Btw, its captain, or Jim — Merkwurdichliebe

Or James T.

You may be the only one in the known universe who has thought these thoughts. But don't despair. Others will follow.

You'd be surprised at how varied the philosophical understanding of concepts like change, time and difference has been . Take the idea of motion.

"Aristotle called it 4opa. This means that a body is transported from one place to another, to its place. Galileo abandoned notions of above and below, right and left. Physical space is homogeneous. No
point is more distinctive than any other. Only this conception of space makes it possible to determine locomotion. Space must be homogeneous because the laws of motion must be the same everywhere.
Only then can every process be calculated and measured.
Nature is viewed in a very specific way to satisfy the condition of measurability. Beings acquire the character of being mere objects and of being objectified. No such "objectivity" can be found in Greek
thought. Being "an object" only makes its appearance in modern natural science. The human being then becomes a "subject" in the sense of Descartes. Without all these presuppositions, the expression
"objective" is meaningless." Heidegger, Zollicon Seminar

Sounds like Heidegger agreed with Kierkegaard.

Which philosophers would you say support your view?

I wrote a short article where I define center in Derridean (and Heideggerian) terms as the thinking of a structure, state, form, pattern as a simultaneous THIS rather than a temporally unfolding THESE.

Here's a snippet of it, explained in my own terms:

Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental
from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between
instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures,
outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints.
When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a
certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each
other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The
particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the
internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless
reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm.

In their essence, Beings don’t HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING
as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation,
(transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not
form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences
.They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no
gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such
that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from
one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature
is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states
that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns
into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states,
Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not
forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give
direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are
commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no
organizing rule, no temporary ‘it’. The transformation is from one differential to the next
before one ever gets to a form.

Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty
ontic abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these
terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining)
such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what ontically
understood symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be.

The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed ‘parts’ captured
in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences
at the ‘same time’, as the ‘same space’, organized and centered as a ‘THIS’, must unravel
with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to,
even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements
cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own
time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as
a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same
time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial
recontextualization.
The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same ‘pre-existing’ structure?
The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to,
and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center.

In the article I link to below I relate my argument to what Hedegger and Derrida say about structures.

https://www.academia.edu/38392519/Heidegger_and_Derrida_on_Structure_Form_and_State

You would not love someone who does not return that love, as that is more a stalkers kind of love. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

You can love someone who has the capacity or potential to love. You can love someone who despises you , because you know he doesn't understand you. You can loved someone for their attributes, even if they don't love or even know you.

The philosophical sense of 'grappling with the meaning of Being' - which is first and foremost a (or the) religious quest. — Wayfarer

Is religious the same as metaphysical? If Heidegger claimed to overcome metaphysics, could there be a post-metaphysical meaning of religion? Perhaps of a Kierkegaardian sort?

'being' being an act of sorts, infers motion, which infers change. — Shamshir

You're basing your understanding of change on motion. But where do we get our idea of motion from? There is a long history in the West, starting with the Greeks, and culminating in Galileo, Descartes and Newton, that frames causation and change in terms of the properties and behavior of objects. But there are specific presuppositions arising out of this history that make possible the concept of an object. One must dig beneath such presuppositions to come up with a more primordial notion of change than that of motion as change of location of an object. This is what Heidegger attempts to do.
Think of it this way. What happens when we question the sense of meaning of something like motion(or any other concept)? You might argue that questioning semantics has to do with subjective meaning and has nothing to do with the objective determination of change as motion. But Heidegger believes that there is no meaning outside of subjective determination. The notion of change that is connected with Being has to do with the way that objective and subjective co-determinatively transform each other in order for us to create meaning, whether in science or any other mode of thinking.

Good question. I like to think that his notion of Being as temporality is a kind of logic.More specifically, he would contrast the present to hand propositional subject-object statement (the basis of logic and objective causality) with the ready to hand taking something 'as' something, as he delineates in the quote I included.

As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together."

It wouldn't necessary be that Heidegger wants to discard the use of logic, so much as he warns us to be vigilant not to orient our thinking around the totalizing and flattening tendencies that can accompany a culture that celebrates objective causality as a privileged avenue toward truth.

Eugene Gendlin, an interpreter of Heidegger, makes this argument:"We need to go back and forth between logic and bodily-felt understanding. They build upon each other. It would be wrong to make an ideology of lauding one and pretending to do without the other."...patterns work-in another, more intricate order which talks back..."(The Time of the Explicating Process: A Comment on Thomas Fuchs’ “Body Memory”).

For my part, I can envision a technological and empirical thinking of the future that wouldn't need to 'dip into' logical formulation at all.

Being is change, yes, but change understood via a certain structurality. Being is change that anticipates. And it anticipates via the directing impetus of its past.

Temporality is the well-spring out of which Dasein as Being in the world emerges.
Temporality is 'simultaneously' of 3 ecstacies. The past as 'having been', the presencing, and
future. Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself,
that is, is futural in its being in general."
"Only because Da-sein in general IS as I AM-having-been, can it come futurally toward itself in
such a way that it comes-back." Thus, "Having been arises from the future".
Being is structurally articulated within itself as the 3 ecstacies. Being is ahead of itself as itself, as
the 'not yet', it projects, anticipates, as fore-having, fore-structuring. It is transcendence. It is also,
as attunement, thrownness, Being as 'being affected by'. "What is projected , fore-given, has the
character of possibility." "World gives itself to Dasein in each case as the respective whole of its
"for the sake of itself," i.e., for the sake of a being that is equi-originarily being alongside . . .
what is present at hand, being with . . . the Dasein of others, and being toward . . . itself(notice
that this is not a progress. It is the hermeneutic circle)"

What are traditionally divided up into sensation, perception, cognition, affect, and language are
united for Heidegger as temporality. Understanding is the cognate aspect, attunement-care the
motivational-affective aspect, discourse the linguistic-communicative aspect.

For Heidegger, technical understanding is rooted in seeing the world as primarily transformable natural resources; as the substrate of a nature full of opportunities for humans to seize. This is contrasted to more 'primordial' senses of understanding associated with art, and a more primordial understanding associated with nature. Artistic understanding and a more primordial way of understanding nature are associated with the concept of 'dwelling', as in being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about. An analogy I like here is the love you have for your family (hopefully anyway) contrasted to seeing them as sources of income to exploit. The former is a cooperative and respectful experience for those involved, even if there are troubles, the latter can be so exploitative its practitioners might not even realize it's exploitative. — fdrake

Yes, the famous Heidegerrian phrase ' the essence of technology is nothing technological" is an attempt to distinguish our primordial relationality with a world from instrumental logic. We can see the development of his critique of technology out of his notion of the present to hand, and through his writing on the history of logic beginning with Plato and Aristotle and subject-predicate propositionality , up though the establishment of objective empiricism with Galileo and Descartes . Heidegger said us he wants, 'in a confrontation with the tradition', to rethink logic, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up.

While it is true his examples of non present-to-hand involvement with the world limited themselves to individual craftsmanship and pre-industrial agricultural communities, it can be argued that potential future technologies that don't succumb to the present to hand propositionality of Gestell(enfarming) , that is , that are founded on a 'revolutionary shaking up of the notion of logic', should be possible for Heidegger. It would be matter of, as Derrida wrote, overtly and explicitly deconstructing what was already naively deconstructing itself in the guise of enframing thinking.

One could say, as you do , that such an approach to the technological would be

being engaged practically in a world we ultimately respect and care about. — fdrake

.

I would add, though, that primordial Care for Heidegger, in its modification as heedful circumspective involvement with the world(the ready to hand) should be understood prior any particular sentiments about that we are involved with. Whether our affective comportment toward what we deal with is one of respect or neglect, fondness or dislike, what distinguishes the significance of handiness from that of the present to hand and enframing is simply what Heidegger calls the 'as' structure of hermeneutically taking something as something. Enframing is a privative, cut-off, levelled down, forgetful derivative mode of seeing, because it loses contact with its larger context of relevance. In enframing thinking propositional presencing “exhibits itself in the light of a cause-effect coherence”, and the danger is that
it does not consider “the essential origin of this causality.” Thus, Heidegger warns of the “supreme” and “extreme” danger of “not apprehending Enframing as a claim”. Note that claims matter to us, whereas the present to hand is supposedly there whether we re involved with it or not.

A "predicate" is "stated" about a "subject," the latter is determined by the former." "Positing the subject, positing the predicate, and positing them together are thoroughly "apophantic" in the strict sense of the word. "Like interpretation in general, the statement necessarily has its existential foundations in fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception. But in the propositional statement "the as-structure of interpretation has undergone a modification. The "as" no longer reaches out into a totality of relevance in its function of appropriating what is understood. It is cut off with regard to its possibilities of the articulation of referential relations of
significance which constitute the character of the surrounding world. The "as" is forced back to
the uniform level of what is merely objectively present. It dwindles to the structure of just letting
what is objectively present be seen by way of determination. This levelling down of the
primordial "as" of circumspect interpretation to the as of the determination of objective
presence is the speciality of the statement. Only in this way does it gain the possibility of a
pointing something out in a way that we sheerly look at it." The pure beholding of theoretical
staring-at is 'a failure to understand it. Assertion is a privation of simple seeing which
understands.

"In the first and authentic instance, this “as” is not the “as” of predication qua predication but is
prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication
has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication
within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of
dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and
take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is
always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as,
but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness
of this “as” is precisely what constitutes the act’s so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is
understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing
apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure.
Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be
found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary]
as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be
understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like.
Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it “as something,” are so
original that trying to understand anything without employing the “as” requires (if it’s possible at
all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order."

Heideger rejected humanism because its form of subjectivity turns humans into objects ('standing reserve'). For Heidegger, even recognizing, as Nietzsche did, that instrumental reason is organized and directed via subjective value structures is still a form of technological enframing.

How bout "all statements that I have ever encountered that make a claim for objective truth change their sense from one instantiation to the next, including this statement."
That's really what radical relativists are trying to say.

it is impossible because it makes no claims to objective truth and meaning, and hence is indeterminate. — philosophy

I may be nitpicking, but Derrida never said that deconstruction was indeterminate.

"I do not believe I have ever spoken of "indeterminacy," whether in regard to "meaning" or anything else. Undecidability is something else again. While referring to what I have said above and elsewhere, I want to recall that undecidability is always a determinate oscillation between possibilities (for example,
of meaning, but also of acts). These possibilities are themselves highly determined
in strictly defined situations (for example, discursive-syntactical or rhetorical-but also political, ethical, etc. ). They are pragmatically determined. The analyses that I have devoted to undecidability concern just these determinations and these definitions, not at all some vague "indeterminacy. " I say "undecidability" rather than "indeterminacy" because I am interested more in relations of force, in differences of force, in everything that allows, precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized."(Limited, Inc)

It is impossible since it moves outside binary oppositions, and so takes to places, to 'the Other', 'the gathering', we have not hitherto known. — philosophy

It would be better to say that deconstruction moves WITHIN binary oppositions to destabilize them by exposing alterity already operating inside each side of a binary.

if we consider Derrida's goal is to say something directly to the culture, both trying to convey some important truth while provoking thought and inspiring action, then I think he starts to make more sense, and that he assumes a significant portion of the culture will read him and take those ideas into yet more conversations affecting yet more people. — boethius

On the other hand, Derrida hated interviews, always insisting that his thought could not possibly be properly understood in a few sentences, and that it required a deep background in a host of philosophical traditions and authors. This doesn't sound like someone who expected to take on the role of public intellectual. Even when he became something of a celebrity, journalists for popular publications wouldn't dream of asking his opinion on the latest political event, as they do with writers like Bernard Henry-Levy. Also, he always said that he was much better received in the U.S. than in France. That is why he spent so much time lecturing in the U.S.

The later Heidegger seems to think that dasein is a possible way of being (an increasingly unlikely one in this age of technology) and not a given; one which is aware of a relatedness to Being & purposely cultivates the “clearing” given to it — Erik

It may be that it is thinking Being explicity that is not a given for the later Heidegger. He recounts the various ways that Being has been inadequately thought throughout history(Plato represents Being as idea and as the koinonia of the Ideas, Aristotle represents it as energeia, Kant as position,
Hegel as the absolute concept, Nietzsche as the will to power). He also seems in these later writings to equate Dasein with man.

"Because one everywhere represents the destiny of Being only as history, and history only as a kind of occurrence, one tries in vain to interpret this occurrence in terms of what was said in Being and Time about the historicity of man (Dasein) (not of Being). By contrast, the only possible way to anticipate the latter thought on the destiny of Being from the perspective of Being and Time is to think through what was presented in Being and Time about the dismantling of the ontological doctrine of the Being of beings". (Time and Being 1962)

We’re a sort of nothingness in which things are revealed (and concealed). — Erik

Nothing, yes, or absencing. I prefer the 'in-between', since it is not as if there are things first , with the nothingness of Dasein added on it them as that which discloses them. Both Dasein and things have no existence apart from this in-between. 'Things' are themselves transformations, transformations of us! Besides, nothingness ca be confused with an absence of meaning, and that is not what the -no-thing means to Heidegger. Being as the -in-between is redolent with possibilities of meaning and sense.

“The 'as' expresses the fact that beings in general have become manifest in their being, that that
distinction has occurred. The 'as' designates the structural moment of that originarily irruptive
'between'. We simply never first have 'something' and then 'something more' and then the
possibility of taking something as something, but the complete reverse: something first gives
itself to us only when we are already moving within projection, within the 'as'. In the occurrence
of projection world is formed, i.e., in projecting something erupts and irrupts toward
possibilities, thereby irrupting into what is actual as such, so as to experience itself as having
irrupted as an actual being in the midst of what can now be manifest as beings. It is a being of a
properly primordial kind, which has irrupted to that way of being which we call Da-sein,
and to that being which we say exists, i.e., ex-sists, is an exiting from itself in the essence of its
being, yet without abandoning itself.

Man is that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place. In projecting, the Da-sein in
him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him subjected to what is actual.
Thus thrown in this throw, man is a transition, transition as the fundamental essence of
occurrence. Man is history, or better, history is man. Man is enraptured in this transition and
therefore essentially 'absent'. Absent in a fundamental sense-never simply at hand, but absent in
his essence, in his essentially being away, removed into essential having been and
future-essentially absencing and never at hand, yet existent in his essential absence. Transposed
into the possible, he must constantly be mistaken concerning what is actual. And only because he
is thus mistaken and transposed can he become seized by terror. And only where there is the
perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment-being torn away in
that wakeful manner that is the breath of all philosophizing.”(Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics, p.365)

No, I think what you're arguing is rather close to my view.

I don't think it's quite right to say that the interpretive contexts adjoined to the statement are necessarily presupposed, as if fitting together with a system of inferential rules and reasonable conduct. The act which adjoins the context to the phrase is creative and spontaneous as much as it is following cues from our previous conventions. — fdrake

I would only add that when looking at the two temporal ends of the actual act, I follow Heidegger. At the end where history partakes of the present, the context that is joined to the phrase is already, as having been , changed by the current phrase. thus, 'having been arises from the future'. The 'now' is ahead of itself as itself, as the 'not yet', it projects, anticipates, as fore-having, fore-structuring. But this fore-having is not pre-supposition. The current phrase, then, is an in-between. It is neither just what was pre-supposed nor is it an absolute novelty. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It understands, interprets, and articulates, and thereby takes apart and changes what it affirms. .
So what you wrote sounds quite compatible with this.

I think what I was really trying to argue before was that in a way the machinery of generalization is its own kind of singularity. What gives hegemonic discourses their violence is that they only glimpse a particular, limited reality. The are called general , but what limits them is what they oppose, exclude or repress.

It occurs to me that what distinguishes philosophers of different eras isn't precisely that some privilege the general over the singular, but the nature of the relationship between what is unique and the covnentional. Deleuze, for instance, doesn't abandon theory. The world is such for him that there is something that is true everywhere, always, for everyone. For him it isdifferential and plural structural relations and assorted other details, that are primordially true. Ut they are only true in this general sense by being true always in particularity actual instantiations. Note that this account lends itself to a critique not unlike that you and Streelightx level against the Derrideans. Whereas you see Deleuze doing justice to the particular, opponents perceptive the way in whicih all particulars interrelate within a world as smelling of a preimposed theoretical machinery. Their world of sharp opposition and dichotomies, of proper and improper formations, is seemingly flattened after the post-structuraslists get done with it.
It is clearly not Deleuze's celebrating of the singular that leads to this impression but his discovery of a world of a radical interconnectedness that opponents simply don't see, and thus misread as abstract theorization,as stampeding over the particulars as they understand them..

At some point, I want to attempt to show how Derrida, or at least Heideger, may be read such that the impression of a machinery of generalization is removed.

[quote="fdrake;281318"We've done just fine supplying relevant contexts to the phrase to interpret it without all the theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular. It hasn't really told us about what senses of possibility or transformation are immanent with respect to the phrase and which aren't, just made us suspect that they exist.[/quote]

Hmm. What would tell us this? I suppose only the actual phrase in the actual context given. But there's a difference between how we actually make our way through such situations of interpretation and how we talk about the way we make our way through them. Aquinas, Descartes and Hegel would all have different takes on what such situations of interpretation entail. And isn't it the implications of their explanations that determine the political, ethical , literary structures of their era?
The issue comes down to how I am inclined to judge someone who fails to come up with the same interpretation that I or my peers do. Or how I judge myself when I fail to make the transition from one gestalt to another. Cultures kill over realities that they believe are absolute and universal, founded upon just the sort of thinking that doesnt recognize the very concept of gestalt shift.

It seems to me that everything that is supposed to make philosophy relevant is at stake in not leaving things to the singular, if the singular fails to also teach us anything about form and pattern.

How do we enable ourselves to slip within the perspective of others whose moral compass appears very different from our own? Our current cultural climate is dominated by blameful moralism on both the right and the left that manifests a failure at some level to achieve a 'houses turn into flowers' shift. Is it closer attention to the singular that is needed? Or a way to understand the singular within the context of commonality and relationality?

With respect to concepts giving us access to the thinking of another from their own perspective, do we really do just fine supplying relevant contexts to those concepts to interpret them, when we find ourselves rejecting an other's way of life? Is it simply the fault of 'theoretical machinery planting seeds of generality within the singular' here? Or is it the fault of a machinery that ends up concluding that the other is utterly singular and unassimilable with respect to our own concepts? Isnt what we strive for an approach to singularity that allows us to look for continuities and connections between the alien other and ourselves that avoids the alienation and incoherence of pure singularity?


It is not enough that senses of possibility or transformation are immanent in the actual. They lead to violence without a way to intimately relate the singular with the general without one dominating the other.

From my understanding Heidegger partook in a singular aspect of Phenomenology, that being a concern with language and interpretation. For Husserl this seemed to be regarded as merely one fragment of the enterprise of Phenomenology (the science of consciousness). — I like sushi

From Husserl's vantage, this is precisely what Heidegger did, and this is why Heidegger was so disappointing to him. Huseerl's great achievement from his point of view was an absolute starting point and grounding of science and logic in acts of meaning. In order to justify an absolute ground, it was necessary to assume a transcendental foundation, but not that of Kant. One wa to see more clearly the split between Heidegger and Husserl is to see how Merleau-Ponty broke away from Husserl. That split was less radical, with Merleau-Ponty continuing to make use, in altered form , of many of Husserl's concepts. But nonetheless, Merleau-Ponty's researches in psychopathology and neurology led him to question how the ego can take in the world and direct itself toward objects without the particularities of those objects changing the sense of the ego that is aiming at them.

"We cannot apply the classical distinction of form and matter to perception, nor can we conceive the perceiving subject as a consciousness which "interprets," "deciphers," or "orders" a sensible matter according to an ideal law which it possesses. Matter is "preg-nant" with its form, which is to say that in the final analysis every perception takes place within a certain horizon and ultimately in the "world." We experience a perception and its horizon "in action" rather than by "posing" them or explicitly "knowing" them. Finally the quasi-organic relation of the perceiving subject and the world involves, in principle, the contradiction of immanence and tran-scendence.'

Notice his focus on being-in-the-world as prior to the self-identity of the ego. That's not too far from Dasein as being-in-the-world. The main pieces are all here, for instance, temporality as a having been that presences from the future(that just means we understand the world and ourselves moment to moment by framing the 'now' in relation to what is just past. Our history is always carried along with us and shapes the 'now', but at the same time that history is reinterpreted by our future-oriented goals. The now is always pointing beyond itself, it is anticipatory. This is somewhat like Husserl's notion of time consciousness,, but for Husserl the just past is literally retained as is, for a second or two, whereas for Heidegger the just past is reshaped by the present.) . Care is just the idea that in intending , we are always in a relation of significance with the world. The world that we are involved with always matters to us in a particular way. The way things matter to us shapes the very meaning of the objects we encounter, in a way that it doesnt for Husserl, who focused on how perception is always giving us shifting aspects of objects. Heidegger was concerned to show that objects only exist for us meaningfully in pragmatic contexts in terms of what we need them for, how we use them and interact with them. Unlike for Husserl , objects don't have any aspects that are independent of this pragmatic 'mattering'.

Attunement, as affectivity, mood ,emotion, is just how we are affected by the engagements that matter to us. We always have some affective attitude ,even in neutral theoretical contemplation.
So in sum, Heidegger thought that human experiencing was too self-reflexively mobile to allow for the justification of the formal transcendental certainties that Husserl offered. Like Merleau-Ponty , he thought that the world intervenes in the very heart of self-identity, such that the 'I' that comes back to itself moment to moment, is always a different one,

StreetlightX just used the rubric of changed foreground against a stable background world , an approach consonant with Merleau-Ponty, to illustrate the dynamic of 'turns into'.
For Heidegger World is always a specific pragmatic totality of relevance within which our interactions with others have significance. His famous hammer example shows how we only notice the hammer as hammer when something malfunctions and our engagement with the meaningful task of using the tool is interrupted. Notice that unlike the foreground -background model , within the totality of pragmatic relevance, the broken tool still has sense, since that relational totality takes account of the idea of tools not only functioning properly but also breaking. Such possibility of failure, absence and malfunction is implied in the pre-understanding of the situational context. Can the example of the borken tool be applied to that of a 'broken' phrase like Houses turning into Flowers? If so, then the phenomenal analysis of 'turning into' would reveal that while at one level the phrase breaks from the context of use, at a more general level it is taken into account in some way, either as nonsense or as an exception exposing the larger totality of relevance framing the discursive situation. As we enter into a particular context of communication and language, we bring to bear , we presuppose, not just what binds the previous phrases to each other normatively, but also what those phrases and the exception share in a more general sense. In other words, the possibility of the breakage of the overall sense is taken into account in the situation where we don't simply label the phrase as nonsensical. Thus, the totality of relevance can make intelligible both a narrower and a more general context.
This is what give us the tools, if we conclude that a revision in our understanding is required , to accomplish such revision. What do you think?

Uh oh. Now the burden is on me not to disappoint.. That may not be easy. It may be a good idea for me to avoid Derrida's terminology as much as possible, in favor of Heidegger, since in my reading Derrida's most important ideas come from Heidegger, and since Heidegger ,at least in his Being and Time period, achieved a degree of definitional thoroughness lacking in Derrida.
I am also comfortable in just using my own terms.

What interests me is the question of what the real and the actual teach us from a philosophical perspective in the guise of the singularity. Houses are turning into Flowers is presumably one such example of an opportunity for revision of a way of thinking. We see in myriad authors, from Kuhn and Foucault to Cavell ,Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, attention to the sort of event which prompts conceptual revolution, gestalt shift, wholesale reorientation of sense, differend, etc.
What's striking to me about Being and Time, by contrast, is the apparent absence of interest in such breaks and transformations, apart from the way that experience already unfolds moment to moment. Many modes of relating to a world are introduced, but Heidegger's intent always seems to be getting back to the primordial condition of possibility of having a world and of relating to beings. There are , of course, many clashing reading of Heidegger, and many camps(right vs left Heideggerians, existentialist vs postmodern ). My own take is that Heideger developed an odd and fascinating approach to grounding meaning , via his equiprimordial concepts of temporality, care and attunement.
My interest is in examining how these linked concepts determine factical experience in and through the sorts of contexts that would include the op's example, such as to reveal why Heidegger may have viewed the notion of singularity in a distinctly different way that the authors I mentioned.

Even where Heidegger seems to treat science in Kuhnian terms, he subordinates its achievements and methods to a more primordial 'ontological understanding of being'.
]
"Whether or not the importance of the research always lies in such establishment of concepts, its true progress comes about not so much in collecting results and storing them in "handbooks" as in being forced to ask questions about the basic constitution of each area, these questions being chiefly a reaction to increasing knowledge in each area. The real "movement" of the sciences takes place in the revision of these basic concepts, a revision which is more or less radical and lucid with regard to itself. A science's level of development is determined by the extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In these immanent crises of the sciences the relation of positive questioning to the matter
in question becomes unstable."(BT,p.9)

Questioning, revision and crisis are grounded for Heidegger in the odd equi-primordial structure of temporality-care-attunement. What is most strange to me about what he does with these concepts is that he doesn't begin from structure, state, form, value and then have these entities interaffect each other to form an inter-subjective world. He doesn't even seem to begin from Deleuze's starting point in structures which are already in differential relation to other structures within always plural contexts.

I would have to go into much detail to make any real sense of what i've said so far but we're already deep into the rabbit hole. It may be better to see how or if you want to refocus this discussion on the specifics of the op.

Was there something I wrote that implied that such temporal 'glue' ought to have no place in any analysis of language and normativity? — StreetlightX

Did I deny that there might be (can be? must be?) 'differenciations within groupings'? Or do you see a word like 'whole', and, ignoring any sense of nuance whatsoever — StreetlightX

You are a thoughful and well-read philosopher. I'm absolutely certain that some sort of temporal 'glue' has a place in your analysis of language and normativity. I am just as certain that you recognize differentiations within groupings. It's a question of what sort of glue and differentiations you have in mind , and how those differ from what I have in mind.

I might have even been more willing to work through with you, what I was trying to bring out with the OP. But why bother? You know what you want to conclude, and your only effort of thought is how you want to arrive at it. I cannot be bothered laying down tracks to your ready-made destination. — StreetlightX

I wrote a ridiculously superficial summary of what I was after. My point wasn't to present a completed argument to you. It was to see if I could get past your hostility and already formed presuppositions about what I had in mind, in order to open up a space to examine certain parts of your op. I don't want to annoy or threaten or bore you. If something that I am trying to present is off-topic, I don't want to derail the discussion. But i can't know what is off topic without your help. If it will help you to call me an idiot or a sycophant of the most tedious tendencies of the Derrida brigade, I don't mind. I'm just hoping to get more of a glimpse of your analytic skills and less of your invective. Just try and pretend for a moment that there is a tiny chance I am not the realization of all your worst assumptions concerning Derrida.

Husserl carried forward Kant's transcendental thinking but abandoned his categories for the intentional activity of a transcendental ego. Heidegger rejected the transcendental ego, a self-identity(auto-affection) supposedly protected from the contingency of history and time. Husserl based intentionality on pure, pre-reflective consciousness. Heidegger rejected the idea of a pre-reflective consciousness , and in fact unraveled the idea of consciousness as an objectifying abstraction masking of a more primordial basis of meaning making. Husserl believed in a distinction between perception and language, between expression and reference. Heidegger rejected this separating of symbolization and expression.Husserl's notion of the object is bound up with and embraces traditional understanding of logic. Heidegger determines logic to be a derivative and limited modality of interpretation.

Pragmatists, post-structuralists, social constructionists, and enactive cognitive psychologists are among those who have followed Heidegger's critique of Husserl's solipsistic transcendental ego.

One is understanding the meaning of Dasein for Heidegger when one grasps his series of equi-primordial concepts:Temporality, Care, Attunement and Discourse. Temporality is the well-spring out of which Dasein as Being in the world emerges. What are traditionally divided up into sensation, perception, cognition, affect, and language are united for Heidegger as temporality. Understanding is the cognate aspect, attunement-care the motivational-affective aspect, discourse the linguistic-communicative aspect.

This may seem a big incoherent muddle to you , but to me it is profoundly useful, and particularly with regard to language and affectivity, is being embraced more widely by psychological theorists who want to move beyond the trandtional split between affect and cognitiion, and between perception and linguistic conceptualization.

The hell with Heideger. I' m making the argument that you're going to misinterpret any attempt to claim that your distinction between a normative regime of sense and its dislocation is an abstraction that doesn't get to the heart of the matter Not my matter, your matter. I know you don't agree with the thesis, but don't discard the whole line of reasoning as irrelevant, unless I've misunderstand the topic. You invoked Cavell and Wittgenstein. Are you disallowing discussion of any other authors? Since you can't disallow my input I'm perfectly comfortable in going it alone and making the points that Heidegger and Derrida would make. Even if they wouldn't make those points, I'm going to,

One way to talk about the transcendental empirical , as Deleuze puts it(I guess its alright to mention him), is to make the kinds of normative vs gestalt shift distinctions that your example wants to point to. Another way is to begin by closely examining what takes place within the normative regime, determining how the moment to moment unfolding of meaning making is structured. A certain kind of understanding of the basis of state, structure, pattern, form and presencing can be seen to justify a range of explanations(Cavell, Deleuze) that talk about such things as whole sale revisions. Another way of determining the basis of the actual in its moment to moment unfolding reaches a rather odd conclusion concerning the glue that holds past , present and future together in the constitution of meanings.
From the vantage of this kind of thinking, an ongoing belonging of what is actual to what it arises out of
results in a different formulation of what would otherwise be understood in terms of notions like whole sale revision of sense. There would indeed arise distinct differentiations, groupings, thematics , epoches, but the differences would among them would become little more interesting than the differentiations within these groupings.

The proponents of this odd approach would argue (or at least this proponent ) that one is not effectively thinking through the actual if one is relying on an understanding that fails to adequately perceive the glue that binds what arises as actual from the having been that frames it and is in turn framed by its future. For their part , the adherents of the norm-wholesale revision approach will be tempted to misread all this as an attempt to subordinate and flatten actuality for the sake of high theory. And that's where things stand now. Perhaps the oddball theorists have it all wrong. But that's different than being off topic.Unless I've misunderstood the topic. What is it, by the way?Is it :'Let's discuss the mechanics of wholesale revision with respect to the language example given'
or : 'Let's discuss both the mechanics of and the justification for the overarching presuppositions framing linguistic norms and their wholesale revision'. If it's the former then I apologize for being off-topic.

He utterly lacks the conceptual resources to think though the actual, and his entire corpus from end to end is vitiated by his formalist proclivities. History dies in Derrida (for the sake, ironically, of time). — StreetlightX

Would you make the same argument about Heidegger? What is the actual for Heidegger? What would he do with your 'Houses are turning into flowers' example? Would he consider it a dislocation of a normative region of phrases? How does the realm of the ready to hand and the Mitdasein treat the distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible? Seems to me he preceded Derrida in depriving the actual of the power to produce wholesale revisions of sense, but I may be misreading him. Looking at just Being and TIme, with all of the modalities of the inauthentic(the ready to hand, present to hand, mitdasein) and the authentic he introduces in the book, nowhere does he seem to give factical particulars the capacity to reorient sense in the way you depict it in your Houses-Flowers example.

If you think Heidegger was a hack ,then I wouldn't bother to read any more Derrida. Or Rorty. Or Dreyfus. Or Gendlin. Or Gallagher. Or Merleau-Ponty. Or Deleuze. Or Lyotard. Or Levinas.Or Gadamer. Or Nietzsche. Or Zahavi(one of the most respected current interpreters of Husserl). You may as well cross off your list the most interesting work being done on theories of emotion(Ratcliffe, Slaby) as well.

I dislike his writing style, but believe that he, along with Heidegger, offers the most radical rethinking of Western philosophy today. I know I'm in the minority on this forum with that view, but before you dismiss him, immerse yourself in Heidegger(if you haven't already). I can't imagine penetrating his prose without this background, not that it will guarantee intelligibility.

I don't think it's that unreasonable to speculate that a level of brain activity below that of an NDE would still be a conscious sort of awareness. Have you seen the recent research suggesting that NDE's correspond to supercharged brain states? if that is the case, its a long way from this level of activity to unconsciousness and that leaves plenty of intermediate levels of awareness, including groggy, foggy, indeterminate, incoherent, disoriented, apathetic, etc..

Do you read Derrida as offering a “generalized logic of singular perturbation“ and ‘conceptual distinction?
Is that how you’re understanding deconstruction? It certainly is the way many acolytes understand and ‘apply’ it, but it is a profound misreading of Derrida, who has insistently argued that the general and the singular are indissociably linked in any context of understanding.
Alll thinking is already deconstructive thinking. When Derrida interprets Kant or Plato, he is contributing to a text that is already in process of deconstructing itself.
That is why his ‘theory’ is always embedded within the most sensitive and local contexts of those who he interprets , and that is the meaning of his famous phrase ‘nothing outside of the text’, which refers to the immediacy and precision of local context. Even when we claim to be transcending local context in generalizing and abstracting, we are never leaving the locality of our own specific context in forming such abstractions. This is what a deconstructive reading brings out. It was also Heidegger’s understanding of existence as temporality and history.

Just as you don’t “subordinate its terms of expression ito a pre-established logic of perturbation and singularity,” you don’t simply use its singularity to tailor concepts to it. Because what makes a singular singular also ties it s a historical context such that what gives it its meaning as unique also joins it thematically to a history. Any meaning is both utterly unique and utterly conventional and there is no thinking, no discourse which operates beyond this historicizing locality.

So I could engage specificallly with the example of the op, or speak more generally as I have, but my argument always had in mind and was organized around the specific example. To move back and forth between the more ‘ general’ and op-specified context with regard to the sentences provided would not result in much of a change in the argument. Not because the general approach ignored the ‘singularity’ of the context, but because that singularity carried forward, even in its particular instanstiation of it , a certain thematics
of thinking. House and flowers were the specific instnatiation I had in mind and tailored my argument to.
This is brcause there is always a specific singularity, regardless of whether meaning to make the general argument or the particular, or whether one is supposedly remaining within a normative region or traversing it for another.

The whole alleged problematic about needing to protect the singularity of a context from abstract logic, it seems to me, implies the assumption that singuality and generality can be thought coherently in separate terms.

From the numerous reports by NDE survivors, which are well documented in books and articles, I don't believe you will find recounted such experiences of "disorientation, confusion, incoherence or something less organized" at the end of their NDEs. When I wake up from dreams, I don't recall such experiences. Do you? — Bryon Ehlmann

NDE survivors didn't die, did they? So their brain activity never deteriorated below a certain threshold. Dead people's brains activity, by definition, deteriorated below a certain threshold. We tend to remember having dreamt only when woken up during rem sleep.
As you know, there are other states of sleep, and not all of them are 'unconscious'.
We can be woken from a certain stage of non-rem sleep and feel profoundly disoriented.

There may be more states of mind for a dying person after the last final conscious moment but they're likely at a subconscious level and result in the production of no new discrete conscious moment. — Bryon Ehlmann

You must know that there are an enormous variety of levels and degrees of consciousness. the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness far from all or nothing.It's not a light switch but a spectrum and near death awareness is at the more active end of the spectrum. What you are doing is choosing a particularly alert state of consciousness in near death experience and making that the sole definition of consciousness.

Forgetting takes time and besides there is no reason to "recall" the final moment because by definition its recall can never become a new present, discrete conscious moment. — Bryon Ehlmann

Forgetting takes no more time that the transition from state 1 to state 2 if state 2 involves a deteioration of brain function with respect to state 1. And since one will not be recalling the prior more aware state, one is stuck, according to your terms , with whatever deteriorated state happens to be the present one, and it makes no difference wherever that transition from aware bliss to groggy incoherence happens in a milisecond or 10 hours.

I write and mean something right now, right this moment. Except that now that I refer back to it , it has changed. No center. Yet there is a way of belonging to a thematic without there being a center . There is relative, differential belonging which is changing itself in an ongoing manner ,yet in ways that allows relative consistency. Thus we have at the same timer difference and continuity. And my claims to 'no center' are self-reflexive. They have built into them this consistent- changing rubric. So it is perfectly possible to articulate a notion of transformative that carries along with it relative stability and have this built right into our discourse about it. This is, after all, how meaning operates anyway.

in my experience epigones of Derrida (or Heidegger, really) end up having the same conversation almost every time. — fdrake

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Let's talk about these epigones. I find the vast majority of readings of Derrida and Heidegger to be utterly conventional, or worse, semi-coherent insubstantialitites. Over and over , Heidegger gets turned into Kierkegaard, Levinas, Sartre or Gadamer, while Derrida becomes an unserious mischief-maker. Simon Critchely in a recent article deemed Derrida all but irrelevant( That happens to be my view concerning Critchely's work, but that's another story).

You could either tread the now well trodden ground of articulating the suspension and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning, or you could focus on the singularity of the utterance as a call for context sensitive methods of reasoning and similarly constrained creativity.[/quote] Yes, treading the well-trodden ground of articulating the suspension is what most Derrideans do. No wonder Streetlight is so bored with them!

Let me see if I can articulate what I am trying to do, and you can tell me, regardless of whether you agree with it, if it is off-topic.

So the singularity of the utterance calls for context sensitive methods of reasoning. Yes, indeed.
Let me take the position of someone having the realization for the first time that what was for so long understood as invariant, the factuality of statements, is subordinant to normative practices of meaning assignment. Such would be a profound epiphany, having implications in so many realms of endeavor, from the ethical and epistemological to the political.

This is where my Derrida-Heidegger come in. rather than focusing on "articulating the suspension(bracketing) and its impacts on metaphysical reasoning", in my reading, they move within the very heart of context itself and notice an almost imperceptible mobility within what has been rendered as structure, presence, state, form, scheme, element, being, the 'is', as the most supposedly irreducible origin of epxeience. What's most remarkable about this 'split' within the 'I" moment to moment is not that it leads to opposition , incommensurability, negation, suspension. On the contrary, it lends to the ongoing temporization of experiencing, in and through all contexts, a radical consistency, integrity and intricacy that is missing from other approaches. Whether you buy this or not, the implication is that what happens BETWEEN supposed normative regime of understanding to another becomes utterly uninteresting, becasue it is now understood to be only an abstracted and derivative way of thinking the basis of transformation in meaning. The real action has not been made visible yet to those who begin from centered contexts and their transformation.


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Most profound. I hear Derrida writes stuff that can sort of sound a little like that.

You sound lie a reformed alcoholic,You're bored by Derrida. I'm bored by the now standard and ubiquitous celebrating of the normative underpinnings of factual discourse.

."

Is it presented in a dialectically oppositional way? — StreetlightX

I suspect this is at the heart of your boredom with Derrida. If you were pressed to perform a deconstructive reading of Cavell , there likely wouldn't be much of substance you would be able to offer, because your leanings are toward a constellation of thinkers outside the orbit of the Derrida and Heideger that I understand. The vital contribution I impute to Derrida and Heidegger has to do with revealing a profound intimacy in the moment to moment unfolding of temporaity that I see as being missed by Cavell, Wittgenstein and others. In my view, to understand being via this intimacy is to make this starting point vastly more interesting than to begin with normative structures and then celebrate their transformation. My writing and thinking was in this direction well before I ever read Derrida or Heidegger, so I can take or leave them. I find your contributions to be among the most thoughtful of the commenters on this site, and since there are few others here who are willing or able to engage at any level with Derrida , I occasionally see if I can draw you into incorporating him into discussion, even if just in the form of a critique.

These days I'm more interested in Heidegger anyway. Poring through Being and Time, I'm struck by the absence of discussion concerning inter-normative discursive regions. I see this a a deliberate outcome of an approach that subordinates apparent breaks and discontinuities to a radical intimacy of movement.

you were gesturing toward the possibility of deconstructing the difference, so that there was no real difference in kind. — csalisbury

What I should have said was that difference in kind and difference in degree are complicit and inseparable both within supposed normative structures and between them.

We couldn't deconstruct the opposition between center and margin if we didn't already understand the distinction. Maybe the distinction is grounded in this or that; still the difference is there, as a fact of distinction.. So deconstruct away, but you'll need to reconstruct in order to explain the fact of the distinction itself. — csalisbury

In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure
implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in
fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such
singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure.
“Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center
could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that
it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of
sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the
universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything
became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the
central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside
a system of differences.”(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352)

“The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into
account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations
to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this
iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements",
because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory
break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling
presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)."

Even with all this said, for Derrida there are more or less stable contexts within which it is possible to come to normative agreement. So he does not eliminate the possibility of locating cultural groupings, schematisms and the like. Rather, he finds a way to think such topologies without recourse to a structural, thematic center.

there's clearly a felt, intuitive, difference between the first two and the third. — csalisbury

Do you mean a felt, intuitive difference between inhabiting and making one's way through a normative sphere vs making the transition from one normative sphere to another? What I find radical in Heidegger and Derrida is their deconstruction of the idea of structure, state, pattern, norm. Whereas for authors from Hegel and Sartre to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, structures are defined in terms of a center that determines them in opposition to other structures, Heidegger and Derrida find movement and transformation WITHIN the idea of structure itself. Heidegger discuses what is 'felt' in terms of Befindlichkeit, attunement, affect, emotoin, mood. He understands these as the way in which I find myself affected by what I am involved with. Affectivity for Heidegger is inseparable from his notion of understanding and temporality. They point to the 'in betweenness' of experiencing the world at every moment, the fact that I am myself by being absent to myself, being beyond and ahead of myself, existing by exiting from myself. This is a radically mobile notion of being, which begins prior to any thinking of normative structures. One could argue that for Heidegger and Derrida there is more or less accelerated thinking, for instance the difference between a text that clings to metaphysical assumptions which Derrida deconstructs, vs a text that overtly recognizes itself as deconstructive.. But here there is not a difference in kind between one form of thinking and another.

Without the just stipulated premise being evidenced false, the longing for nothingness holds the exact same properties as the longing to arrive at the planet’s horizon. It can’t be done. Not that it’s inconceivable; it is—as evidenced by our ability to understand the concepts. It’s just that it’s metaphysically impossible and, hence, a complete falsehood. — javra

Heidegger, Nietzsche and various post structuralist thinkers point to the approach to nothingness within the history of Western metaphysics as being dominated by presence, truth , immediacy and plenitude. In order to maintain this privileging , whatever threatens this dominance in the from of negation, nihilism and nothingness ,must be treated as accidental and secondary. As an example, negation is only a means to a positive end for Hegelian dialectics. Post-structuralism instead identifies the nothing as a positive meaning co-defining particular contexts of experience. They wouldn't say that achieving nothingness is impossible, rather that we do it all the time, as we transition between regions of meaning. The point is that invoking nothingness, in the traditional sense, as an alternative to being is unknowingly embracing a certain kind of being. It's not that we can't get what we want when we desire the nothing, but that longing for the nihil is just as much an active engagement with meaningfulness as desiring anything else, because the nothing always manifests itself as a certain kind of substantive within meaningful contexts.

And fuckyall btw. Ban me..im waiting. — Nobody

Was that your first language?

Some deaths occur in conjunction with the neural net being knocked out: frozen to death; struck by lightning; & struck by electricity. With such afterlife experiences there is no winding down of consciousness. — Daniel Cox

What does winding down mean? Look at it this way. When someone is in what Ehlmann calls a blissful end of life experience, you can be sure that state will involve lots of complex neural activity. Why is this? We know what the brain's activity is like during rem sleep. It is very active, especially in the frontal cortex, where emotion and cognition are centered. During non-rem sleep the brain is much less active, even though the person is healthy and not near death. So near death 'bliss' must look neurologically somewhat like a dream state. What we also know about dreams is that a person is much more likely to remember their dreams if they are woken in the midst of one, rather than during non-rem sleep.

This is because once the level of brain activity drops below a certain threshold, forgetting takes place. Recall of a context requires the ongoing maintenance of that context , or else the reconstruction of it. I'm guessing that near death experiences of bliss or whatever are like rem sleep. They are remembered because the relative level of brain activity they require is maintained up till the point that they are revived. Studies have shown that "when the heart stops, neurons in the brain appeared to communicate at an even higher level than normal, perhaps setting off the last picture show, packed with special effects."

A dying person's neurological activity will at some point drop below the threshold necessary to recall an experience like 'meaningful bliss'. It doesn't matter whether the brain winds down to this threshold or reaches it all at once. Forgetting will take place. Think about a person getting electroshock treatment. This causes an immediate degradation of brain activity rather than a winding down, and amnesia is a side effect of it. So it should be irrelevant from the perspective of memory and recall how rapidly one transitions from 'meaningful bliss' to brain death. It is absolutely certain that the last states of neural activity one will experience will not be complex bliss but disorientation, confusion, incoherence or something less organized. If you're going to argue, as Ehlmann has, that each frame of consciousness carries its own discrete meaning, then it is contradictory to arbitrarily choose the blissful frame as the last one that will be remembered when we know it will not be the last state of mind for a dying person.

The only way one could justify such a claim is if one made a distinction between the blissful state and what follows it in terms of its qualification as conscious. One would have to abandon an emergent , relativist notion of what consciousness is(global, distributed patterns of neural activity), and substitute a dualist, platonic notion where consciousness is an all or nothing phenomenon residing in certain states but not others. Then one would have to cherry pick a speculator subjective state associated with near death experieince and crown that the 'real' last state of consciousness for everyone.

If you read or studied my NEC Theory article more carefully, I believe you might understand why I have no interest in arguing with you on the issues you raise. — Bryon Ehlmann

I read your article after I posted my last comment and saw that you discussed.negative near death experiences and brain deterioration. So let's talk about a different aspect of your thesis. You wrap your claims up in science, but that is misleading. The science with regard to human experiences is multi-faceted; one particular focus has to do with describing and measuring the dynamics of neural processes(what has been dubbed the sub-personal level). Other approaches deal with cognitive-affective and perceptual levels of functioning. But while there may be superficial agreement on facts at the discrete molecular and neural levels, as soon as we shift to complex levels of mental functioning, disagreements multiply. How does a neural net function? Should it be modeled as a computational system, a distributed parallel, dynamic, a connectionist architecture, or via a non-representational enactivist description? The differences in these approaches are key to assumptions concerning what consciousness might be.

Robert Lanza, who you reference in your article, treats the basis of consciousness as energy, which he explains, can never be eliminated, only transformed. Thus, "At death, you change reference points. It‘s still you, but you experience different lives, different friends and even different worlds. Although individual bodies are destined to self-destruct, the alive feeling—the ‘Who am I?’- is just a 20-watt fountain of energy operating in the brain. But this energy doesn’t go away at death. One of the surest axioms of science is that energy never dies; it can neither be created nor destroyed. But does this energy transcend from one world to the other?"

You also mention Hameroff, who, following physicist Roger Penrose, believes that consciousness can be understood as a sub-neural quantum process(they call it Orch-OR). Their notion of an afterlife apparently shares with Lanza the presumption of an active energic process. Critics have pointed out the major problem with such theories is that they aren't compatible with the current models in physics.

"Believing in life after death, to put it mildly, requires physics beyond the Standard Model. Most importantly, we need some way for that “new physics” to interact with the atoms that we do have."

Your approach overlaps these researchers in some ways but departs from them in others.
Like them, you draw form older information processing models of consciousness, using the computer as a metaphor for how thought functions. This first generation approach to cognition has been abandoned by researchers in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience in favor of embodied, enactive approves which, following Gibson, don't understand the mind as simply receiving 'information' , as data, from an external world and then computationally manipulating it.Rather, they see perceptual processes as interpretative from top to bottom,.They see meaning as more of an activity, performance, exchange, than as static content, 'data', 'information'.

You also mention Bruce Greyson, Emily Williams Kelly, and Edward F. Kelly, who have embraced Frederic W. H. Myers' psychical, spiritualist ideas of consciousness. Myers doesn't seem particularly compatible with what you are claiming. The active, changeable character of his post-physicalist subjectivity contrasts sharply with your static , frozen picture .

When we speak about states of consciousness we are referring to subjective ways that the world is like for us . Objective third person empirical approaches cannot 'prove' what goes on at a subjective level. They cannot tell us what it is like to be a bat. They can only produce models of functioning of neural components and attempt to correlate these processes with subjective reports of states of consciousness.The problem boils down to the fact that doing something like measuring metabolic activity in a portion of the brain during a subjective state is not the same thing as elucidating the nature of that subjective state. Quantum science and neurological measurement are not the right approaches to deal with the arena of subjectivity and consciousness as it is lived by persons. The most promising avenues toward integrating empirical psychological science and subjectivity are the recent interdisciplinary areas of philosophical phenomenology and cognitive science(the journal phenomenology and the cognitive sciences is a leading resource), The work by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and others correlating neuroscience, phenomenology, cognitive science and mindfulness practices is another promising avenue.

In sum, the problem with claiming to have 'proven' a particular theory of consciousness is that the very nature of subjectivity touches upon the conditions of possibility of empiricism. In other words, subjectivity and objectivity are reciprocally dependent on each other when it comes to studying consciousness. Thus, any claim about the nature of subjective experience is both an empirical and a philosophical claim. Your idea of a subjective state as potentially freezable , out of time and absent of material conditions(except for the initial material condition of the dying state) implies a philosophical position which differs not only from those of philosophers and psychologists I follow, but also Hameroff, Penrose and Lanza, who point to persisting real and changing energic fields as substrate of beyond-death subjectivity, and Myers, whose romantic spiritualism is an animated force.

I imagine if I were to suggest to you that your model requires a physics that doesn't exist yet, or a spiritualist transcendentalism that you have yet to elaborate, you might point to the 'empirical evidence' in favor of your theory. But I would be willing to lay down big money that if you submitted your article to Hameroff, Penrose or Lanza, they would likely make the same argument as I would. Of the large list of references in your paper, none of them directly support , much less speak to, your central claim of a timeless, static, yet meaningful ongoing state of awareness. Rather than couching it in empiricist terms, it would be more interesting, and others would pay more attention, if you fleshed out the philosophical presuppositions grounding it and contrasted them with those of competing approaches.