Since deterministic systems have to adhere to the Principle of Least Action and humans consistently violate this principle, is this free will? — Agent Smith

This thought experiment here is ill conceived because causality is NOT derived from physics. It is presupposed by physics. The principle of least action is just a variant of the principle of sufficient cause, which is apodictic.

If you want to go after freedom, you have to look at how the things work: long story short, we live most of our lives unfree, that is, bound to the processes of living that are part of our existence's structure: the working, cooking, driving, making plans, and so on--these are not "freely" done. They are done without any second order of thought at all, robotically, if you will, automatically, no more free than my finger hitting the right key while typing. Invisibly done, as an act of instinct: it occurs independently of a free will, even if there is such a thing.
But stop typing, because there is a disfunction, and now you have to attend to this, and now you are "free" of the automatic process. Now pull back from the entire living process of rote activities, allow none to possess your attention. Now you are in a rare state of mind, open, and when a thought does occur, you dismiss it, for thoughts are agencies of control.
You are free, are you not?

Doing so is no easy task. But I’ll just say that if intrinsic value is a non-contingent end-in-itself this to me strongly connotes concepts of an ultimate reality. Brahman as an eastern, Hindu notion of this; the One as a western Neo-platonic notion. The underlying idea pivoting around the supposition that all sentient beings are, for lack of a better phrasing, fragmented emanations of this ultimate reality which is not contingent and is an end-in-itself. Thereby making each sentient being endowed with that which is not contingent and an end-in-itself, i.e. with intrinsic value, relative to itself. — javra

The hard part is to ground intrinsicness. Language itself, the defining and contextualizing, gives whatever it takes up a form that can be controlled, totalized, if you will, into familiar categories. Speaking qua speaking puts things in familiar contexts; it is inherently contextualizing, which is why philosophers have so much resistance to something like "qualia". If we could talk about qualia, then that would be talk about ultimate reality.
Not much you can say about Brahman, is there. The atman is Brahman is pretty empty, but then, there is the bliss of this realization that is qualitatively different from qualia, the "being appeared to redly" kind of thing. This bliss is not just a good time. It is deeply profound in a way that is alien to everydayness. This is where concepts like ultimate reality (you find this in the Abhidhamma) get interesting: it is an intuitive experience, not found in our language because it is not normalized for sharing. It would be different if we were all Tibetan monks, who, I have read, talked readily about this kind of thing. Ultimate here is the big impossibility of Wittgenstein, who told us that our world is structured such that certain concepts are just nonsense. this kind of thinking stopped philosophers from moving beyond the commonplace thinking of science and culture. Witt was no mystic.
Anyway, as I see it, if you are looking for ways to talk about ultimacy, you have to go "to the things themselves" and here, you have to discover the "Otherness" of the world. In my thought, this begins with Husserl. See his Ideas I, and prior (or contemporaneously) the last books of Logical Investigations which I am just reading now for the first time. Husserl gets very intimate with the intuitive disclosure of the world and gives the whole affair ground breaking language. One cannot SAY the world, but one can approach it, negatively (apophatically) go into it. Husserl's phenomenological reduction is like this: a method, not unlike meditation!

Yes, it has to be. How would you isolate the variable intrinsic value otherwise? — Agent Smith

Oh. I get the point. Intrinsic value is useless, it has no utility, not good for something else.....I was a bit slow on this. I thought you had no use for the idea itself.

For anything at all. We don't need to specify what exactly something is useful for; that something can be used (Wittgenstein & meaning of life) is all that matters. — Agent Smith

No, no. I mean, you say intrinsic value is useless. Yet the notion of instrumentality implies something that is not useless, something that is for what is not instrumental. Otherwise, you end up with a system instrumentality that has no designated value.
Wittgenstein put value up front, but insisted we couldn't talk about this, even though he talked about it. Its the "ladder" explanation.

1. Intrinsic value only [useless] :sad:
2. Instrumental value only [useful] :smile:
3. Intrinsic + Instrumental value [useless + useful] :chin: — Agent Smith

Useful instrumentality begs the question: instrumental for what? This will no doubt point to something else that bears the same question, until something that is not questionable is reached.

One must remember that nothing in the world has meaning in and of itself, but only in relation to a conscious subject. Another way of clarifying might be to say that the physical world is utterly meaningless. It only gains meaning when biological consciousness bestows meaning upon it. So, your struggle is right on the money. Intrinsic value is necessarily a value to biological consciousness, it may well be a property of an object, but it can only have value if consciousness determines it so. — boagie

But you have to see that conscious subject ARE the world. There is nothing localized about a person at the broadly conceived totality. I am what the world does under certain conditions and this physical existence just the form of something eternal. So, when consciousness "bestows meaning" upon a thing, this act has only apparent boundaries of locality. But the concept of locality altogether disappears in the broadest conception of things.

To my mind the answer is: that for which anything is instrumental. More precisely: each and every first-person subject itself relative to itself in nonreflective manners (“nonreflective” here meaning: intrinsic value doesn’t pertain to the thoughts one thinks of oneself - for these are instrumental - but to oneself as, in part, thinker of such thoughts).

Given that each sentient being holds intrinsic value relative to itself, it can then be possible for some sentient beings to find other sentient beings’ personal intrinsic value to be of intrinsic value to their own selves: we address such tendencies by terms such as “compassion”, “love”, and so forth. Their suffering becomes our suffering just as their joys become our joys.

This to the effect that if one’s compassion for some other is strictly instrumental then it cannot be genuine compassion. For example, if you hold compassion for another strictly so as to be praised by the general public so as to get a promotion at work, you in fact don’t genuinely care for the other. But to the extent that you do genuinely care for the other, their being - replete with its intrinsic value relative to itself - will become intrinsically valuable to you.

When we don’t (intrinsically) value the intrinsic value of another, they at best become only instrumentally valuable to us. And this is where they get used.

If all this holds, then by shear fact that subjective beings occur in the world, so too occurs intrinsic value. If any one of us doesn’t find anyone else to be intrinsically valuable, the individual will nevertheless be intrinsically valuable to him/herself. — javra

I think you are close, or, closer than anyone I have come across. But you don't quite say what intrinsic value IS. The having it as something on the value end of a desire, that is, in the valuing agency herself, is of course right, but how does the having such a value make that value an intrinsic value? What makes it intrinsic? Being non contingent. This means among all the things one can say to contextualize the value, once these are suspended, there still remains what is independent of all this. Once it is linked to a contingency, like ice cream or skiing, then you find difference, you find indeterminacy. Intrinsic value can't be something that is relativized to a particular person's tastes, for if, say, skiing were an intrinsic value, it would be a value for all. Intrinsic values are not variable.
The trick is to reconcile the vagaries of subjectivity with the requirements of intrinsic value.

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.

↪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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Right, so you obviously believe Dennett did not understand traditional phenomenology. I'm inclined to agree, insofar as Dennett claims that it consists in mere introspection; which is what I take Zahavi to be arguing.

So, the question that follows is as to what else phenomenology consists in (because it seems that introspection is definitely part of it). Off the top of my head seems to consist in extending the kind of synthetic a priori thinking that began with Descartes and was improved by Kant into more corporeal areas of inquiry. — Janus

I think Dennett cannot make that dramatic move away from a scientist's model of the way the world is put together. He cannot prioritize meaning over material substance, is one way to put it. Heidegger asks, what is the very first thing we encounter in the world? It is meaning, not material substance, and by this, as we see in Being and Time, it is not conceptual meaning, but, and I find him aligned with dewey here, the whole ball of wax: affect, caring/concern, being with others, ready to hand "spatial" relations and so on. This is, no, CAN BE, the kind of analysis you get if you allow the phenomenon to take center stage. A lot of post Heideggarians these days.

I think you have to put Kant's synthetic apriori judgments aside for Heidegger. Heidegger does not live and think in the same world. Phenomena are not representations. They are the only basis for ontology we have, and the entirety of what IS, is analyzed very differently. Being and Time takes Descartes' res extensa and res cogitans (I think I have that right) as one big presence-at-hand error error, failing to understand the fundamental ontological ready-to-hand relations.

As I think of Heidegger, I see that it is impossible to fit him in Dennett's (and the analytic pov) simple thinking. Heidegger is kind of sui generis, even though when you read him, you find the whole history of philosophy throughout.

For me, I don't have a pro's detailed understanding, but I like to read Heidegger more than Husserl because the former really takes one on a trip, like an intellectual's adventure, a radically new way to conceive the world. But Husserl's epoche has this undeniable intuitive, revelatory dimension. Consider his Four Principles of Phenomenology:

so much appearance, so much being”
“that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition”
“zu den Sachen selbst!”: To the things themselves!
“so much reduction, so much givenness.”

This where my interests lie now.

I never thought of Descartes in terms of synthetic priori judgments, and I don't really understand how this would work. How does this go?

Whaddaya mean? — Agent Smith

I mean when we make statements about the world, the first place basic inquiry begins is the beginning: the language event that produces meaning that is presupposed in the utterance. THE phenomenological insight is that what is there sitting before waiting for analysis already possesses the terms for analytic work, and these terms are not magically hooked up with their referents: they are pre-understood in the language of an evolved knowledge base. So, the geologist isn't looking at "properties" exhibited by the object that are stand alone; their "standing" is a composite of what the understanding brings to the occasion.
This is the kind of thing Dennett and his ilk do not want to talk about. But there is a whole history of philosophy that does talk about this, right up to the present time.

Dennett levels this criticism at phenomenology in Consciousness Explained and proposes that, because of this subjective nature of phenomenology, which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with, it should be thought of as "autophenomenology", and as a supposed corrective he proposes a discipline he names "heterophenomenology", which is the "third person" recording, analysis and critique of the reports of others about what they take to be the nature of their consciousness. He says that this is not a new discipline but is in fact just Cognitive Science. The other dimension of this investigation is brain imaging to look for neural correlates with what people report is going on in their minds. — Janus

Keep in mind that Dennett does not believe that his assumptions about science's knowledge claims are absolutes, but that, following Russell, he thinks science is simply the only wheel that rolls. And it does roll so well! Thus you get outrageous utterances like "which doesn't give us any reliable data to work with." he really isn't even trying to understand phenomenology, and I doubt he has read much, or any. He reads scientific journals, I imagine exclusively. Heidegger? I think not.
People like this are simply out of their depths. They don't see that phenomenology is not at all in conflict with scientific perspectives; it's just that science is altogether something OTHER than philosophy. Dennett doesn''t seem to want to look closely at this because he's too busy reading other things, and also, I think, because it does take a certain capacity to freely pull away from the paradigms of science and move to a higher order of thinking, which he doesn't have. Training forbids.
So this philosophically myopic thinker really doesn't understand anything about phenomenology. He thinks it's like studying qualia, and if you ever take a little time to read Being and Time, you would see this is Heidegger (as well as the post modern thinking that followed him) says nothing at all like this. Husserl was a bit like this (Heidegger said he was "walking on water).

Anyway, never listen to a scientist turned philosopher. All they produce is dogmatic reassurances that everything is okay and we really DO understand the world. They are a silly bunch.

I don't think I said that. Was it implied? — Agent Smith

You said:The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth.
Phenomenology is indeterminate on the issue of foundational knowledge claims, and for most, the only foundation one can defend is hermeneutics, and this applies across the board, even to the itself, which is hard for many to grasp. There really is no way out: Language itself is inherently indeterminate.

The takeaway: There's something nonchemical about biology and there's something nophysics about chemistry, so on and so forth. — Agent Smith

Of course, there is something "non phenomenological" about phenomenology, which is really why phenomenology rules the day at the presuppositional level of analysis: In the presence of things qua presence, the lack of foundational discovery undermines knowledge claims of all kinds, and here lies the most profound revelation of our being human.

While it may be true that being poor in the country is less stressful than the city, at least it sounds intuitive true, you still sight the virtues of being poor. Listen to the hyper wealthy talk casually about poverty, and you will find exactly that kind of dismissiveness. Jeff Bezos and his ilk are especially flippant about what is in fact a living nightmare, being poor that is.
However, putting aside how this kind of thinking plays into the hands of a wealthy person's rationalization, my happiest days were when I was, well, free of the bondage of possessions. — Constance

Half right Constance. It is a myth that the rural poor are happier. In a world where entertainment does not run cheap, the only ones happy and poor are monks and nuns.

Were you raised in poverty? Are you poor now? Do you have family or old friends who are poor? Many of the rural poor are more content and less stressed than the suburban & urban 'working poor' or 'lower middle-class'. — 180 Proof

That is a wonderful rationalization for the perversions of capitalize. Next thing you'll be telling me is that Jeff Bezos actually deserves a quadrillion dollars, making sure the the most wretched in society are not spoiled by health care and education.

I have been reading Daniel C Dennet on the concept of qualia. He speaks of
'how philosophers have tied themselves into such knots over qualia. They started where anyone with anyone would start: with their strongest and clearest intuitions about their own minds. Those intuitions, alas, form a mutually self-supporting circle of doctrines, imprisoning their imaginations in the Cartesian Theater. Even though philosophers have discovered the paradoxes inherent in this closed circle of ideas_ that is why the literature on qualia exists _ they haven't had an alternative vision to leap to, and so, they get dragged back into the paradoxical prison. That is why the literature on qualia qualia gets more and more convoluted, instead of convuluting agreement'.

I see the issues of metaphysics and how this is bound up with human perception as extremely difficult aspects of philosophy. The issue of what is regarded as 'qualia' seems important. However, it may be that such an area is a complex area rather than straightforward, so I raise it as an area for philosophical exploration and questioning.I wonder about the whole nature of phenomenology as part of perception, but, at the same time, questions about the nature of reality may need to take on board ideas within empirical scientific disciplines and aspects of the power of reason. It is within this context which I raise the question of the idea of 'qualia', with a view to how that may stand in relation to metaphysics, and the limitations of the human mind in understanding reality, philosophically and from a scientific approach. In this thread, I am asking to what extent is the concept useful or not? Does the idea of qualia fuzz and blur the whole area of explaining life and the debate between materialism and idealism? — Jack Cummins

The reason why philosophers have muddled the whole affair is that they refuse to acknowledge the ontological primacy of caring and its "objects". Qualia are, as Dennett, I think dismissively, puts it "pure phenomena", but what is IN phenomena? It is not the bare recognition of some "appeared to redly" kind of thing. This is awfully naïve, an abstraction from experience. But affect: the interest, desire, love, hate, fear and all the rest are always of-a-piece with qualia and it is here the apprehension of the being qua being of a thing, if you will, is discovered. The existence qua existence (not mincing words here) of this lamp on the table is IN the bare features once the cognitive dimensions are analytically removed. In other words, do a reduction to the pure sensory features in the empirical presentation, and while you may find the conceptual structure never to be reduced, the "bare" witnessing in the conceptual scheme can be pure, I claim, and here, qualia's identity is understood: in affect, existence "speaks".