It's control over desire (as a whole) to the extent that a person is deciding as a harmonized unity. Nietzsche isn't wrong to point out the problem of one desire simply acting as a tyrant over others, although he fails to extend the nature of this problem to social relations between people far enough IMO. He sees clearly how a person, as a whole, isn't free if one desire simply lords over the others like a tyrant, but then fails to see how the human tyrant becomes unfree through his tyranny in the interpersonal sphere, how power and the role of Lord becomes a trap — Count Timothy von Icarus

Deleuze’s Nietzschean-inspired model posits assemblages of desiring elements which produce what he calls a plane of consistency. This plane creates relational connections within the person , and a point of view or perspective, without any overarching synthesis. There is no one self, no one overarching desire, but a society of selves and a society of desires that manifest a relative ongoing thematic unity throughout its changes. Tyranny and power are not properties of individuals, they are manifestations of affects circulating though a culture , from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Subjects are produced by the way power circulates though a community.

Even if we accept Nietzsche's description of the will as a "congress of souls," we can still suppose that some congresses are more harmonious than others. This is the difference between the person who does a chore they don't like because they have been forced to, because they do not want to be punished, or because they do not want to hurt the feelings of another, versus the person who does a chore they don't like because they have decided that it must be done and is "better," in a holistic sense. This second person is acting out of a positive duty thay they desire as part of their identity. This is the fire fighter who fears a burning building as much as anyone, but who wants to rush in on another level, because he wants his identity to include his duty. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to making a leap here from harmonization of desires to normative ethics as altruism. For Deleuze, the consistency of personality is produced as a relation between heterogeneous differences( desires, affects). This society of the person is constantly changing in small ways, exposed to an outside that is not only outside the person, but beyond the cultural norms. And yet we have a tendency to. get ourselves stuck in repressive, conformist social structures that each of us participate in and perpetuate. Altruism for the sake of the repressive goals of a social structure is a kind of selfishness. That is, a being caught up in a stagnant idea of the social self.On the other hand , recognizing that the ‘self’ is always naturally reinvented in the direction of new values, which are neither simply the result of cultural inculcation nor a solipsistic ‘selfishness’ points one in the direction of a robust ethic of altruism.

A "full" freedom requires that we have control over our desires. This is where Frankfurt's distinction between first order desires "I want to x" and second order desires "I desire that I should want to x," is key. We can also have negative second order desires, i.e., "I want to not desire x," e.g., when a drug addict wants to be free from the desire of their addiction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this control over desire or just being at the mercy of one desire over another? Since you mentioned Nietzsche, I thought I’d quote him on the issue of will and desire:

The fact] that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us . . . While “we” believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence [or violence] of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides.

There is no struggle of reason against the drives; what we call “reason” is nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions,” a certain ordering of the drives.

Then you point to the way in which desire leads to injustice. I think there is a connection, and it is one Nietzsche profoundly misses (or rather refuses to address). If we have people with reflexive and negative freedom, people who have self control, means, and freedom from constraint, they might still desire to do things that deprive others of their freedom. What is missing in Nietzsche but present in Hegel, Honneth, etc. is a conception of "social freedom," as the ways in which desires are harmonized such that they don't conflict. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What writers like Deleuze and Focault get from Nietzsche is the fundamentally social nature of drives. Because our drives are inextricably bound up within a larger community, the essential question for them is not how to harmonize individual drives to achieve social ethical norms, but how we ever manage to resist those normative chains that bind us.

The impulse toward the community is itself a drive, in competition with the other drives: we never leave the domain of the drives. The drives never exist in a free and unbound state, nor are they ever merely individual; they are always arranged and assembled, not only by moral systems, but more generally by every social formation.

…the fundamental problem of political philosophy is one that was formulated most clearly by Spinoza: “Why do people fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” The answer: because your desire is never your own. Desire is not a psychic reality, nor is it strictly individual; rather, your drives and affects are from the start part of the social infrastructure.”( Dan Smith)

Hierarchy is the natural way we organize society, and is the only way to organize modern society. What alternatives do you suppose? No leaders? No elites? No social structure? — ButyDude

I highly recommend The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wingrow. Their exhaustive look at the anthropological and archeological evidence led them to this conclusion:

Time and again we found ourselves confronted with writing which simply assumes that the larger and more densely populated the social group, the more ‘complex’ the system needed to keep it organized. Complexity, in turn, is still often used as a synonym for hierarchy. Hierarchy, in turn, is used as a euphemism for chains of command (the ‘origins of the state’), which mean that as soon as large numbers of people decided to live in one place or join a common project, they must necessarily abandon the second freedom – to refuse orders – and replace it with legal mechanisms for, say, beating or locking up those who don’t do as they’re told.

As we’ve seen, none of these assumptions are theoretically essential, and history tends not to bear them out. Carole Crumley, an anthropologist and expert on Iron Age Europe, has been pointing this out for years: complex systems don’t have to be organized top-down, either in the natural or in the social world. That we tend to assume otherwise probably tells us more about ourselves than the people or phenomena that we’re studying.Neither is she alone in making this point. But more often than not, such
observations have fallen on deaf ears.

It’s probably time to start listening, because ‘exceptions’ are fast beginning to outnumber the rules. Take cities. It was once assumed that the rise of urban life marked some kind of historical turnstile, whereby everyone who passed through had to permanently surrender their basic
freedoms and submit to the rule of faceless administrators, stern priests, paternalistic kings or warrior-politicians – simply to avert chaos (or cognitive overload). To view human history through such a lens today is really not all that different from taking on the mantle of a modern-day King James, since the overall effect is to portray the violence and inequalities of modern society as somehow arising naturally from structures of rational management and paternalistic care: structures designed for human populations who, we are asked to believe, became suddenly incapable of organizing themselves once their numbers expanded above a certain threshold.

Not only do such views lack a sound basis in human psychology. They are also difficult to reconcile with archaeological evidence of how cities actually began in many parts of the world: as civic experiments on a grand
scale, which frequently lacked the expected features of administrative hierarchy and authoritarian rule. If there is a particular story we should be telling, a big question we should be asking of human history (instead of the ‘origins of social inequality’), is it precisely this: how did we find ourselves stuck in just one form of social reality, and how did relations based ultimately on violence and domination come to be normalized within it?

That sounds right. I like Rahula's What The Buddha Taught, and I imagine the state you describe as the goal. This is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. Feuerbach also, in his own words, sees and says this. — plaque flag

But this thinking all rests on the supposition of a purely ‘neutral’ attention that can be separated off from any intentional objects being attended to. But there is no such thing as neutral attention. To attend to something is already to intend it, to desire, to will. Attending is a biasing.

The idea of the mind reposing, awake and alert, in the sheer ‘luminosity' of consciousness (its quality of non-reflective and open awareness), without attending exclusively to any particular object or content, is a form of desire and intentionality in that in simple self-reflexive awareness, it is at every moment relating to a new object (its own changing sense of non-objectifying awareness of the arising and passing away of temporary forms), and being affected, disturbed, by it. Disturbance, desire and dislocating becoming is prior to, that is, implicit but not noticed in ‘neutral' compassionate awareness. Becoming is the restless anxiety of desire, striving, motivation, and the ground of all attention, affect and valuation. Primordial awareness is from moment to moment a new way of being -affected-by the world, and thus, what ever else it is affectively in its particular and contingent experience of ‘now', a kind of uncanniness.

I think the most charitable way to read it is as gazing on The Unchanging with adoration. Or feeling oneself in a sort of divine stasis, having temporarily become The Illuminated One — plaque flag

I think feeling is central to many of the modernizations of meditative practice. Non-judgemental , non-intending bare awareness of being is supposed to be connected with the feeling of unconditional, intrinsic, spontaneous compassion and benevolence, peace and fundamental warmth toward the phenomenal world, concern for the welfare of others beyond mere naive compassion, joy and of the mind, etc, and this is a kind of auto-affection or self-luminosity. It all rests on the supposition of a purely ‘neutral’ attention that can be separated off from any intentional objects being attended to.

A question that might be asked is whether this is true by definition --- whether we tend to understand 'Being' [the truly real ] precisely in terms of constant presence. If so, is this a bias ?
I'm of course not the first person to speculate in this way. I bring up a famous issue. Much of radicality of Being and Time is perhaps in its claim or suggestion (according to some) that being is time — plaque flag

Heidegger analyzes how Nietzsche’s Eternal return makes use of this notion of Being as constant presence to turn it against itself via time as a continual passing away. Eternal return of the same is the same by being Willed as always different from itself.

“…the answer Aristotle gave to the question of the
essential nature of time still governs Nietzsche's idea of
time. What is the situation in regard to time? In being,
present in time at the given moment is only that narrow
ridge of the momentary fugitive "now," rising out of the
"not yet now'' and falling away into the "no longer now”
Nietzsche conceives time metaphysically as a succession of punctual‘nows’.
“This passing away is conceived more precisely as the successive flowing away of the "now" out of the "not yet now" into the "no longer now."… Time persists, consists in passing. It is, in that it constantly is not. This is the representational idea of time that characterizes the concept of time' which is standard throughout the metaphysics of the West…. in all metaphysics from the beginning of Western thought, Being means being present, Being, if it is to be thought in the highest instance, must be thought as pure presence, that is, as the presence that persists, the abiding present, the steadily standing "now.

To modern metaphysics, the Being of beings appears as will.” In Nietzsche’s will to power, will is that which is present to itself as what is.
“Among the long established predicates of primal being are"eternity and independence of time. Eternal will
does not mean only a will that lasts eternally: it says that will is primal being only when it is eternal as will….The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.

What is in time is what recurs in the eternal return. Only because Nietzsche thinks of time in terms of the traditional metaphysical notion of ‘in-timeless’, the sequence of present nows, can he posit the eternal return as the endless presence (Being) of the willing of itself.
…will is primal being only when it is eternal as will. And it is that when, as will, it eternally wills the eternity
of willing. The will that is eternal in this sense no longer follows and depends on the temporal in what it wills,
or in its willing. It is independent of time. And so it can no longer be affronted by time.
The will is delivered from revulsion when it wills the constant recurrence of the same. Then the will
wills the eternity of what is willed. The will wills its own eternity. Will is primal being. The highest product of primal being is eternity. The primal being of beings is the will, as the eternally recurrent willing of the eternal recurrence of the same. The eternal recurrence of the same is the supreme triumph of the metaphysics of the will that eternally wills its own willing.

For the mystic time and change would not really exist and this is because they have seen beyond it. The clock still ticks but what is truly and ultimately real is unchanging. This would be Being, not the personal experience.of a being.

The word 'reflexivity' implies some sort of dualism so I'm not sure it's relevant here. I may be misunderstanding what you mean but it. — FrancisRay

I’m aware that the classical understanding of the ultimately real is the eternally unchanging. My argument is that the idea of seeing beyond time to some sort of awareness or reality is incoherent. To be aware is to change. Pure anything , including pure timelessness, is not Being but the definition of death itself.

t I am more interested in how the boundary is formed; the 'dash' between organism and environment. You say, "the organism interprets..." and one assumes therefrom that the environment does not interpret. So there is an action before the act of interpretation, which is the act of self identification, that has to happen for there to be a separate world to interpret. — unenlightened

Most of our living is social, and our cultural environment is reciprocally interpretive. In the agential realism of Karen Barad and Joseph Rouse the non-human environment also interprets. Not everything for them has to lead back to a perceiving subject. They are perfectly happy to imagine a world without humans or animals in which each aspect of it interacts with other aspects in an agential way. That is, material interaction always takes place within configurations of mutual affecting that lend to all phenomena an intrinsically interpretive character.

Concerning the idea of organismic self-identification, on the one hand, one would have to say that the ‘self’ of the organism is not something locked within the borders of the physical body or brain, but is instead the ongoing and continually changing patterns of activity produced by brain-body-world reciprocal interaction. On the other hand, the organism part of this body-world interaction is characterized by a certain operational closure or asymmetry with respect to the world. Merleau-Ponty describes this ‘boundary’ as a ‘flesh’ of the world or chiasm, a kind of reciprocal exchange. One would have to imagine a self which continually comes to itself from the world, reinventing itself through this exposure and yet maintaining a certain integrity or style of being through these changes.

. The idea of the eternal now requires the idea that we can transcend the experience-experiencer duality. As you seem to say, if we cannot do this the idea makes no sense.

We never experience the pure present. There isn't time to experience it. But we can be in it. This explains how yogis can sit for weeks without moving. They are not experiencing the passing of time. — FrancisRay

Is such a sitting yogi having an experience of anything while they claim to not experience the passing of time? There is a tendency to confuse the conventional measurement of time
via clocks and time itself. For instance, the concept of time dilation in physics is typically described as a slowing down or speeding up of time because clocks slow down when accelerated. But a more slowly ticking clock is not the same thing as a time moving more slowly. Most fundamentally time is not like motion, to be sped up or slowed down. Time is the nature of the changes in what we are involved in. If we are immersed in a flow experience, the consistency and coherence of that kind of creative unfolding will be experienced as a speeding up or stoppage of time, because we normally pay attention to a clock and it’s meaningless movements when our task is interrupted, or when we are distracted and bored.
In short , where there is no time there is no experience. The mystical and religious notions of pure unchanging reflexivity, of awareness without intention, fail to recognize that such notions of pure identity rely on fundamental difference. The only pure ground is already a repetition. It is the repetition of difference in itself.

Perspective seems to correspond to the form of the rock; the rock has a form, and that gives rise to any subject necessarily having a particular perspective on the rock. Whereas the 'affect' of an organism is the internally generated sense of its own being. The yeast cell defines itself and delimits itself as sugar in, CO2 or Alcohol out.

A subject locates itself as an entity, and its perspective arises from its location. But such a definition of self is necessarily permeable and incomplete. It's affect is its response to its environment as well as its response to itself. ( — unenlightened

The enactivists look at subject-object, organism-environment this way:
The organism interprets its world, but not by representing it, not by attempting to match an internal model with an external reality. Instead, perception is grounded in sensory-motor interactions with the world. We know by doing, not by representing. Organisms know their world by building a niche out of it and interacting with this niche. Whatever aspects of that world are irrelevant to the goals and purposes that are defined by organism-niche interaction are invisible to that creature. So all living systems, through their activity within their niche, continually define their world via what matters, is significant and relevant to their continued functioning. The organism ceases to be an organism as soon as it loses this goal-oriented integrity and unity of functioning. Affect in its most basic form is simply this normative, goal-oriented organizational a priori. To perceive a rock as an object with properties such as weight, size and shape is to first construct such idealizations as identically persisting object number, magnitude, extension and measure. In other words, mathematics, logic and empirical science are human-created environmental niches that guide the way we interact with our world. They are affective value systems, through which we normatively determine correctness or incorrectness, truth and falsity in relation to all the features of rocks and other value objects experienced from within our constructed niche.

We are self-aware as a unified whole - perception of shape, colour and movement appear to us as a unified whole (or gestalt) even though the sub-systems of the brain which process these are separate. Neuroscience hasn't identified the particular brain system that provides for this unification. It's called the 'neural binding problem' and is recognised as a scientific validation of the hard problem of consciousness… current science has nothing to say about subjective (phenomenal) experience. — Wayfarer

Enactivists disagree with Chalmers belief that we dont have a way to explain the unification of consciousness or subjective experience empirically. For instance, Evan Thompson sees affectivity as the unifying glue.

Rather than being a collection of pre-specified modules, the brain appears to be an organ that constructs itself in development through spontaneously generated and experience-dependent activity (Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997; Quartz, 1999; Karmiloff-Smith, 1998), a developmental process made possible by robust and flexible developmental mechanisms conserved in animal evolution (Gerhart & Kirschner, 1997).”

“Douglas F. Watt (1998) describes affect as ‘a prototype “whole brain event”', but we could go further and say that affect is a prototypical whole-organism event. Affect has numerous dimensions that bind together virtually every aspect of the organism—the psychosomatic network of the nervous system, immune system, and endocrine system; physiological changes in the autonomic nervous system, the limbic system, and the superior cortex; facial-motor changes and global differential motor readiness for approach or withdrawal; subjective experience along a pleasure–displeasure valence axis; social signalling and coupling; and conscious evaluation and assessment (Watt, 1998). Thus the affective mind isn't in the head, but in the whole body; and affective states are emergent in the reciprocal, co-determination sense: they arise from neural and somatic activity that itself is conditioned by the ongoing embodied awareness and action of the whole animal or person.

Although the physical and energetic coupling between a living being and the physicochemical environment is symmetrical, with each partner exerting more influence on the other at different times, the living being modulates the parameters of this coupling in a way the environment typically does not. Living beings, precisely because they are autopoietic and adaptive, can “surf” environmental events and modulate them to their own ends, like a bird gliding on the wind. Interactional asymmetry is precisely this capacity to modulate the coupling with the environment. If we lose sight of this interactional asymmetry, then we lose the ability to account for the directedness proper to living beings in their sense-making, and hence we lose the resources we need to connect sense-making to intentionality.”

“One of the basic propositions of the enactive approach is that being autonomous is a necessary condition for a system to embody original intentionality and normativity. Unless the processes that make up a system constitute that system as an adaptive self-sustaining unity, there is no perspective or reference point for sense-making and hence no cognizing agent. Without autonomy (operational closure) there is no original meaning; there is only the derivative meaning attributed to certain processes by an outside observer.”
(Thompson 2001)

How does phenomenology explain the existence of disagreement between people? And how does it propose that disagreement be resolved? — baker

Husserl puts the emphasis on empathetically understanding the other from within their one perspective.

“The human being lets “himself” be influenced not only by particular other humans (actual or imagined) but also by social objectivities that he feels and apprehends as effective objectivities in their own right, as influencing powers. He is afraid of “the government” and carries out what it commands. He views such and such individuals, for instance, the police officer, etc., as representatives of the government only; he fears the person who is an official representative. The customs, the church, etc., he feels as powers, too. Seen from the objective perspective of the historian and sociologist, human beings are real and, among them, such and such interconnected relations exist, such and such social objectivities exist, etc. And the task is to describe this in general, concrete and, where possible, in comparative terms, to describe the factual connection, to delineate universal class-concepts and rules, etc., just as in any morphology.

If the community of humankind is to be described historically in concreto in its becoming and in its dependence on other communities (for even the social objectivities have their “causality”), then the objective of an understanding of the inner connections requires that one immerse oneself so deeply in the consciousness of the respective individual human beings, so as to be able to exactly relive their motivations. One must immerse oneself so deeply that one brings to “givenness” their interpretations, supposed experiences, their superstitious fantasies, by means of which they let themselves be “influenced,” let themselves be guided, attracted, or repelled. The “real connections” consist in this: Under given circumstances such and such notions, etc., were (“understandably”) evoked in human beings, whereby such and such reactions were motivated in them, which in turn determined the course of their development.” (Basic Problems of Phenomenology)

but I favor an inclusive approach. It's all real. Confused daydreams are real, and they exist in the style of confused daydreams. All entities are semantically-inferentially linked in a single nexus. Language is directed at the one common world. — plaque flag

You’d like Deleuze’s approach. He distinguishes between the virtual and the actual. Both are real; the virtual is the problematic field within which actual events arise and disappear.

I'd rather say physics doesn't need to make metaphysical suppositions. It has banished metaphysics to a different department. Physicists often stray into metaphysics and sometimes hold strong views, but when they do they're no longer doing physics — FrancisRay

I’m not talking about sitting down to write a treatise with the word ‘metaphysics’ in the title. I’m talking about the presuppositions , usually unexamined, that make it possible to do any kind of science. Thomas Kuhn understood this. Think of a scientific paradigm as a kind of metaphysical frame. Physicists may think they have banished metaphysics, when all they have done is banish a certain strand of metaphysical thinking and substituted for it another, even more insidious one , which they are so far from recognizing that they have convinced themselves they have somehow escaped from history.

we do not experience time. It is a fiction created from memories and anticipations. This is what Husserl means by saying time is stretched. It has to be stretched in order to create the illusion that we are experiencing it. — FrancisRay

I would say it is the pure present we only experience as a fiction , and that, most primordially, the only thing we do experience is the tripartite structure of time.

The study of appearances is physics and the natural sciences and the the study of their origin and true nature is metaphysics and mysticism, so I'm not sure how phenomenology could be defined as a distinct subject. The boundaries are always going to be messy. . . .

I wonder if we all agree on the definition of phenomenology, since all those I've seen are quite vague. . — FrancisRay

I would say physics is the study of appearances as filtered though a particular set of metaphysical suppositions, what Husserl calls objectivist metalhysics. All science is doing metaphysics, but implicitly rather than explicitly. Heidegger would say that the notion of ‘appearance’ of a world before a subject is itself grounded in a particular metaphysical presupposition. A perhaps you can see, Im defining metaphysics as a set of grounding presuppositions guiding any domain of culture.

Husserl shows that (the 'experience' of ) time is stretched. There is no pointlike now, except as a useful mathematical fiction (the glories of R). But the gap between the so-called experience of time and time itself is also a fiction. 'Time in itself' is silly talk, 'decadent' metaphysics without an intuitive foundation — plaque flag

Yes, which is why I think Heidegger’s critique of internal time consciousness as a metaphysics of presence is a bit unfair to Husserl.

The point is that phenomenology is exclusively concerned with observable phenomena or appearances and has nothing to say about the origin and essential nature of phenomena. Thus it is defined as being free from any claims concerning existence. It doesn't stray onto metaphysics but is a non-reductive approach. Nothing wrong with this but it cannot produce a fundamental theory — FrancisRay

This doesn’t seem to be true for the founder of phenomenology:

Our monadological results are metaphysical, if it be true that ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical. On the other hand, what we have here is anything but metaphysics in the customary sense: a historically degenerate metaphysics, which by no means conforms to the sense with which meta­physics, as "first philosophy", was instituted originally. Phe­nomenology's purely intuitive, concrete, and also apodictic mode of demonstration excludes all "metaphysical adventure", all speculative excesses. (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations)

To bring latent reason to the understanding of its own possibilities and thus to bring to in­sight the possibility of metaphysics as a true possibility—this is the only way to put metaphysics or universal philosophy on the
strenuous road to realization. It is the only way to decide
whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy—that of humanity which seeks to exist, and is only possible, through philosophical reason, moving endlessly from latent to manifest reason and forever seeking its own norms through this, its truth and genuine human nature— whether this telos, then, is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations * and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not
rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy. ( Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences)

The 'pure witness' is, in my view, anonymous being, more like a clearing or the light that shines on the scene of development. Or really just its being there. Just its happening.

FWIW, I don't think babies are able to think of being in this world, but I think we practiced concept-mongers understand their awareness to be awareness of the world. — plaque flag

Yes, indeed.
The personal ego is itself an idealism in that, rather than leading us back to the apodictic self-othering, subjective-objective becoming of temporal constitution, the psycho-physical ego is itself a product of constitution, via self-apperception. When we complete the epoche by abstracting away this self-apperception, we arrive at the primordial stratum where there is as yet no ego, but there remains the unitary flow of subjective temporal processes. “At the beginning of its development, the subject is not an Object for itself and does not have the apperceptive unity, "Ego."”(Ideas II, p.361)

Husserl argues that “As pure Ego it does not harbor any hidden inner richness; it is absolutely simple and it lies there absolutely clear. All richness lies in the cogito and in the mode of the function which can be adequately grasped therein.”(Ideas II). Husserl describes this pure ego pole as non-perceivable, non-graspable and anonymous. “...the ego which is the counterpart (gegenüber) to everything is anonymous. “ This suggests that for Husserl, the pure ego may function as nothing but an empty zero point or center of activity.

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. — plaque flag

Husserl’s genetic method begins with an ego-intentionality which we imagine as preceding the constitution of any regularities in experience. At this point there isnt much to determine that there is something like ‘the’ world, if this is to indicate a realm of recognizable regularities, patterns and meaning. So what sort of process is required to turn a chaos of meaningless flux into the meaningful, stable patterns that would justify calling what we experience ‘the’ world? The flux would certainly need to make itself amenable to the construction of simple predictable groupings of some sort or other, but this is still a far cry from a world of stable objects that the subject can interact with. One would have to imagine that the subject progressively synthesizes out of simpler correlations more and more complex ones. In Heidegger’s terms, the subject creates a ‘worlding’. If this is an entangling of subject and world , it is one in which what the world brings to the correlation is subordinated to the requirements of recognizability and similarity.

“...consciousness is connected in the most general way to another consciousness [in the same person] by a commonality that is correlatively noetic and noematic; and all connection is connection through "commonality." through uniformity and similarity.”(Passive and Active Synth)

Right, but it isn't just translation. We'd need some sort of very good predictive capability — Count Timothy von Icarus

Predictive capacity is already implied in the philosophical approach. Translation proceeds from a philosophical mode of anticipation into a conventionalized mode of prediction, which in today’s sciences means mathematisizing the objects of study i order to build apparatus for the purposes of calculation and measurement. This doesn’t make the scientific version more precise than the philosophical , it merely swaps a deeper philosophical notion of precision for a shallow instrumental idea of precision.

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 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)

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.

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.

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.

:up: I think the human imagination is a domain for fruitful exploration, but not for definitive knowledge of anything other than just what is imaginable. I, like you, am science oriented in that I think the only really definitive knowledge comes from observation. Phenomenology, including introspection, I would say gives us knowledge of how things appear to us to be, but I don't have any confidence that it can tell us how things really are. Here I have principally the nature of consciousness in mind, and maybe we can never know what its nature is as it cannot be directly observed. — Janus

Imagination and observation can’t be disentangled in the way you think they can. It is not as though what we imagine is locked in some secret inner sphere we call subjective consciousness. That’s an old fashioned way of thinking about subjectivity which just perpetuates a dualistic thinking (imagination is non-observational subjectivity, scientific observation is oriented toward contact with a real, objective world). This way of thinking is utterly unable to explain how leading edge philosophical ideas thoughout history have anticipated , by decades or more, the results of the sciences. Observation indeed.

I tend to think our world is pre-cognitively co-constructed by the bodymind/ environment and that we are constitutionally blind to that process. We and the world, the whole shebang, emerge out of the other side of that process, so to speak — Janus

This intersubjective construction of objectivity is what phenomenology is about , not ‘introspection ’, which is a common misunderstanding of its method.

Mama say what? :yawn: — jgill

Don’t tell Sokal

(By the way, googling for the source of the quote that Josh provided above, I happened upon this pdf from the erudite and charming Michel Bitbol, a French - therefore continental! - philosopher of science - Is Consciousness Primary?) — Wayfarer

One of the important features of the paper is that it isn’t trying to posit consciousness as an ineffable, inner sanctum. On the contrary, Bitbol emphasizes the irreducibly intersubjective nature of experience.

“…objectivity arises from a universally accepted procedure of intersubjective debate. Do not construe it as a transcendent resource of which intersubjective consensus is only an indirect symptom. Draw inspiration from a careful reflection about physics : either from the process of emergence of objective temperature valuations from an experiential underpinning , or from the model of quantum mechanics construed as a science of inter-situational predictive invariants rather than a science of “objects” in the ordinary sense of the word. Then, recognize that intersubjectivity should be endowed with the status of a common ground for both phenomenological reports and objective science. Start from this common ground in order to elaborate the amplified variety of knowledge that results from embedding phenomenological reports and objective findings within a unique structure.”

IMO, there is nothing particularly theistic at expressing awe at the regularities in the world. We appear to have a universe with a begining. So at one point, there was a state at which things had begun to exist before which nothing seems to have existed. This forces us to ask the question "if things can start existing at one moment, for no reason at all, why did only certain types of things start to exist and why don't we see things starting to exist all the time? Or if things began to exist for a reason, what was the reason?"

I don't see how this is essentially a theistic question though. It seems like a natural outgrowth of human curiosity, God(s) or no. — Count Timothy von Icarus

One can trace a Platonism beginning in Greece, making its way through religious Christian thought and finally arriving at a humanism which retains the idea of the uncaused cause and the pure immanent identity of what presents itself to itself, but transfers these from God to mathematical idealities such as identity, pure quantitative magnitude and
extension.

↪Joshs Seeing the same things and conceiving of them in different ways are two different things altogether. I haven't denied that we might come, and historically speaking have come, to conceive of things in novel ways — Janus

I think I sent this to you before, from Francisco Varela, but I’ve always found it provoking.

One of the most seductive forms of subjectivism in contemporary thought is the use made of the concepts of interpretation, whether by pragmatists or hermeneuticists. To its credit, interpretationism provides a penetrating critique of objectivism that is worth pursuing in some detail. To be objective, the interpretationist points out, one would have to have some set of mind-independent objects to be designated by language or known by science. But can we find any such objects? Let us look at an extended example from the philosopher Nelson Goodman.

A point in space seems to be perfectly objective. But how are we to define the points of our everyday world? Points can be taken either as primitive elements, as intersecting lines, as certain triples of intersecting planes, or as certain classes of nesting volumes. These definitions are equally adequate, and yet they are incompatible: what a point is will vary with each form of description. For example, only in the first "version," to use Goodman's term, will a point be a primitive element. The objectivist, however, demands, "What are points really?" Goodman's response to this demand is worth quoting at length:

If the composition of points out of lines or of lines out of points is conventional rather than factual, points and lines themselves are no less so. ... If we say that our sample space is a combination of points, or of lines, or of regions, or a combination of combinations of points, or lines, or regions, or a combination of all these together, or is a single lump, then since none is identical with any of the rest, we are giving one among countless alternative conflicting descriptions of what the space is. And so we may regard the disagreements as not about the facts but as due to differences in the conventions-adopted in organizing or describing the space. What, then, is the neutral fact or thing described in these different terms? Neither the space (a) as an undivided whole nor (b) as a combination of everything involved in the several accounts; for (a) and (b) are but two among the various ways of organizing it. But what is it that is so organized? When we strip off as layers of convention all differences among ways of describing it, what is left? The onion is peeled down to its empty core.

We experience things with preconstructed abilities to represent; but this isn’t where knowledge starts: that’s a model we came up with to predict our experience. It could be that we don’t represent anything at all, nor do ‘we’ exist in the world as it actual is. — Bob Ross

I think phenomenologists would agree that our ability to represent or model is not primary. They would say instead that there is no experience of any kind that is not conditioned by prior experience, which anticipatively projects forward into and shapes what we actually experience. This is not a consciously created model or representation that we simply fit over what we see. It is an intrinsic part of what we see. This mutual dependence between subjective projection and objective appearance is most fundamentally what the world actually is, and we can never get beyond or beneath this intertwined structure of experience to get to an independently objective world or an inner subjective realm.

Science observes, and then attempts to explain what is observed. I see fire, for example, and I explain it in terms of phlogiston, then later I explain it in terms of agitated molecules. I continue to see the fire the same way; its appearance does not change regardless of the theory about its cause. — Janus

Do you think you would see a group of lines the same way if you recognized them as just a pile of sticks compared with seeing them as forming a familiar Chinese character? Would your eye follow the shapes in the pile the same way? If you had never seen a computer before would you recognize the tower, mouse and screen as belonging to a single object? If you didnt know what a bus was for would you interact with it in the same way?

The way we formulate our enquiries towards the world is in response to the way the world appears to us. We have no control over how the world appears to us. — Janus

What would you consider conscious control? Remember those magic eye puzzles with the embedded 3-d object? Or what about optical illusions where you can switch between tow images within the same picture? Isn’t that analogous to how well science can reconfigure the way that world appears to us though a gestalt shift?

•Logic is relationships which always replicate; a subset of science — Kaiser Basileus

Do relationships which always replicate exist in nature?

I'd have to say, "Of course mathematics is in the world — wonderer1

Mathematics is the world to the same extent that French or German is in the world, as a peculiar grammar by which we organize it for our purposes.

Bitbol provides a counter to this argument:

... the reality of first-person consciousness is apodictic, cannot plausibly be denied.
If X is true by definition (i.e. apodictic), then X is merely abstract and not concrete, or factual. Given ubiquitious and continuous (i.e. embodied) stimulae from environmental imbedding, sufficiently complex, functioning, brains generate recursively narrative, phenomenal self models (PSM)¹ via tangled hierarchical (SL)² processing of which "first-person consciousness" consists. That these processes are also voluntarily as well as involuntarily interruptable, Wayfarer, demonstrates that the "reality (that) cannot be plausibly denied" is primarily virtual. :sparkle: — 180 Proof

“The creators of objective knowledge become so impressed by its efficacy that they tend to forget or to minimize that conscious experience is its starting point and its permanent requirement. They tend to forget or to minimize the long historical process by which contents of experience have been carefully selected, differenciated, and impoverished, so as to discard their personal or parochial components and to distillate their universal fraction as a structure. They finally turn the whole procedure upside down, by claiming that experience can be explained by one of its structural residues. Husserl severely criticized this forgetfulness and this inversion of priorities, that he saw as the major cause of what he called the “crisis” of modern science (Husserl, 1970).

According to him, it is in principle absurd to think that one can account for subjective conscious experience by way of certain objects of science, since objectivity has sprung precisely from what he calls the “life-world” of conscious experience.
One might suspect that this is only the old-fashioned opinion of some philosophers of the past who knew virtually nothing about modern neurophysiology. But, interestingly, the same remark was stated in several texts of modern scientists, as an elementary truth one is bound to rediscover after a long wandering in the labyrinth of naturalism. One finds it, inter alia :
• in many articles of Francisco Varela, according to whom “Lived experience is where we start from and where all must link back to, like a guiding thread”

my OP is using the definition of metaphysics which is the study of that which is beyond all possible experience, so within that terminology I am saying it is an illegitimate source of knowledge… I think the single biggest problem for Kant is that he starts out with a model and not pure experience. We should always start epistemically with pure experience. We do not know immediately that our conscious experience is a representation, once we do take up that model then Kant’s arguments come into play. — Bob Ross

Kant’s metaphysics grounds the condition of possibility of experience in something prior to experience. This turns the subjective categories into in-themselves objects, transcendent to the experience they condition. Your recommendation to start out from pure experience runs the risk of substituting for Kant’s idealist metaphysics an empiricist metaphysics in which we assume the objects of pure experience can be made to appear to us disconnected from the presuppositions and expectations we bring to our apprehension of them.

Phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty, who advocated a return to the things themselves, argues that the pure experience of things always comes already conditioned by prior experience. Things appear out of a background interpretive field.

“We must show that idealism is on the same level as empiricism itself. Both take the objective world as the object of their analysis, when this comes first neither in time nor in virtue of its meaning; and both are incapable of expressing the peculiar way in which perceptual consciousness constitutes its object. Both keep their distance in relation to perception, instead of sticking closely to it.”

r. If the regularities are there, then "what mathematics describes," is everywhere in the universe, even if "mathematics" is not. If we take mathematics only to be the descriptions, not the things described, then mathematics is still "embedded in the universe — Count Timothy von Icarus

The philosopher Eugene Gendlin described the empirical world as a ‘responsive order’. By that he meant the evidence we receive from the world is a response to the way we formulate our inquiries toward it. It can respond very precisely to different formulations, but always in different ways, with different facts. This is why the evidence ( and regularities) changes with changes in scientific paradigms. We can think of the responsive order as a kind of dance or discursive conversation. The assumption here is that our perceptions, observations and models are not representations of something. Instead they are forms of action on the world. We make changes in our environment and anticipate how it is likely to respond and talk back to our instigations, based on channels of expectation we erect from previous interactions with it. This is like a dance that I teach someone, in which my moves have built into them expectations concerning how the other will respond to my actions. Their actual response will never precisely duplicate my expectations, and so I adjust my next move to accommodate the novel aspect of their response.

Through this continual reciprocal process of action, feedback and and adjustment, not just between me and the world but between me and a discursive community of other scientists, I come to see a world of predictable regularities. I may even convince myself that these regularities are embedded in the world itself rather than being the product of a particular interactive dance that I initiate according to certain rules. In order to form this belief, I must formulate the dance in such a way that I abstract away my intricate adjustments to the continually changing qualitative feedback the world answers my actions with. To do this, I construct logico-mathematical idealizations that force changes in kind into changes of degree. Out of a flowingly changing experiencing I abstractively construct idealized ‘objects’ that I can then compare and contrast calculatively through methods of quantification. But then to claim that these mathematical structures are embedded in the world is like saying that the actual dance that results from the reciprocal back and forth adjustments between me and a partner are embedded in that partner. In fact they are embedded in neither the subject nor the object, but in the in-between interaction guided and constrained by the subject’s normative expectations.

What mathematics addresses is in the world, but it is no more a description of that world than my initiating and participating in a dance is a description of the dance. What mathematical structures describe, then, is the idealizing objectivating comportment of a subject toward its world, that way in which it conditions the world to talk back to it in the form of self-identical objects and quantitative relations. Having a world to idealize ( even if the aspect of that world one is idealizing derives from imagination) is is as essential as having a subject to do the idealization. Each side is in partnership with the other.

I will say this. It is no accident I used the metaphor of the dance , rather than something like a chaotic flux, to describe our relation to the world. I believe ongoing structural regularities are intrinsic to our experience of the world, but I also think logic-mathematical reasoning is derivative and secondary in comparison with the reciprocal, pragmatic kind of regularity exemplified by a dance.