies, which appear in our perceptual field as more than mere physical objects. This is what he called the experience of "alterity" (otherness).
In the Fifth Meditation, Husserl explores this through the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). He suggests that we "appresent" or co-present the other’s mind: we perceive another body as similar to our own and, by analogy, attribute to it a consciousness like ours. This isn’t a naive belief or a logical inference but a fundamental structure of experience. For Husserl, the other is not just a theoretical construct; the other’s existence as a minded being is given in a unique, indirect way within our intentional acts.
So, yes, Husserl did believe in the existence of other minds in a literal sense—as distinct, conscious entities separate from oneself—but he reframed this belief within the limits of phenomenological evidence. He didn’t take it as an unexamined assumption (as in everyday realism) but sought to show how this "otherness" is constituted in our subjective experience without stepping outside his transcendental method."

I'm not sure that I follow... In my opinion, "other" minds are a misnomer, because i consider my conception of "other" minds to logically reduce to my personal thoughts, feelings and observations. So I accept that "other minds" exist in a manner of speaking, but i am an anti-realist with respect to their existence. Therefore I am not troubled by disagreements or uncertainty with regards to whether a given machine, animal, vegetable or mineral is conscious or not, and I feel no compulsion to settle the matter one way or another. As I understand it, if Bob questions whether Alice has experiences, he is ultimately questioning the course of his experiences, for Bob doesn't possess a concept of Alice's experiences that is distinct from his own.

Is that what Husserl thought?

I don't know enough to say whether it's Husserl's thought, but I cross-checked it with my AI buddy Chuck (a.k.a. ChatGPT4) which responded 'Overall, the passage is a well-articulated summary, and while it could be more precise in distinguishing Husserl’s phenomenological approach from traditional epistemology, it correctly conveys his main insights into the problem of other minds.'

Anyway it makes perfect intuitive sense to me. Even though I don't know other people in the same way I know myself, I know they are persons like myself. 'Husserl explores this through the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). He suggests that we "appresent" or co-present the other’s mind: we perceive another body as similar to our own and, by analogy, attribute to it a consciousness like ours.' I've often opined that empathy is the natural antidote to solipsism.

Anyway it makes perfect intuitive sense to me. Even though I don't know other people in the same way I know myself, I know they are persons like myself. 'Husserl explores this through the concept of empathy (Einfühlung). He suggests that we "appresent" or co-present the other’s mind: we perceive another body as similar to our own and, by analogy, attribute to it a consciousness like ours.' I've often opined that empathy is the natural antidote to solipsism. — Wayfarer

Certainly empathy is an antidote to psychological solipsism. But does empathy refer to other minds 'in themselves' that possess an existence that is independent of one's experiences of empathy? Didn't Husserl appreciate that methodological solipsism cannot establish the metaphysical realism of other minds?

If we consider borderline cases in the animal kingdom or in AI, the public make wildly different judgements as to the sentience that they ascribe to the entities concerned. Suppose that Alice and Bob are two equally brilliant and informed cognitive scientists who nevertheless disagree as to the sentience they each ascribe to a borderline case 'X'. Are they disagreeing about the same thing? Or is their disagreement akin to an aesthetic disagreement about X that isn't expected to have an objective answer?
According to the anti-realist, Alice and Bob's disagreement as to the sentience of X is only an objective disagreement in so far that their disagreement is the product of different scientific understandings of X. So if Bob and Alice are assumed to have a full and equal scientific understanding of X but nevertheless disagree as to its sentience, then the anti-realist considers their disagreement to be a subjective disagreement that only expresses the fact that Alice and Bob are in different psychological relationships to X. The anti-realist can consider disagreements over the sentience of X to be ethically important, without considering the disagreements to have epistemological or metaphysical significance, at least not from a public perspective.

I would regard the presumption that other beings are like myself as apodictic. I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to believe otherwise. And real life is not a hypothetical exercise.

↪sime I would regard the presumption that other beings are like myself as apodictic. I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to believe otherwise. And real life is not a hypothetical exercise. — Wayfarer

For Husserl such recognition requires a constituting synthesis , an analogizing transfer of sense from what has already been constituted as my immediate sphere of own-ness ( my self-reflecting ego, and my sensing and sensing body) to that of another subject.

“ I can never have access to the body (Leib) of the other except in an indirect fashion, through appresentation, comparison, analogy, projection, and introjection.

There is an interesting interpretation based on the temporality in which subjectivity unfolds. It refers to the absolute novelty of the future now that becomes the present. This absolute novelty makes the non-present now constitutive of subjectivity. Is this not what the other has always meant, another perception as another absolute now? This would restore the possibility of another subjectivity as equally originary.

“The now is not a point but a continuity that is always in transition.” (Lectures on Time-Consciousness)

Makes perfect sense to me…

As does that.

I have an aphorism on my profile page which is trying to express a similar idea, 'Reality comes into existence through beings'. I'm not perfectly happy with it, but the idea that it attempts to express is that apart from the experience of beings nothing exists. See the Schopenhauer excerpt on this page, How Time Began with the First Eye.

Also:

Our experience of time depends on the flow of cosmic time that we measure through our experience of time, and only life can know life. Like the ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its own tail, we are in the universe and the universe is in us. This is the strange loop.

Merleau-Ponty puts his finger on the strange loop when he writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world; and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world that it itself projects.” This statement is meant to clear a path between two extremes. One is the idea that there is a world only for or in consciousness (idealism). The other is the idea that the world exists ready-made and comes presorted into kinds or categories apart from experience (realism). Instead of these two extremes, Merleau-Ponty proposes that each one of the two terms, the conscious subject and the world, makes the other one what it is, and thus they inseparably form a larger whole. In philosophical terms, their relationship is dialectical.

The world Merleau-Ponty is talking about is the life-world (lebenswel), the world we’re able to perceive, investigate, and act in. The subject projects the world because it brings forth the world as a space of meaning and relevance. But the subject can project the world only because the subject inheres in a body already oriented to and engaged with a world that surpasses it. The bodily subject is not just in the world but also of the world. The bodily subject is a project of the world, a way the world locally self-organizes and self-individuates to constitute a living being.

You may want to say that the universe—the whole cosmos or all of nature—subsumes the life-world, so the strange loop pertains only to us and our life-world, not to us and the universe altogether. But quarantining the strange loop this way won’t work. It’s true that our life-world is a minuscule part of an immensely vaster cosmos. The cosmos contains our life-world. But it’s also true that the life-world contains the universe. What we mean is that the universe is always disclosed to us from within the life-world. The life-world sets the horizon within which anything is observable, measurable, and thinkable. So the life-world and the universe themselves are caught up in a strange loop. — The Blind Spot, Evan Thompson, Marcello Gleiser, Adam Frank, Pp 198-9

I would regard the presumption that other beings are like myself as apodictic. I wouldn’t be so egotistical as to believe otherwise. And real life is not a hypothetical exercise. — Wayfarer

It depends what you mean by apodictic. Anti-realism doesn't necessarily deny the possibility of logical certainty with regards to the existence of other minds - on the contrary, if 'other' minds are considered to refer to a psychological aspect of the observer who interprets phenomena , then anti-realism could provide a more compelling account than Cartesian minded realism as to why the existence of other minds cannot be denied. On the other hand, such apodicity would be relative to the observer, perhaps with one observer insisting that a chat bot is conscious and the other insisting otherwise, without there existing an observer-transcendent matter of fact to settle the issue.

It depends what you mean by apodictic — sime

The meaning of ‘apodictic’ is not subject to qualification. Something cannot be relatively apodictic.

The point at issue is that sentient beings are, in fact, beings.