Here is a long extract from Francisco Varela's last writing at the time of his ultimately failed liver transplant which Steve also quoted in the C&P thread today and which I think you will find to be extremely ramifying concerning the issue of AI:
"We can start with the embodied sentience of the organism, the ‘natural’ basis for
the study of lived events. Sentience, in this sense, has a double value or valence: natural
and phenomenal. Natural because sentience stands for the organism and its structural
coupling with the environment, manifest in a detailed and empirical sense. It
thus includes, without remainder, the biological details of the constitution and explanation
of function, an inescapable narrative. Phenomenal, because sentience has as its
flip side the immanence of the world of experience and experiencing; it has an inescapably
lived dimension that the word organism connotes already.
Moreover,
that the organism is a sentient and cognitive agent is possible only because we are already
conscious, and have an intrinsic intuition of life and its manifestations.
It is in this sense that ‘life can only be known by life’ (Jonas, 1966, p. 91).
This intertwining can be grounded on the very origin of life and its world of meaning by the self-producing
nature of the living. Given that the scientific tradition has construed the natural as the
objective, and thus has made it impossible to see the seamless unity between the natural
and the phenomenal by making sure they are kept apart, no ‘bridging’ or ‘putting
together’ would do the work.
The only way is to mobilize here a re-examination of
the very basis of modern science. But this gets, all of a sudden, too ambitious.
Exploring the phenomenal side of the organism requires a gesture, a procedure, a
phenomenological method, contra the current prejudice that we are all experts on our
own experience. Little can be said about this lived dimension without the work that it
requires for its deployment. ( In a basic sense, this is also close to the recent interest in
‘first-person’ methods in cognitive science.) And therein resides its paradoxical constitution:
our nature is such that this gesture needs cultivation and is not spontaneously
forthcoming. This is why it is appropriate to reserve the name of feeling of
existence
(sentiment d’existence, a term I borrow from Maine de Biran)
as the core phenomenon here, the true flip side of sentience.
The feeling of existence, in itself, can be characterized as having a double valence too. This is expressed as a tension between two simultaneous dimensions: embodied
and decentred. Embodied: on the one hand examining experience always takes us a
step closer to what seems more intimate, more pertinent, or more existentially close.
There is here a link between the felt quality or the possible depth of experience, and
the fact that in order to manifest such depth it must be addressed with a method in a
sustained exploration. It is this methodological gesture which gives the impression of
turning ‘inwards’ or ‘excavating’. What it does, instead, is to bring to the fore the
organism’s embodiment, the inseparable doublet quality of the body as lived and as
functional
(natural/phenomenal; Leib/Körper).
In other words, it is this double aspect
that is the source of depth (the roots of embodiment go through the entire body and
extend out into the large environment), as well as its intimacy (we are situated thanks
to the feeling-tone and affect that places us where we are and of which the body is the
place marker).
Decentred: on the other hand, experience is also and at the same time permeated
with alterity, with a transcendental side, that is, always and already decentred in relation
to the individuality of the organism. This defies the habitual move to see mind
and consciousness as inside the head/brain, instead of inseparably enfolded with the
experience of others, as if the experience of a liver transplant was a private matter.
This inescapable intersubjectivity (the ‘team’) of mental life shapes us through childhood
and social life, and in the transplantation experience takes a tangible form as
well. But it is also true in the organism’s very embodiment, appearing as the depth of
space, of the intrinsically extensible nature of its sentience, especially in exploring
the lived body."
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4 | Page 28 | The Paracast Community Forums
