I have been sincerely trying to do that on each occasion. It seems you're not understanding what I'm trying to convey. I think you're approaching it from the natural attitude (beginning from 'From a phenomenological perspective....') — Wayfarer

No, I'm not approaching from "the natural attitude". Your attempt to dismiss what I have said, without addressing it on it's own terms, by labeling it as coming from "the natural attitude" is facile, and shows your lack of ability to participate in open discussion in good faith. When you are ready to address what I say on its own terms, then come back to me. Until then I am done trying to engage with you.

Now you're speaking my language. — Wayfarer

No, I'm merely expressing a logical possibility. I know that for you it is an article of faith; personally I don't have an opinion either way. As I've tried to explain to you, considering consciousness as prior is a methodological approach in phenomenology, and considering the physical as prior is a methodological approach in science. Neither need to be adopted as beliefs in order to practice the respective disciplines, they are merely methodological starting assumptions.

Like, I said, can someone Conceive of another way of creating consciousnesses except through Evolution? — Michael Sol

The other logical possibility is that consciousness is uncreated.

I think Schopenhauer is either wrong or doesn't mean what you think he does. It doesn't seem to me that you understand the concept of transcendental idealism. To repeat, the transcendental is ideal only in the sense that we cannot do more than think about it, that is it cannot be more than an idea for us, since it is not accessible via the senses.

Is it therefore merely imaginary or is it real? If it is real then that amounts, in another sense, as I have already explained, to transcendental realism; i.e. that the transcendental is ultimately real (even though ideal to us).

If you are going to comment please address what I have actually said and point out what you think is wrong with it. If you can't do that then we can't have a satisfying discussion and neither of us will learn anything.

Are there determinate entities we might call "thoughts". I would say 'no' because thinking is a process. There is certainly thinking. When we say there are determinate entities it is usually because we can look at and examine them. Can we do this with thoughts? I don't think so, thoughts are known only in the thinking of them, or reflexively known only in remembering that we have thought them; which amounts to thinking them again.

You're partly on the money here I think but I'm somewhat struck by this as I have never thought the idea of a god was coherent, unless you opt for a Protestant anthropomorphic, personal god, which to me would seem somewhat unsophisticated and lacking in plausibility. Is god 'energy' or the ground of being.... what can it mean? Theology may well amount to great scholarly edifices made of paying cards for all we know.

Nevertheless, I think god seems more graspable than Platonic forms on the basis of god's centrality to our culture despite its supposed secularism. Think of all the movies, TV shows and art featuring god/s. Comedian George Burns played god in a hit movie back in the 1970's, but who would you get to play the collective unconscious or the Platonic realm? It would have to be Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collette... — Tom Storm

It's true; there are many conceptions of God from impersonal deistic conceptions to personal theistic ones. And I agree it could all be "edifices made of playing cards", just mere imagination pointing to nothing beyond itself. That is why such things are always, and always must remain, matters of faith in my view.

:lol: Daniel Day Lewis or Toni Collete as the collective unconscious or the platonic realm. Very imaginative, and somehow apt!

Actually, the ding an sich is necessary for perception, the passive impression on the sensory apparatus. Post-impression, it is the active faculties of representation that intuits the sensation, which gives phenomenon. You know the drill.....“arranges the matter of the object according to rules”. — Mww

Yes, I agree that this is what I think Kant means.

Epistemological juxtaposition: the thing we represent to ourselves, the ding an sich is the thing we don’t. Not to be thought of from an ontological perspective at all; the ding an sich certainly exists....as whatever it is. The whatever it is we know as something.....is the thing. — Mww

Right, exactly what I've been saying to @Wayfarer above; but he seems to think it amounts to transcendental realism. I have made this point before; when we think of the empirical from our perspective it is real ( because accessed via the senses) and when we think about the transcendental from our point of view it is ideal ( because it is whatever is beyond what can be accessed via the senses, and thus can only be (more or less) thought about, imagined.

If we reverse this and think about the empirical from the "point of view" of the transcendental, it is ideal because it is conditioned and formed by our ideas and judgements, and thinking about the transcendental from this perspective it is real, because it is whatever it is in an absolute sense independently of our cognitions. This is the same as if we posited the situation from how we can imagine God's perspective.

Of course all of this is us thinking, but we are able to put ourselves in "other shoes" via the imagination. It's the best we can do, so it will have to suffice.

Kant says there are things in themselves, but that we can say nothing about them other than they must exist; how is that different to what I've said?

Assuming continuation of life after death, what leads you to believe that the conditions of that existence will be worse?

But there is vast disagreement about that. The Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic for starters. Theistic personalism v classical theology. List could go on indefinitely, let's not get bogged down in that. — Wayfarer

The fact that people can think different things about God is not relevant to the point, though. We can think, and many things have been thought, about God was the point. Same cannot be said for the collective unconscious, karma, akashic records and so on.

'The transcendental realist therefore represents outer appearances (if their reality is conceded) as things in themselves, which would exist independently of us and our sensibility and thus would also be outside us according to pure concepts of the understanding.'

The italicized phrases mean the same, do they not? — Wayfarer

No they do not. I haven't said that "outer appearances" could exist independently of us. It is whatever it is that presents to us as outer appearances that exists independently of us. Anything we say about what it is will be classed as an appearance for us, and yet if we want to say that those things existed prior to the emergence of humans (which seems obviously to be the case) then we can only refer to them as "things as they exist in themselves" or some such.

But there is vast disagreement about that. The Great Schism between Orthodox and Catholic for starters. Theistic personalism v classical theology. List could go on indefinitely, let's not get bogged down in that. — Wayfarer

The fact that people can think different things about God is not relevant to the point, though. We can think about God was the point.

So, Epicurus has not shown us that death is harmless, but rather that we do not cease to exist upon dying. — Bartricks

On the assumption that we continue to exist after death, is death still to be considered harmful? Would the answer to that not depend on the conditions we find ourselves in after death?

Strange. I think it is the nebulous idea par excellence. — Wayfarer

I don't know why you would say that in view of the existence of a very long history of theology. God is not a determinate object, obviously, but people can, have and do think quite coherently about the idea of God. Can you say the same about the ideas of Plato's forms, the collective unconscious, etc.?

I have no idea why you posted that quote from the SEP. I haven't anywhere said that things in themselves are "objects in space and time". When I say "world" I am not referring to the world as perceived, to such objects as perceived, but to whatever it is that, in collaboration with our senses, gives rise to such objects.

I am saying that whatever that is, everything we know seems to tell us it must be independent of our perceptions; i.e., that it would still exist regardless of whether we perceive it. To deny that would be to deny the existence of anything prior to the advent of humans, which seems quite absurd.

Kastrup argues that Jung was an idealist and that the collective unconscious (Jung I think describes it as a primordial reservoir we all draw from) is a version of Mind at Large. You'll note that Jung stated these images were shared across all human cultures. Hence Joseph Campbell's book A Hero with A Thousand Faces which draws together the collective imagery and narrative traditions of the world's hero myths via Jungian archetypes. The basis of the scripts for Star Wars... — Tom Storm

It's a long time since I've read Jung or The Hero With a Thousand Faces, but what you say seems right to me; that Jung, along with Campbell, posits a cross-cultural commonality of mythical and religious themes.

It never seems to be spelled out though, just what this "storehouse" of archetypal imagery is supposed to be. In that sense it is, for me, a nebulous idea like Platos' realm of the forms, the Buddhist notion of the "alaya-vijnana" or storehouse consciousness, the theosophical and anthroposophical idea of "akashic records' and Sheldrake's "morphogenetic fields".

I think all these kinds of ideas fall apart and fail to make much sense without a further positing of a universal mind or God.

Well, that depends on what you consider ‘the world’ to be, as distinct from ‘we’. At what point do we end and the world begins? My point is that affect refers to a relative aspect of energy at the level of potentiality. Language structure insists on a subject-object distinction, describing the relation of ‘affect’ as a verb - but I think this can limit our understanding of what affect is in potentiality. The more we understand the broader scope of affect in potentiality, the more self-consciously we can collaborate in the process. — Possibility

We are part of the world of course. But it doesn't seem that the world depends on us, on our perceiving it, in order to exist. Of course to exist in the form in which we (uniquely) perceive, it does depend on us, but even there we also depend on it, or at least that seems most plausible.

I agree that we might think that ultimately, or primordially, experience is prior to the subject-object distinction; but there we would be feigning to dip into the pre-cognitive ocean of being, and I think we can only hint at that, because all we can propositionally say remains firmly in the cognitive realm of subjects and objects.

So, I meant to say that we are affected pre-cognitively, and that 'affect' in this sense signifies some process prior to perception whereby our senses collaborate with the world (as part of, or not separate from, the world, of course) to give rise to sensory phenomena and the conscious and unconscious affects (or responses) we experience in respect of those.

I’m going to be lazy and hide behind the following quotes. Let me know if they answer your question.

Ratcliffe says:

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”

Zahavi concurs with Ratcliffe:

“Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our
conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.” — Joshs

OK, these ontological positions are not the bare phenomenological position of the epoché; wherein the question is bracketed for methodological reasons.

So, "the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description" for the purposes of phenomenological investigation, but not for the purposes of scientific investigation.

As to Zahavi's "What we call "reality""; we call many things reality depending on what we are investigating or what our ontological commitments are. There is no "ultimately" about it; it remains contextual, unless you want to posit some ultimate ontological truth; but then many different ultimate ontological truths are posited by many different thinkers of different stripes.

In assessing the plausibility of any metaphysical or ontological position, I think the one thing which must be explained is the commonality of experience between humans and even between humans and animals, so I don't think appealing to "mind-and language- dependent structures" is going to cut it, unless you are opting for some kind of idealism which posits a collective mind. In the case of animals of course the "language" part must be omitted.

I don't agree. I think the idea of God is not nebulous; it is the idea of an infinite intelligence. Likewise the idea of a person as subject is not nebulous, it is the idea of a finite (embodied) intelligence. Neither God nor person are perceptible objects, if that's what you had in mind by "thing".

To say something occurs 'in the mind' is not the same as to say it occurs in your mind or my mind alone. Consciousness is a collective. Through language, enculturation, and common standards we each are an aspect of a collective consciousness. This is made explicit in Jung's doctrine of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. — Wayfarer

The problem with this is that Jung did not posit a collective consciousness, but a collective unconscious. In any case the idea of either is nebulous, what could such a thing be? Are human minds connected at some deeper level, or only in the sense that we participate in a common culture?

Yes, exactly, which is to say that the both the thing perceived and the percipient are necessary for the appearance of phenomena.

Right, "material cause" does seem somewhat inapt given Kant denied space and time and the twelve categories of judgement as being applicable to things in themselves.And this denial does seem to be a somewhat problematic element in Kant's philosophy, since surely it must be said that things in themselves are necessary for the appearance of phenomena, no? Which means that if they are not the material or efficient causes then at least they must be a necessary condition.

The other point is that to "eliminate" the thing in itself is to posit an alternate necessary condition for the appearance of phenomena. So, for Berkeley this is God; things in themselves are things as God "thinks" them. Thinks can still be (our) mind-independent physical existents, but they are not the bare "physical existents" of physicalism because their existence depends on their having their being in God. For Fichte it is not something physical at all but "Absolute Ego"; the problem being that it is not clear what such a thing could be. And Schopenhauer;s "Will" cannot account for differentiation or order.

:ok:

We perceive others, so there seems to be no reason to deny they are real. What could it even mean to deny that there are others? To put it another way, in what sense could we think of others as being unreal? Who do you think you are conversing with on here, for example? Yourself? If I were unreal to you and you were unreal to me, where would that leave us?

And with respect to each system, what is it precisely that needs to be explained by the Transcendent Factor? Is it something peculiar and unique to each system, or something common to all the systems? — charles ferraro

I'd say what needs to be explained is the commonality of experience. I see a cat, and others will also see it just where I do. Even my dog will see it, judging from his behavior.



What I was agreeing with was the positing as outlined by Charles in his most recent post, of God, Absolute Ego, the thing in itself and will in the respective philosophies. As to their respective roles in explaining commonality of experience, I think Kant's and Berkeley's work best. Either there are things in themselves that explain our commonality of experience or else Berkeley's "God does it". Fichte's "absolute ego" and Schopenhauer's "will" are too nebulous to be explanatory of that commonality, at least as far as my understanding of them goes, which admittedly isn't all that far in the case of Fichte.

Indeed, for Schopenhauer the will is mindless; only the representation is a product of mind. And insofar as the will or primal energy drives the representation; the latter is not solely a product of mind.

But if we take the view that brain is simply what mind looks when seen form a certain perspective, then are we are faced with a chicken and egg question? — Tom Storm

That's a good question: only if we want to think of one or the other as prior I guess, so the problem with what I said is that it should have been 'depression may be correlated with abnormal brain chemistry'. The question would be then whether there could be the kind of abnormal brain chemistry associated with severe depression, and yet no severe depression. Or whether there could be severe depression in the absence of abnormal brain chemistry.

Perhaps childhood psychological trauma could cause chemical imbalances in the brain. So some cases of depression may have purely physical causes and others may have emotional causes.

What are real possibilities, as distinct from merely logical possibilities, other than actual potentials; things which, given the way things are, could possibly come to be?

Yes, I think that's exactly right.

You haven't addressed my points as far as I can tell. Doesn't the cat have its own life,nature and attributes, which contribute to constituting anyone's perception of it?

I can see how it would seem that way. But I would argue that ‘affect’ considered as something acting upon us is inaccurate. Affect is part of us, part of our awareness, connection and collaboration with the world. It refers to an ongoing distribution of attention and effort. When what we experience appears to be a ‘lack of affect’, it translates to insufficient attention and/or effort directed towards a particular aspect of experience, rather than a generalised lack. Depression can appear to be a force restraining us, but it, too, may be more accurately described as an ineffective distribution of attention and effort.

This is the problem with affect=energy that I think Astrophel was pointing out. Perhaps take a look at Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made. — Possibility

Don't you accept that we are affected by the world below the level of our conscious awareness? If you want to say that we construct the world, that each one of us constructs our own worlds, and that we are not affected by anything unconsciously or other than ourselves, that would be pure idealism and then we should know just how we construct the world. But we do not and the idea seems incoherent and absurd.

You say "collaboration with the world" which is pretty much what I've been saying, but then when you claim that we are not affected in the sense of being acted upon by things other than ourselves, you seem to be denying that very collaboration.

You say that depression may be "more accurately described as an ineffective distribution of attention and effort"; as though it all relies on the willing subject, and I can only say that if you had ever suffered from severe depression you would not say that. Depression can result from "abnormal" brain chemistry, and that fact is uncontroversial.

Also I haven't said that affect is nothing but energy. Everything is energy of one kind or another, but it doesn't follow that anything is nothing but energy.

What is the world? We certainly know it, but what is it that we can know it? — Astrophel

So you admit that we know the world and that we can say things about the world it seems. Is the question as to what the world is meaningful? If I say the world is X, are you not then going to ask "What is X"? The world is many things and everything, so how could it makes sense to ask what it is, as if you are seeking some kind of essence or ultimate definition? The world does not exist, as Markus Gabriel says, in the sense that it can never become an object of perception.

But the cat is a certain way for me differently that it is for others. Each has their own perspectives on a changing experience. For me to expereince this changing flow of senses as ‘this cat’ is already for me to form an abstraction, an idealization, a single unitary ‘this’ out of what is only ever experienced as this changing flow. My own experience of this flow as a unified object is an idealization, since my actual experience of the ‘thing’ never completely fulfills this identity. — Joshs

I agree that identity is an idealization; the thing in front of us is a cat, not an identity. And of course there are differences in the ways the cat will be for each of us. But there also recognizable commonalities like colour, sex and so on, which, even though they too may be different for each of, the fact of their existence is arguably independent of any subjective act of constitution.

What is to be explained is that we all see the ginger male cat as a ginger male cat. This cannot be explained wholly by the role of subjective or inter-subjective constitution, even though such constitutions play a role on our perceptions. How would you explain, for example, that a dog also sees a cat there, judging from its behavior?

It’s more than just feeling energy, though. You’re referring to affect as positive energy, but affect is also inclusive of what holds us back, what renders us ignorant or non-responsive - and even this language inaccurately implies a force acting on us, when that isn’t the case. — Possibility

Right, affect can be considered to be something acting upon us, primordially speaking, even unconsciously. It can also be considered to be a felt impulse or emotion. In the cases where what holds us back is not a negative affect it would seem to be a lack of affect. I would also say that there is a sense in which lack of affect amounts to a force restraining us; think about depression, for example.

:up:

From a phenomenological standpoint, the cat looks the way it does as a function of a subjective constituting process that also involves an intersubjective aspect. To say it is constituted does not mean ‘invented’ out of whole cloth by a subjectivity. Rather, there is an indissociable interaction between subjective and objective poles of the perception. — Joshs

The involvement of an inter-subjective aspect would only be possible on account of agreement. If the cat were not a certain way: tabby, ginger, male, female, etc,. there would be no possibility of inter-subjective agreement.

By saying "there is an indissociable interaction between subjective and objective poles of the perception" I take it that you mean that subjectively "seeing as" is dependent on inter-subjectively evolved categories of being? I would agree with this, but would add that what is seen as whatever it is must have its own contribution to make.

Cheers.

I found this, which seems relevant to your question, Tom:

Husserl rejected Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves and wanted “to radically deracinate the false transcendence that still plays its part in Kant's 'thing-in-itself' doctrine and to create a world concept that is purely phenomenological” (Husserl, 2008, p. xxxix, my translation). Thus, for him, a physical thing is not an appearance of an incomprehensible thing in itself. Instead, Husserl (1983, p. 92, see also 2003, p. 67, 2004, p. 129) saw it as “fundamentally erroneous to believe that perception […] does not reach the physical thing itself.”

Second, Husserl rejected Kant's route of access to knowledge about a priori structures. Kant (1999, A 35/B 52) stated that “no object can ever be given to us in experience that would not belong under the condition of time.” If, however, all intuitions and experiences we can have are already temporal, we cannot intuitively study how temporality and sense intuition become interwoven in the first place. As a result, Kant's access to the processes preceding our experience is speculative. Kant's (1999, A 91-92/B 123–124) was well aware of this, as he clearly rejected establishing causality's necessity based on experience (a posteriori). He pointed out that his entire system is ultimately a thought experiment that aims to achieve verification by means of being thinkable without contradiction (see Kant, 1999, B xviii–xix).

Husserl (1970, p. 115) took issue with these speculations about intuitively inaccessible processes allegedly shaping our actual experience. He complained that Kant resorted to a “mythical concept formation. He forbids his readers to transpose the results of his regressive procedure into intuitive concepts […]. His transcendental concepts are thus unclear in a quite peculiar way.” Husserl consequently sought to intuitively explore the conscious processes shaping experience as we know it.

One important feature that Husserl (1960, p. 144, 1970, p. 199) did accept was Kant's so called “Copernican turn.” In order to explain how we, as subjects, can have knowledge about objects, Kant (1999, B xvi-xvii) suggested that we conceive of the object's appearance based on forms that we find in ourselves as experiencing subjects. In line with this, Husserl (1960, p. 114) postulated an“‘innate' Apriori, without which an ego as such is unthinkable.” This explains why he (see Husserl, 1968, pp. 250, 300, 328, 344) assumed our world experience is relative to an absolute, transcendental subjectivity that constitutes it.

Husserl likewise accepted Kant's (1999, A 51/B 75) claim: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Adopting this means that one always needs to look out for the proper correlation between any given intuition and concept, as only together can they be meaningful. Kant (1999, A 240/B 299) elucidates further: “t is also a requisite for one to make an abstract concept sensible, i.e., to display the object that corresponds to it in intuition, since without this the concept would remain (as one says) without sense.” As the categories are concepts, this transfers to them as well. Thus, in a similar vein, Husserl (2001b, p. 306) wrote:“It lies in the nature of the case that everything categorial ultimately rests upon sensuous intuition, that […] an intellectual insight […] without any foundation of sense, is a piece of nonsense.” Husserl always asked for a sensory foundation when a priori (eidetic) structures are to be explored phenomenologically.

Bolded parts are quoted from Husserl.

From here:

Fair enough. So for a phenomenologist Kant's metaphysics and idealism in general is of no particular value? — Tom Storm

I don't know enough to give an adequate answer to that. I have often read that Husserl's phenomenology owes a lot to Kant (as does just about every movement in modern philosophy in one way or another I guess). I think Husserl rejects the coherency of the notion of things in themselves, but I'll need to look into that more closely.

I stand by what I wrote - but I can see why the argument was made. Phenomenology acknowledges its affected position. Energy = affect when understood from beyond affect. — Possibility

Doesn't affect feel like energy to us though? Something moves us, and we know from our embodied experience that all movement requires effort (energy); we feel the energy of that movement. What is emotion if not e-motion?

I don't understand why you have gone from talking about cats to talking about brains. How do we know anything about brains if we don't know anything about the world? How can we say anything about brains if we can't say anything about the world?

Faith - if by that you mean belief without evidence - no. Faith - if by that you mean belief based on the evidence of personal experience - ok. — T Clark

The distinction there is between inter-subjectively evident and subjectively evident. It seems to me that whatever cannot be evident in any way more than to oneself, cannot be a good reason for anyone else's beliefs except one's own.

I would say the phenomenologist is not concerned with noumena. Remember Husserl's injunction to "return to the things themselves". The cat is the thing itself. The cat looks the way it looks to anybody that looks at it (either tabby, ginger, tortoise-shell, male or female, relatively large or small, and so on), so the way it looks cannot be constructed by my mind, even though it is mediated by the kind of mind and sensory setup I have.

I would have thought it is a collaboration; otherwise solipsism rears its boring head.

Of course, we assume there is something out there that is a cat, but the meanings that id the cat are not out there at all. — Astrophel

If you and I were in the presence of a fairly ordinary looking cat I can say 'look at the cat, what colour and pattern would you call that, tabby or tiger?' and I can be confident that the answer you give will be sensible and understandable. You won't say 'it's purple, no pattern at all'.

If that's not talking about something in the world, what would count?

Your understanding does not reach into the world and grab a cat. — Astrophel

I don't even know what that means. It seems to be some sort of weird inapt analogy between grasping with the hand and grasping with the mind; I'm not seeing the relevance.