when we speak of the world, we have revealed the way the world "shows itself"?
— Constance

We havent revealed the way it shows itself. But what is revealed gives you information. — EugeneW

Does science passively give knowledge and information about a world outside of the knower , or is it an activity that makes changes in the world and then gauges it’s predictions in terms of the responses of the world to its interventions? Isnt there a fundamental circularity in science? For instance, a theory is usually tested by
means of instruments described and interpreted by means of this very theory. Another level of circularity is that an ‘anomaly' (threatening to falsify the theory) can only be expressed in terms of this theory.
In other words truth as consistency rather than truth as correspondence?

Dicing up the world into particulars, what reason does, among other things, does not hand us the world; it does give us a means to manage and deal with the world, but the world altogether is not logical; it is alogical, apart from logic, qualitatively different, and language is mostly self referential, as are logical proofs. So when a scientist tells you the planet Jupiter has a mass and a trajectory round the sun, and is a distance D at time T, and so on, what is s/he talking about? It is about relations WE have with that planet, not the thing out there. — Constance

Is this what you had in mind?If so, I agree completely.


“Now, an intra-ontology of embodiment has momentous implications for how we conceive knowledge. In the framework of a standard ontology, we strive to acquire
knowledge about what is given out there, and this non-committal knowledge can be encoded intellectually. But in the framework of an intra-ontology, non-committal knowledge appears as a non-sense. According to a Merleau-Pontian phenomenologist, knowledge affects the two sides that arise from the self-splitting of what there is (namely of embodied experience). In other terms, knowledge of something arises concomitantly with a mutation of ourselves qua knowers. And this mutation of ourselves qua knowers manifests as a mutation of (our) experience that cannot be encoded intellectually, since the very processes and conclusions of the intellect depend on it.

Such intra-ontological pattern of knowledge is universal. It may look superfluous or contrived in the field of a classical science of nature, where the objectification of a
limited set of appearances is so complete that everything happens as if the objects of knowledge were completely separate from the act of knowing. But it becomes unavoidable in many other situations where this separation is in principle unattainable, such as the human sciences or quantum mechanics.

This is why Varela considered that a purely intellectual operation (“a change in our understanding” about some object) is not enough to solve the mind-body problem, and even less the “hard problem” of the origin of phenomenal consciousness, namely of lived experience. For these problems are archetypal cases in which the inseparability between subject and object of knowledge is impossible to ignore. What is needed to overcome them, according to the lesson of the intra-ontological view of knowledge, is nothing less than “a change in experience (being)” (Varela 1976: 67). Addressing properly the problem of lived experience is tantamount to undergo a change in experience.”(Michel Bitbol)

But could Heidegger have done the same work as a movie director? I wonder if certain projects require a particular expression? — Tom Storm

The reason cultural eras can be depicted in terms of movements that encompass the whole range of cultural
creativity( Classical, Renaissance, Enlightenment , Modern, post-modern) is because in each of these eras what was expressed in painting or music or science amounted to variations on a common theme of ideas(worldviews) .
Eventually there will be Heideggerian poetry, dance, art, music and science. There are already approaches within cognitive psychology , political theory and psychotherapy that are Heideggerian to some extent.

People do all sorts of jobs without reading historically significant texts in their area. The key issue in work is accreditation and/or competence, not books read. — Tom Storm

I think you’ll find that many of the greatest philosophers formulated the kernel of their innovative ideas when they were too young to have read other philosophers. So where did they get their ideas from? By forming a novel interpretation based on their exposure to those around them while growing up, as well as pieces of the culture as expressed through publicly available art, music, science, etc. I don’t think we would know about them as philosophers if they had not eventually gotten around to reading other philosophers, or at least those in fields relevant to philosophy( Wittgenstein had read relatively little in the history of philosophy, but knew the sciences, mathematicians and a certain cohort of contemporary philosophy quite well). One needs to have this exposure not in order to come up with great original thinking , but to come up with and refine a language of expression of the ideas. The same original kernel of genius one begins with early in life may find its language of expression in science or the arts rather than philosophy, depending on which form of expression one discovers is most satisfying.

What are those? I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of metaphysics articles, those are the big ones I was aware of. How do they get around it? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let me list some of those who unravel the notion of objects having intrinsic presence or substance or being.

Hillary Putnam, Dan Zahavi, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida , Merleau-Ponty, Matthew Ratcliffe , Michel Bitbol, Foucault, Deleuze, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Evan Thompson, Richard Rorty, Francisco Varela, Eugene Gendlin, Paul Ricouer.

To get around the idea, that is, to deconstruct it, is to place contextually pragmatic relations prior to the intrinsic being of objects ( or semiotic codes or informational structures) . In other words, difference before identity.

. If consciousness/experience is all there is then are you only referring to your consciousness/experience? Where is your consciousness/experience relative to mine? If you're saying that consciousness exists everywhere are the boundaries of everywhere your own consciousness, or is there consciousness outside of your own? Do other minds only exist within the boundaries of your own consicousness/experience or are they separate from yours? If the latter, then what is the medium that divides one mind from another? — Harry Hindu

Viewpoints among phenomenologists differ on this issue.
Husserl took individual consciousness as primary. But this is not the consciousness of a natural-biological human being. I constitute a world of objects, myself as natural entity and other persons at higher levels of constitution from a more primordial stratum of expereincing in which myself as person , other persons and a world of natural
objects only exist as unidentified phenomena. But these objective facts are all contingent and relative. Only the constituting activity of intentionality is primary. This is what Husserl means by consciousness. Not a substance, object, intrinsic quality or sets of a priori formal categories. Rather a constantly flowi g , changing site of intersection between memory , present and anticipation. Even though he argues we must begin from the point of view of my own consciousness, Husserl also believed that an indefinite community of consciousnesses interact to form a total, intersubjectivitely valid world.

Gendlin allows us to understand a world history prior to human consciousness, but the important point t is that the nature of this ‘naturalism’ is consistent with Husserl’s analysis of consciousness. There are no neutral , dead impersonal particles, waves , codes, information. Rather , living and pre-living phenomena function according to a radical relationality that does not conceal relevance, sense, normativity and point of view within an ill-conceived neutral monism that remains stuck within the natural attitude.

Gendlin can describe a natural history pointing backward from my own human consciousness that is consistent with phenomenological concepts because he
transforms the nature of naturalism and biological embodiment so that they are consistent with the dynamics of consciousness. Neutral
monisms instead force consciousness into the old naturalist mold. One only needs a monism with two components ( subjectivity and objective reality) because one has failed to integrate them.

“However, the problem of those neutral monisms, both in their static and dynamic versions, is that they posit a false symmetry between consciousness and its objects. This symmetry is false because it is a purely intellectual construct, in which the constituted bodily objects and the constituting embodied consciousness are formally put on a par with one another. But whenever intellectual constructs are perceived as such, and one starts to become aware of the lived background of the process of construction, the symmetry is lost. One then understands that the only coherent strategy is to dwell continuously within the lived process of constitution of an objective domain by concrete present consciousness, instead of just simulating the constitutive dependence of manifest objects on an abstractly conceived consciousness (as dynamical neutral monisms do). We are thus drawn back to a phenomenological form of performative idealism, after a detour through reflexive monism. This should not be a surprise since even reflexive monism arose from a phenomenological insight: “what I normally thought of as the ‘physical world' … and my ‘experience of the world' were one and the same!” ( Bitbol)

How is saying "consciousness is primary" or "experience is all there is" not simply implying that solipsism is the case? — Harry Hindu

How is

For me, "naturalism" is simply the idea that things exist and they exist in particular ways. Whatever is the case is natural and how it changes is natural. All explanations that attempt to describe or symbolize the way things are are natural explanations. Even god would be natural if one were to exist and has a causal influence on everything else. If solipsism were the case, then solipsism would be the natural state of affairs. — Harry Hindu

If making consciousness primary is solipsistic, how is a naturalism that claims the existence of entities independent of awareness of them not also a solipsism? After all , this alleged ‘independence’ of things is always only perceived through conscious construal. There’s a certain radical connectness between the subjective and objective poles of experiencing which can never be transcended. It wouldn’t be a ‘substance’ we’re talking about, since that brings us back to the assumption of entities ‘outside of’ warner’s of them. It would instead be be a relational point of view that is primary.

Think of the substance as like an analog signal and consciousness as a digitization of the analog signal - like making particles/objects out of waves. A view (first-person) emerges from the way the information is organized and as a relationship between body and environment. — Harry Hindu

Signals , waves, particles , codes and information are neutral entities belonging to nobody in particular. But these are never perceived as these neutral , dead in-themselves generic things. We only end up with this way of thinking about them by ignoring the subjective context of sense in which they are construed in awareness.

“ The standard question “where does consciousness come from ?” provides us with a good illustration of how misguided one can be if this radical self-referentiality is ignored. When we ask the question “where ?”, we prepare ourselves to focus our attention on some restricted region of our conscious experience : right or left, up or down, nearby or far away, inside or outside the skull, in this or that part of the brain. And when we think we have got the answer, after a deep speculative reflection or after a long experimental inquiry, this answer inevitably consists in pointing towards an object or a process that we can describe, think about, or even sometimes imagine. In other terms, answering a question about the origin of consciousness is tantamount to singling out a given content of our consciousness, and encouraging others to modulate their own consciousness accordingly. Everything looks as if we were trying to ascribe consciousness as a whole to some part of it ; as if conscious experience, this all-pervasive fact that constitutes our lives, were tentatively encapsulated in a fraction of it.”(Michel Bitbol)

how would a phenomenologist read idealism in the Kantian or Schopenhauerian sense? Are you getting at this when you write:

Bitbol accepts no notion of formal categorical contents of subjectivity. — Tom Storm

Yes, Bitbol keeps from the Kantian notion of Idealism that the experienced world is a world of ideas rather than senseless objects. What makes an idea an idea is that it provides a formal element tying together subject and object. For Kant this formal element is metaphysical categories of space time causality etc. For Bitbol what ties subject and object together is memory and anticipation

f you look at theories of parts and wholes in metaphysics, generally it is proposed that things are just the sum of their traits, and so traits are the logical unit of analysis. The primary opposing theories to this view hold that objects possess an essential haeccity, a substratum of "thisness." This substratum of bare being/identity makes a thing different from just its traits, and so neatly solves many problems of identity that come up when you posit that a thing is just the tropes/universals it possesses/instantiates. However, the substratum is unanalyzable, an ontic primitive, and so it can't be where your analysis starts, and is arguably a vaccuous concept entirely — Count Timothy von Icarus

You’re leaving out phenomenology, Wittgenstein , poststructuralism , deconstruction and various and sundry other recent positions that unravel the notion of objects having intrinsic presence or substance or being.

From your reading of these 'conditions of possibility' is he a Kantian idealist or an an idealist in any sense? — Tom Storm

Definitely not a Kantian Idealist. Rather, he uses Kant as a source of inspiration. Bitbol accepts no notion of formal categorical contents of subjectivity. The phenomenological approach is about correlations that shape and reshape both the subjective and the objective poles of experiencing in each moment of actual experience. If that makes him an ideas or then all the physicalists, materialists and naturalists on this site are major idealists.

“ Consciousness is the name we give to the astounding realization of immediate existence, even before
its more intricate connotations such as reflective self-consciousness or moral conscience. Consciousness, in this very elementary sense, is existentially primary. These obvious (yet destabilizing) remarks are not derived from any reasoning. They rather arise when we suspend any judgment, and just state the elementary features of what we are living. They express what E. Husserl (1913/1931) called a phenomenological description ; a plain statement of what is immediately experienced, irrespective of any interpretation of the contents of experience in naturalistic terms. So, asserting that consciousness is “existentially
primary” is no metaphysical doctrine ; this is no idealist or panpsychist doctrine of the ontological primacy of consciousness to be contrasted with a doctrine of the ontological primacy of matter.

This is just an invitation to be faithful to our own lived experience in its most pristine form. Is such lack of reasoning a defect of the (phenomenological) approach ? Actually, it might well be its major quality. Indeed, as E. Schrödinger (1964, p. 19) noticed, when the problems of mind and consciousness are dealt with, the reasoning is part of the overall phenomenon to be explained, not a tool for any genuine explanation. Here again, radical self-referentiality must be taken
into account. As any reasoning, a reasoning about consciousness involves a conscious experience ; aknowledging the validity of a personal reasoning, or even of a mechanical inference performed by a Turing machine, is still a conscious experienice.”

Physics is also effectively silent on the role of the observer, or more specifically - the conscious observation of such things - as if physicists have direct access to the processes they are attributing laws to. — Harry Hindu

I’ve been reading Michel Bitbol, a philosopher of quantum
physics who argues that the most profound i mplicario. of the new physics is that “Quantum Mechanics is nothing more than a general method for predicting
experimental and technological phenomena that are co-produced by our own activity.” He has elaborated a metaphysics for a radical neurophenomenology that is not a neutral monism placing consciousness and naturalism on an equal footing , but a grounding of naturalism in consciousness. Consciousness must be primary, since all our objective science are activities within and of consciousness. “…experience is not one node in an intellectual graph among other nodes; it is not one box in a functionalist diagram among
other boxes. Experience is the lived origin and byproduct of any process, including the
intellectual process. Experience is all that there is at this very moment when I am writing and you are reading. Indeed, experience is the lived background of the very
intellectual inference that there is something beyond experience.”

https://d1wqtxts1xzle7.cloudfront.net/70309754/Dialectic_of_Body_and_Consciousness_Last2-libre.pdf?1632745964=&response-content-disposition=attachment%3B+filename%3DThe_Tangled_Dialectic_of_Body_and_Consci.pdf&Expires=1647977298&Signature=aF-czUmBimH59xOAXfaQoEn1uOuQ57sLMG7As9~BZKRLHrAHk5UeDrJ6IDng569AX-zZ-uWJ-nZJ-dFKqQ~ZjGpQfYLZiGAetqEJ5gf~vhYMBxufFbkYgd2PnESSj9bj6LVwXvmHxyzS4nvCyd2Gl0oahJ08Bzb0hR1LHNlvwZruw9OSvOMMOkTYhROS7Gw5AbN5bwuaGuKng~cPIX9G--3jvQ1xZ2eUobu22tckaebjTc4-x9MQLkCJXB6qLgMyrMUsK-j6Ww-w5ZLMD8J-jszJFlI4A2VjRegUTt7-lA5EFoEKjFRD~tPkOIpRG3xIz4u2rL-pL2AlCgdn5Yx-~Q__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJLOHF5GGSLRBV4ZA

“Michel Bitbol is emeritus researcher at CNRS/Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He received a M.D., a Ph.D. in physics and a “Habilitation” in philosophy. After a start in scientific research, he turned to philosophy of science, editing texts by Erwin Schrödinger and formulating a neo-kantian philosophy of quantum mechanics. He then studied the relations between physics and the philosophy of mind, in collaboration with Francisco Varela, and drew a parallel between Buddhist dependent arising and non-supervenient relations in quantum physics. He also developed a first-person conception of consciousness expressed from the standpoint of an experience of meditation. More recently, he engaged a debate with the philosophical movement called “speculative realism”, from the same standpoint.

His research interests are mainly focused on the influence of quantum physics on philosophy. He first worked on Erwin Schrödinger's metaphysics and philosophy of physics.[3]

Using theorems demonstrated by Jean-Louis Destouches, Paulette Destouches-Février, and R.I.G. Hughes, he pointed out that the structure of quantum mechanics may be derived to a large extent from the assumption that microscopic phenomena cannot be dissociated from their experimental context.[4] His views on quantum mechanics converge with ideas developed by Julian Schwinger[5] and Asher Peres,[6] according to whom quantum mechanics is a "symbolism of atomic measurements", rather than a description of atomic objects. He also defends ideas close to Anton Zeilinger's, by claiming that quantum laws do not express the nature of physical objects, but only the bounds of experimental information.

Along with this view, quantum mechanics is no longer considered as a physical theory in the ordinary sense, but rather as a background framework for physical theories, since it goes back to the most elementary conditions which allow us to formulate any physical theory whatsoever. Some reviewers suggested half-seriously to call this view of physics "Kantum physics". Indeed, Michel Bitbol often refers to the philosophy of I. Kant, according to whom one can understand the contents of knowledge only by analyzing the (sensorial, instrumental, and rational) conditions of possibility of such knowledge.

competition~cooperation is the natural dynamic driving any society. And it is hardly rocket science to draw the usual pragmatic moral imperatives from that.

a successful ethical agent would be defined as an individual able to balance this dynamic in its most synergistic way. A win-win where the creative possibility is being invested in making a better social structure for all - and that better social structure being in turn one that would be capable of fostering exactly that kind of individual disposition.

Something like a modern social democracy, as enjoyed by the worlds happiest nations. So what have you got against golden rules like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? — apokrisis

I’m writing a paper on the modern history of moral blame, which gives me a slightly new framework within which to view our previous conversations.
It strikes me that cooperation and competition both require shared values. Without agreement on a larger system of practices , neither cooperation nor competition are coherent. Relativistic approaches to ethics argue that there can be no ultimate agreement among disparate cultures on what constitutes a better social structure (Russia vs the West, or social conservatives vs liberals in the U.S.). In the U.S. there is wide disagreement over what makes us happy ( only some believe we need to “make American great again”). So the golden rule turns out to be as relativistic as the values that determine what we want to have done to us or in our name.

Opposing the moral relativists are those who believe utilitarian consensus is possible. Their justifying metaphysics tends to involve some
form of objective naturalism, providing the ground of correctness and consensus.

The game is precisely that kind you would call a totalising and univocal game - one that absorbs all plurality and contingency into the eternalised hardness of its irrefutable logical structure.

And it is indeed game over for plurality and contingency when the triadic structuralism of Peirce and systems science comes to include them as part of a larger dialectical logic. — apokrisis

Doesn’t this swallow up and bury the mystery of sense? As in the ‘sense of a meaning’? Isnt the sense of any concept , fact , perception subject to constant contextual shift in its sense? Do we simply reduce sense and its transformations to biological causal processes, or does trying to ground sense in causal mechanisms just keep us trapped within the circle? Is it totalizing finality we need or endlessly rejuvenating creative wonder?

What are the moral implications of this totalizing univocal game? As ethical agents what should we strive for? I assume not just historically contingent, relativistic change?
Are there certain universals we should be guided by in our relations with others?

The dichotomy starts in the raw possibility that is a tychic vagueness and then unfurls towards is two immanent and logically-reciprocal limits of being.

The end or goal is marked by becoming as stably divided as possible. — apokrisis

. Sounds like a game the whole family can play But who invented the rules? Can we invent new rules?

You would find the reference in the language game but he very specifically speaks about everything having a reference. — Shwah

“The mistake here then is (Baker &) Hacker's thought that what is problematic for Wittgenstein—what he wants to critique in the opening remarks quoted from Augustine—is that words name things or correspond to objects, with the emphasis laid on the nature of what is on the other side of the word-object relationship. Rather, we contend that what is problematic in this picture is that words must be relational at all—whether as names to the named, words to objects, or ‘words' belonging to a ‘type of use.'It is the necessarily relational character of ‘the Augustinian picture' which is apt to lead one astray; Baker & Hacker, in missing this, ultimately replace it with a picture that retains the relational character, only recast. There is no such thing as a word outside of some particular use; but that is a different claim from saying, with Baker & Hacker, that words belong to a type of use. For a word to be is for a word to be used. Language does not exist external to its use by us in the world.”(Phil Hutchinson and Rupert Read)

Thinking in these terms might also highlight the impotence of the "answer" given by the fine tuning argument. The fine tuning argument answers the question of why there is life in the universe by saying, basically: because otherwise there wouldn't be life in the universe. Or, in its more general form that applies to all of these questions: because otherwise things would not be the way they are. — Luke

‘Why’ questions look for an overarching explanatory scheme to organize particular facts or subordinate the patterns.

“But if wonder (namely, about the “obvious”) is one element that motivates philosophical questioning, it can be only the occasion for asking a real question instead of getting thrown off by some prejudgment. For even here, Lotze is caught in a widespread prejudgment that remains just as dominant today, namely, that we must simply accept and leave untouched, these supposedly basic concepts—even in the case of the most general concept: “being” / actuality.”

“All great and genuine philosophy moves within the limited sphere of a few questions which appear to common sense as perennially the same, although in fact they are necessarily different in every instance of philoso­phizing. Different not in any merely external sense, but rather in such a way that the self-same is in each case essentially transformed once more. Only in such transformation does philosophy possess its genuine self-sameness. This transformation lends a properly primordial historicity to the occurrence of the history of philosophizing, a historicity which makes its own demands.”

“ Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder-the manifestness of the nothing-does the "why?" loom before us. Only because the "why" is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds and ground things. Only because we can question and ground things is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher.”
(Heidegger)

If so, attention could then more fruitfully turn to the semiotic view of information that bridges that "insuperable gap". As has already been covered in this thread. :grin: — apokrisis

Thought you’d be interested in this from Derrida:

“Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another, would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign. I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognize that we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches the movement of signification is what makes its interruption impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable proposition for Husserl, whose phenomenology remains therefore-in its "principle of principles" -the most radical and most critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence.

The difference between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word phenomenology : Lambert proposed in fact to "reduce the theory of things to the theory of signs."

According to the "phaneoroscopy" or "phenomenology" of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence, it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology that "the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign."There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in the luminosity of its presence. The so-called "thing itself" is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of reference, to be separated from itself.“

Information is communicated between persons, not objects. You're doing the anthropomorphising I cautioned against. — Daemon

I do t want to do any anthropomorphizing. I want to see if this ‘between persons’ nature of information points to a split between mind and nature , between information and the physical, and perhaps amounts to a specific dualism separating subjectivity and the objective world. In short, I want to see if you’re reserving a very special place for anthropos.

That is the reductionism you seem to so admire. Break things down into their simplest parts so that you can build them back into complex wholes. — apokrisis

that is what you are doing by insisting that "information" should be still synonymous with "meaningful". — apokrisis

That may be the point. I may be mistaken, but I’m getting the feeling Daemon may want to protect an insuperable gap between the meaningfulness of mind (and information as communication of ‘facts’) and the extreme reductiveness of physicalism.

to inform someone is to provide them with facts, the facts are information. — Daemon

Given this definition of information as communicating facts, what is key here isnt the notion of communication. In its simplest form , any physical causal interaction between objects is a ‘communicating’. It’s the notion of a fact that seems to be central. What is a fact? How would you define it most rigorously? If animals communicate with each other , then do they know facts? Do bees or worms or even simpler creatures who communicate know facts? If not , then it is not information that they are communicating, and there must be something utterly unique about the human. mind.

I'm not a physicalist. — Daemon

If you’re not a physicalist, then how would you describe yourself? Are you a dualist, placing mind in a separate realm from the physical?

the concept of information adds a great deal to our understanding of DNA, but information doesn't play a role in genetics itself. — Daemon

But what is your most empirically rigorous definition of information, then? Would this involve reducing the concept of information to a configured populations of neurons firing? Would you argue that any other account of information is lacking something?

What’s the difference between a configured population of neurons and a random collection of marbles in a jar ? Is the word ‘configuration’ key here , that what distinguishes information from a random collection of particles is a certain order? If so, what is it about the concept of information that allows us to know the difference between a collection that is ordered and a collection which is random?

Information isn't everywhere in the universe, it's in minds. It isn't in the tree stump. — Daemon

Let’s talk about minds, then. My surmise is if one takes the position you do that a naturalist explanation demands we be able to reduce all phenomena of life to interactions between biochemicals , and these to the stuff that physics deals with , then the concept and use of information that minds produce must itself be reducible to such physical substrates. So our seeing a set of lines as the mona lisa vs just a random set of lines must avail itself of a reductive empirical analysis that fully explains how our brains are organizing this ‘information’. It turns out we have some choices here. in the realm of psychological models. It seems to me that stimulus-response theory was designed to make psychology compatible with descriptions at the biochemical
level. Skinner’s theory of language learning, for instance, in contrast with cognitive models , avoids informational heuristics. I think he would agree with you that the concept of information doesn’t add anything to a linear causal s-r account of such phenomena as recognizing an array of points and lines as the mona lisa.

Would you agree with this , or do you mean to argue that the concept of information , while adding nothing to our understanding of something like a dna code, does add something to our understanding of perceptual recognition? Put differently, do you think people use the concept of information to describe a particular phenomenon simply because they don’t understand it well enough to use a causal physical account instead(like the choice of cognitive psychological vs neurochemical descriptions )?

Information is not in (for example) DNA in the same way that the meaning "me" is not in this vertical line: I — Daemon

How do you know that that’s a vertical line? That’s just one of a potential infinity of meanings we can assign to it. If you tell me that you are intending us to interpet the image as a vertical li e, is there supposed to be something irreducible in this claim, as if there really is such a thing floating around the universe whose absolute in-itself identity is a vertical line? But isn’t vertical a term referring to a spatial orientation relative to a observer? And isnt line a geometric concept? If we remove the observer who knows geometry or other language concepts from the context , does it still make sense to refer to a vertical line existing independently of our interpretation of it? Is there any way of describing it that does not presuppose an observer? Wouldnt it be better to simply say that human beings perceive the world in terms of constraints and affordances whose particular meaning is relative to our point of view? That leaves you with the ability to say that there are in fact real things in the world outside of our interpretive faculties, but any attempt to pin them down takes us back to their relationship to our interpretive faculties.
And isnt it the case that the way that objects interact with other objects is a kind of interpretation also? This would mean that no object exists as what it is outside of its relation to a neighborhood of other objects, and as this environment changes, so too does the essence and properties of the object.

You may be interested in a relatively new approach in philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology(OOO). It was introduced by Graham Harman and has been embraced by a number of writers. It is also related to speculative realism. OOO argues that much of recent philosophy relies on correlationism , which is essentially subjectivism. Objects are claimed to only exist as correlated with a human subjective perspective. We see this in writers as diverse as Hegel, the American Pragmatists, phenomenology and postmodernists. It is also a presupposition of the semiotic and information-based approaches to biology discussed in this thread.
OOO asserts that real objects in the world cannot be assimilated into subjective frameworks of knowledge in the way that subjectivists believe.

The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a dome of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary inbrelation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we see my claim a complete lack of awareness is involved.
— Joshs

Could you rewrite this please? — Daemon

What a mess. That’ll teach me to write while hiking.

Here’s the edit:


The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a form of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary in relation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we end up concluding that a complete lack of awareness is involved.

I think the issue of blindsight is a good example:

Laura Chivers writes 'Blindsight is seen clinically as a contrast between a lack of declarative knowledge about a stimulus and a high rate of correct answers to questions about the stimulus . People suffering from blindsight claim to see nothing, and are therefore unable to reach spontaneously for stimuli, cannot decide whether or not stimuli are present, and do not know what objects look like. In this sense, they are blind. However, they are able to give correct answers when asked to decide between given alternatives. Studies done with subjects who exhibit blindsight have shown that they are able to guess reliably only about certain features of stimuli having to do with motion, location and direction of stimuli. They are also able to discriminate simple forms, and can shape their hands in a way appropriate to grasping the object when asked to try. Some may show color discrimination as well . Subjects also show visual capacities, including reflexes (e.g. the pupil reacts to changes in light), implicit reactions and voluntary responses.

People suffering from blindsight are not "blind" because their eyes do not function. Rather they suffer from cortical blindness. People suffering from cortical blindness receive sensory information but do not process it correctly, usually due to damage in some part of the brain. The damage in blindsight patients has been shown to be in the striate cortex, which is part of the visual cortex. The striate cortex is often called the primary visual cortex , and is thought to be the primary locus of visual processing . Destruction or disconnection of the striate cortex produces a scotoma, or a region of blindness, in the part of the visual field that maps to the damaged area of the cortex . Depending on the extent of the lesion, vision can be absent in anywhere between a very small section of stimulus field and the entire field . The person is unable to process the sensory input to the striate cortex, and does not recognize having seen the object. '

Cognitive theorists conclude from clinical examples of blindsight that consciousness is only a part of what goes on in the brain, and that consciousness is not needed for behavior. To argue that blindsightedness is not an example of unconscious processing (experience occuring in parallel with, but independent of conscious awareness) requires a new and different sensitivity to content of experience, and to the understanding of awareness. If there is no 'feeling of seeing' in blindsightedness, as is claimed, then there is feeling of a different sort, a quality of meaning that is overlooked by contemporary approaches to cognition and affect because of its subtlety. Familiarization with Gendlin's focusing techniques is one way to develop sensitivity to what for most is a world they have never articulated. This is the important point; phenomena such as blindsightedness evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need , of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in blindsightedness. One has before one a task involving an intention to see, which implies the involvement of a certain concept of vision that the perceiver expects to encounter.

If the claim for blindsightedness were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in seeing than one normally expects of a visual situation, (for instance, if one expects contrast, color, perspective, one gets instead a vague or incipient meaning that is not recognizable as seeing even though it in fact is normally part of all visual experiences), then I would be in agreement. If, however, the claim is that whatever meaning or information is prompting the blindsighted behavior is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called blindsight is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously, intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Blindsightedness is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced.

The nature of the experience in blindsightedness would not be unlike the way that the 'same' object that one observes over the course of a few seconds or minutes continues to be the 'same' differently even though it is typically reported to be self-identical over that interval. A changing sense of a thing is not noticed until it becomes an intense affect, and then it is ossified as an abstract 'state'. From the perspective of awareness, cognitivism seems to order experiences hierarchically, privileging what is considered conceptual content over affectivity by virtue of its supposed repeatability, and valuing both of these over other events that are labeled unconscious because they are assumed to be devoid of any conscious content. Blindsight involves a barely discernable shift of sense in an ongoing experience of regularity. There would be not only blindsight, but deaf-hearing, numb-tactility and non-conceptual conceptuality. The test of consciousness of a thing:'Can one see that thing emerging from a field of perceived sameness?' is wrongheaded because it doesn't recognize that the field of supposed sameness is already a movement of changing meanings. The conscious-unconscious binary should be re-configured as a spectrum of meaningfulness)

I don't think you do get it Joshs. I'm making the same point as our friend Galuchat: the meaning of

I

is not in the line, it's in our minds.

Similarly, the meaning of the paint splodges (Mona Lisa) is not in the painting, it's in our minds.

Similarly, the meaning of the marks on the toast (Jesus) is not in the toast. — Daemon

No, it is in both. Objects are what they are to us in relation our pragmatic interactions with them. An object is what we can do with it , how it changes when we move our head or walk around to the back of it or pick it up. An object is our expectation that it will remain self-identical at least over very short periods of time. We invented this notion of physical ‘object’ but there never was in fact anything like that in our experienced world. It a useful fiction that has allowed us to build ingenious devices, but it becomes severely limited when we attempt to apply this way of thinking ( physical causality) to human behavior.

Husserl analyzed how we construct the notion of a spatial object , out of which the natural sciences created their notions of physical matter.

One of the key aspects of Husserl's approach was his explanation of the origin of spatial objects. Rather than defining an object in terms of its self-subsistence over time with its properties and attributes, he believed such entities to be , not fictions, but idealities. That is to say, what we , in a naive naturalist attitude, point to as this 'real' table in front of us, is the constantly changing product of a process of progressive constitution in consciousness. The real object is in fact an idealization.This process begins at the most primordial level with what he called primal impressions, which we can imagine as the simplest whiffs of sensation(these he calls actual, rather than real. Actual impressions only appear once in time as what they are. When we see something like a table, all that we actually perceive in front of us is an impoverished, contingent partial sense experience.

We fill in the rest of experience in two ways. Al experience implies a temporal structure of retention, primal impression and protention. Each moment presents us with a new sensation, th4 retained memory of the just preceding sensation and anticipation of what is to come. We retain the memory of previous experiences with the 'same' object and those memories become fused with the current aspect of it. A the same time, we protend forward, anticipating aspects of the object that are not yet there for us, based on prior experience with it. For example, we only see the front of the table, but anticipate as an empty horizon, its sides, and this empty anticipation joins with the current view and the memory of previous views to form a complex fused totality. Perception constantly is motivated , that is tends toward toward the fulfillment of the experience of the object as integrated singularity, as this same' table'.

Thus , through a process of progress adumbration of partial views, we constitute what we call and object. It must be added that not just the sens of sight, but all other sense modalities can come into play in constituting the object. And most importantly, there is no experience of an object without kineshthetic sensation of our voluntary movement in relation to the thing seen. Intrinsic to what the object means as object is our knowing how its appearance will change when we move our head in a certain way, or our eyes , or when we touch it. The object is what it is for us in relation to the way we know we can change its appearance relative to our interactions with it.

In sum, what the naive realist calls an external object of perception, Husserl treats as a relative product of constant but regilated changing correlated modes of givenness and adumbrations composed of retentions and protentions. The 'thing' is a tentative , evolving achievement of memory , anticipation and voluntary movement.

From this vantage, attempting to explain this constituting process in psychophysiological terms by reducing it to the language of naive realism is an attempt to explain the constituting on the basis of the constituted. The synthetic structure of temporal constitution is irreducible to 'physical' terms. On the contrary, it is the 'physicai' that rests on a complex constitutive subjective process that is ignored in the naive attitude.

I was asking you to explain unconsciousness — Daemon

Look at my edit of the r previous post.

Can you explain then how we can ever become unconscious? Digestion continues in comatose patients. Can you explain that? — Daemon

This is how I conceive it. Consciousness for a human being is associated with highly complex forms of awareness(memory and recognition, affectivity, etc). But if one believes as I do that consciousness occurs within living things as a spectrum of complexity, ranging from the simplest proto-consciousness up through social behavior among humans, then one has to imagine how the ‘subjective’ experience of awareness changes as one moves up or down this spectrum of complexity.

The question of whether and to what extent there is awareness in comotose patients or those in non-rem sleep has not been settled. I would argue that there is a dome of implicit consciousness , but it is so rudimentary inbrelation to what we typically demand of the term ‘conscious’ that we see my claim a complete lack of awareness is involved. The same difficulty arises in attempting to pin consciousness to a particular brain area as trying to limit consciousness to the brain as opposed to the rest of the body. While clearly some parts of the brain appear more crucial
for consciousness that others , localizing awareness to a particular structure has been no more successful that trying to connect emotion or memory exclusively to certain brain areas. All these processes , emotion, consciousness, memory, are global processes involving the whole brain. And researchers are discovering that distinguishing brain from body is just as arbitrary. The global scene of consciousness is brain-body-environment.

I simply dont beleive that what we call consciousness or awareness is some adaptive mechanism ,above and beyond the purposive, adaptive behaviors exhibited by very simple living things , that more or less suddenly makes its appearance in certain lines of creatures. But this way of looking at consciousness , as either some kind of special mechanism that emerges somewhere in evolutionary history or a panpsychic metaphysical substance, is what we are left with if we look at a living system as a collection of parts like a car engine.

As Thompson writes:

“The panpsychist argues that we cannot make good on this invocation of emergence, that it is ultimately mysterious. Hence the options would seem to be either some kind of dualism or some kind of panpsychism. But this line of thought is not at all the one we find in Merleau-Ponty and Simondon. Already in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty rejects analytical reductionism for physical forms like waves, soap bubbles, and convection rolls. As he says, “The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fictitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations.”Consider also this passage, which I quote in Mind in Life:

“…each local change in a [physical] form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures us of the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality. And it is no more composed of parts which can be distinguished in it than a melody (always transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression. Possessing internal unity inscribed in a segment of space and resisting deformation from external influences by its circular causality, the physical form is an indi-vidual. It can happen that, submitted to external forces which increase and decrease in a continuous manner, the system, beyond a certain threshold, re-distributes its own forces in a qualitatively differ-ent order which is nevertheless only another ex-pression of its immanent law. Thus, with form, a principle of discontinuity is introduced and the conditions for a development by leaps or crises, for an event or for a history, are given.“

In Simondon and Merleau-Ponty what we find is a reconceptualization of matter, life, and mind, one that does not bring mind down into the domain of microphysical processes nor equate mind with information transfer and self-organization, but rather tries to show how the notion of form as dynamic pattern or individuation process can both integrate or bridge the orders of matter, life, and mind, while also accounting for the originality of each order. This is the path I try to follow in Mind in Life and not panpsychism.“

We might usefully think about this vertical line:

I

Do you see what I'm getting at Joshs? — Daemon

Yes, I do.

We could also use the point at the end of this sentence as an example .


From Francisco Varela:

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.”

Much of what we do ourselves is also unconscious.
If you want to say the bacterium is conscious, then you'll also have to say that say our digestive system is conscious, that it makes sense of the food we eat and acts with intentional purposiveness.



Consciousness is about feeling, experience. There's no reason to think the bacterium feels anything, that it has any conscious experience. We know how it does what it does, we can describe that down to the finest detail, and we know that it's an unconscious process (like our digestion). — Daemon

I disagree. The key to understanding consciousness is that the functioning of a living system is a
unified totality. Our digestive system isn’t a closed system, it is an aspect of the total functioning of our organism , which inseparably interweaves body, mind and environment as a single system. I wouldnt say much of what we do is unconscious in the sense of subsystems operating completely independently of awareness. I prefer the distinction implicit vs explicit consciousness. Much of our behavior ( like automatically driving a car while taking or watching the scenery) and much that takes place in our bodies we only have implicit awareness of; these process affect awareness in the background.
A bacterium has proto-sensation and feeling. We don’t know what a bacterium does the way we know what a computer progress or other machine does. We only describe and predict the bacterium‘s behavior in the most general possible terms. We used to think we knew what pigeons were doing when we used stimulus -response models to train them. Then we discovered how poorly such approaches explained animal behavior. It was t long ago that we believed even higher animals had no language , cognition, emotion , tool making or cultural
transmission. I guarantee what we know about the behavior of bacteria will be very different decades from now than it is now.

Now, keep this lack of haecceity in mind and think of how different particles might be seen to function very much like the way letters function in a text (a "T" is always a T; the specific T is meaningless, only its role in a word matters). You get a view of reality more similar to how we tend to think of language, than the view we get of particles as tiny balls bouncing around (which is itself just an abstraction). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I’m curious. Do you consider this thinking on information and semiotics that you have been discussing to be philosophy, and if so, what do you think is its relation to the work of contemporary philosophers? Peirce tends to be mentioned by semioticians as their patron saint , but there tends to be no mention by this group of the croute word Peirce by Dewey and James and the implications of this for semiotics. Do you think that the role that philosophers used to play in dealing with questions concerning the ground of being has now been usurped by the natural sciences? Is the proper role
of philosophy today merely that of clarification of empirical findings?

Information is an emergent pattern of relations amongst physical systems that occurs at a higher level of abstraction than the underlying chemistry. It's not 'something more' than the underlying chemistry, just like the Mona Lisa isn't 'something more' than the materials that make it up. That's because the Mona Lisa exists as a result of the very specific constraints that have been imposed (via the work of the artist) on the underlying substrate. — Theorem

Is the Mona Lisa the result of constraints on the part of the artist or a change in perspectival attitude of both artist and viewer, a kind of gestalt shift that transforms the sense of what one is perceiving?

Bacteria direct their movements according to the level of noxious or beneficial chemicals in their environment. In order to swim in the right direction (let's say towards an attractive chemical) it seems that the bacterium must be able to track the change in concentration of the chemical over time. That would seem to require a memory, which is an aspect of mind. — Daemon

Bacteria do more than track levels of chemicals. The nature of their functioning is unified such as to form a normative anticipative sense-making. The organism doesn’t just adapt to an independent environment. It co-defines that environment through the aims of its its own functioning. Put differently , the environment is shaped by the organism as much as the organism adapts to its environment. That’s a reciprocal feedback dynamic.

“Bacterial chemotaxis provides a minimal yet rich and fundamental case of living as sense-making in precarious conditions. Sucrose and aspartate, for example, have valence as attractants and significance as food, but only in the milieu or niche that emerges through bacterial liv-ing. Put another way, the status of these molecules as nutrients is not intrinsic to their molecular structure; nor is it even simply a relational feature of how these molecules can bond to other molecules in the cell membrane.

Rather, it belongs to the context of the cell as an individual, that is, as a self-individuating process that be-haves as a unity in dynamic concert with its immediate environment. When Merleau-Ponty writes, in his lecture course on Nature (discussing von Uexküll), “the reactions of the animal in the milieu . . . behaviors . . . deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of objects,” his description applies also to microbial life: the reactions of the bacteria in their milieu—their tumbling and directed swimming—deposit a surplus of significance on the surfaces of molecules. Clearly, this significance depends on the structural features of physiochemical processes; it depends on the molecules being able to form a gradient, traverse a cell membrane, and so on. For this reason, the physico-chemical world is not formless and undifferentiated, receiving form only from living beings; rather, the physicochemical world is a morphodynamical world of qualitative discontinuities that offer regions of salience for living beings. But the significance and valence of these saliencies as attractants and repellents emerges only given the bacterial cell as a metabolic and behavioral unity—in other words, as a living being.”

we can see that the bacterium achieves what it does without consciousness. So I don't agree with Thompson when he says where there is life there is mind. — Daemon

I would argue that the unified functioning of the bacterium is a kind of proto-consciousness. It involves sense-making, affective valence and intentional purposiveness.

“My proposal, spelled out in Mind in Life, is that living as sense-making in precarious conditions is the living source of intentionality. Sense-making is threefold: (1) sensibility as openness to the environment (intentionality as openness); (2) significance as positive or negative valence of environmental conditions relative to the norms of the living being (intentionality as passive synthesis— passivity, receptivity, and affect); and (3) the direction or orientation the living being adopts in response to significance and valence (intentionality as protentional and teleological). This threefold framework structures my discussions in Mind in Life of the sensorimotor and affective sense-making of animal life, which is made possible by the unique structure of the nervous system, as well as my discussions of human forms of sense-making, such as time-consciousness, emotion, and the participatory sense-making of empathy and social cognition.”
(Evan Thompson)

What's the relevance to consciousness or the mind? — Daemon

The model of a normatively based dynamical non-linear reciprocal feedback system is precisely how many are. now conceiving of consciousness. See Evan Thompson’s Mind in Life’.

I don't think those processes do "express" increases in complexity. A little more explanation perhaps? — Daemon

Much of our orientation toward science and other aspects of life is based on learning and growth of knowledge. Standard of living is measured by economic productivity , which is a product of innovation. Is there a direction to knowledge or just random
change?

Descartes thought we were born with a divinely given ability to ascertain rational truths about the world. Kant believed truth was pattern
or scheme-based. We contribute our own categories to our experience of the world, so that causal
relations of physical stuff come pre- ordered in some fashion. Biologists now talk about living systems as self-organizing. Their functioning is norm-based tether than just arbitrary relations among chemicals.

What’s crucial in these examples are the concepts of complexity , pattern, scheme, thematics, normativity. I think they imply a non-linear, reciprocal feedback idea of interaction between physical entities that is a more sophisticated understanding of causality than linear causal dynamics allows for.

The mouse would press a button when it saw the line, to get a reward. Is that close enough to "sign evaluation" for you? It all takes place thanks to the bioelectrochemical processes (and not "information"). — Daemon

How would you talk about the difference between the chemical environment of the sun vs the earth. They both involve law-governed interactions among particles. The
chemical environment on earth is clearly different than the sun, but is it just different or different in a particular way? What about the difference between inorganic and living processes, or between lower and higher animals , or the. neurological organization with the brain as we move from early humans up through cultural history? Would you agree that the kinds of differences we are looking at have to do with increases in the complexity of organization?

How do bioelectrochemical processes express increases in complexity of neural organization as opposed to just arbitrary differences? How do we know that a sequence of chemicalinteractions is a pattern rather than an arbitrary causal chain of events? Within a causal physical description , what is the difference between pattern and random causal change?

The corollary of this argument, the one that information ontology rests on is the question "once you've recorded all the information about an object, what else is there?" If the information about the object is the only thing you can show to exist, then the next step is to cut out the unnecessary metaphysics and posit that physical things are information. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Relating this discussion of information, thermodynamics and semiotics back to the OP, which is the contribution of neuroscience to the elucidation of consciousness, I suggest that to the extent that neuroscience sees itself unproblematically as a naturalistic science, it will fail to grapple with what are emergingas the most relevant t tooics concerning what is inextricably correlated with consciousness , such as self-awareness, emotion, empathy , sense of identity and time.

Put differently, neuroscience needs to radically rethink reductionist models of ‘information’ and ‘code’ in the direction of phenomenology and Wittgenstein.

So, to put the question directly, how can you support the claim that all of the examples he cites here are physical? As he says, the mathematical symbols that express the laws of science are not themselves subject to physical laws. — Wayfarer

From a phenomenological perspective, it would not be the case that subjective experience stands apart from physical laws in its own realm, but that it is the condition of possibility of the natural attitude and its accompanying physical laws.

“The purely Objective consideration, which investigates the Objective sense of thingness, requires that things be dependent on one another as regards their states and that they, in their real existence, mutuallly prescribe something to one another, regard­ing, specifically, their ontological content, their causal states.
The question now is whether a thing, which indeed remains one thing under all circumstances, is the identical something of properties and is actually in itself solid and fixed with respect to its real properties; that is, is a thing an identity, an identical subject of identical properties, the changing element being only its states and circumstances? Would this not then mean that
according to the various circumstances into which it can be brought, or into which it can be thought to be introduced, the thing has different actual states, but that in advance- a priori - how it can behave, and, further, how it will behave, is predelineated by its own essence?

But does each thing (or, what is equivalent here: does any thing at all) have such an essence of its own in the first place? Or is the thing, as it were, always underway, not at all graspable therefore in pure Objectivity, but rather, in virtue of its relation to subjectivity, in principle only a relatively identical something, which does not have its essence in advance or graspable once and for all, but instead has an open essence, one that can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness? But this is precisely the problem, to determine more exactly the sense of this openness, as regards, specifically, the "Objectivity" of natural science.”(Husserl, Ideas II)

I grant you that the with consciousness we are attempting to examining the very same process or entity by which we examine that process or entity. However, there are two sides of this equation, the third-person examination, and the first person phenomenon we are trying to explain. — hypericin

I suggest that whatever our alleged subject matter, be it consciousness or quarks, we are always at the same implicitly experiencing the object we are conscious of and the subjective consciousness of it. The third person examination simply isn’t able to make explicit what is implicit in it, which is that any experience of an entity is the experience of a a particular contextual sense of that entity, which is a sense for me , from my point of view, at this moment. Built into the very meaning of the entity as I experienced it right now is its particular relevance to me. Relevance is covered over by the third person mode of thinking.

I wasn't making any theoretical claims about the relation between mind and world or that there is a mental theatre. I know from experience that I perceive things with greater clarity and vividness the less my mind is agitated by thoughts; that's all I was referring to. — Janus

I was trying to convey the idea that every awareness we have is a kind of change and therefore a kind of thought. So to distinguish between the receiver of stimulation and the stimulation itself, or between the mind and the thoughts it thinks, is to focus on two kinds of awarenesses, two kinds of changes and therefore two kinds of thoughts.
When I perceive myself as ‘stilling’ or quieting my mind, I am not reducing thoughts. What I am doing is shifting the mood of my thinking fro anxious to peaceful. We tend to think of thoughts as discretely felt packets of things. The more out of sorts or anxious we are , the more the flow of experience seems to be cut up into these discrete bits. When we are simply drifting pleasantly along , it is not as if this flow of thought is slowed. On the contrary, the feeling of pleasant thought-free awareness is one of a more accelerated kind of thinking that is marked by a thematic consistency and intimacy. Becuase this kind of flow of thinking is so smoothly self-consistent it seems to us that we are thinking fewer thoughts.
So the opposition you make between agitated thinking and vivid clarity is the distinction between this smooth flow, i. which things make sense , and the interruptive, alienated flow of thinking.