Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

[Constance]

 

[Constance]

 

[Constance]

 

[Constance]

 

[smcder]

Thanks for reposting this link to some of Bataille's publications. I especially appreciate the potential value of this one --

"Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography
This excellent biography depicts the man behind the repellent ideas, and also helps to illumine the ideas themselves. The French edition was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt."

-- though I'm not ready to invest time in reading it. I find Bataille's ideas helpful in turning our thinking about human consciousness toward the organic, biological, development of innumerable species of life whose evolution on earth has influenced and continues to influence our own species' struggles in experiencing reflective consciousness and mind at the nexus of our worldly experience, but I also find many of the apparent excesses and extremes of his compounded ideas to be repellent. It seems that it would take a considerable investment of time to read all of Bataille's published work to find any balance, or existential faith in our ability to make our collective, socially minded existence rational and ethical, which is for me the great demand before us as a species bearing power over and responsibility for one another and for the other sentient animals that exist in this historical epoch. Basically, at this point I think some of his insights are useful and significant but not sufficiently balanced to help us survive our worst instincts or most self-destructive ideas. I'll still be very interested in reading any comments others here have on Bataille's writings.

I've come across a paper on the sociopolitical/ethical aspects of Merleau-Ponty's contributions to phenomenology that might be helpful in evaluating the pragmatic values achievable in the closely aligned philosophy of existentialism. These schools of thought are so closely aligned that they are often referred to as either phenomenological existentialism or existential phenomenology. I've only read the first quarter of this paper, but I recommend it anyway because I think it might well help us to recognize in human consciousness and mind the integration of the origins of knowledge and insight arising from both the inherited emotional and the humanly developed intellectual streams of our human experience and the resulting contradictions in contemporary human thinking. Here is an extract from the paper that concerns Bataille's thought and MP's responses to it:

". . . Second, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s trope of Nietzschean heroism, one might be tempted to think of Georges Bataille, with whom Merleau-Ponty was likewise personally acquainted. Bataille was a major proponent of Nietzschean ideas in France—yet this was primarily because he accepted Kojeve’s thesis that human society was entering a terminal stage of universal homogeneity in which human negativity had nothing to do. In his terms, this gave rise to the problem of ‘‘unemployed negativity,’’ and in particular to the problem of securing recognition for it as such.29

For Bataille, however, the end of History was rolled together with the death of God in a way that at once opened up and radically undermined the possibility for genuine subjectivity. This yielded the paradoxical or ‘‘impossible’’ situation of ‘‘sovereignty’’ that was central to Bataille’s thinking. In this sense, he was not so much a follower of Nietzsche as someone who aspired to imitate Nietzsche. He took up Nietzsche as a sacred ‘‘hero’’ of non-conformism, but this precisely in his tragic, mad solitude—it was a matter, so to speak, of an imitatio anti-Christi. This is why, in his works from the war years, Bataille stated that his aim is ‘‘to invent a new way to crucify myself.’’30 He made of his existence a ‘‘combat’’ [bataille] that incarnated sacrifice by trying to mimic the sacrifice of God.

This effort on the part of Bataille was the result of his having accepted—and having tried to live out the consequences of—the basic premises of both the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of heroism. This made Bataille himself the focal point of their underlying conflict. Thus, while his uptake of Nietzsche was infused with the themes of war and violence, it was primarily directed inwards in a selfdestructive way that does not conform to the model of self-assertive mastery sketched by Merleau-Ponty. So although Bataille was one of Merleau-Ponty’s covert interlocutors, (he will resurface below), he does not, as we might be tempted to think, represent the trope of Nietzschean heroism. . . ."

http://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/pdfs/smyth--heroism_and_history_cpr_2010.pdf

I'm looking at that paper now -

@Constance writes:

"... or existential faith in our ability to make our collective, socially minded existence rational and ethical, which is for me the great demand before us as a species bearing power over and responsibility for one another and for the other sentient animals that exist in this historical epoch."
...
"... I think it might well help us to recognize in human consciousness and mind the integration of the origins of knowledge and insight arising from both the inherited emotional and the humanly developed intellectual streams of our human experience and the resulting contradictions in contemporary human thinking."

That is the issue: rationally grounding the prevailing Judeo-Christian ethic without the religious framework that created and sustained it.

Steven Pinker puts a lot of what I would call "faith" (McGilchrist would call it the loony optimism of the increasingly un-tethered left-hemisphere) in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature - arguing that we are "growing" increasingly less violent - I do think he recognizes this is contingent and argues that our "rational" investment is needed to keep this trend going, ours and that of future generations ... but it's easy enough to ask, rationally, why would we want to do this? You can't ground such a why scientifically or rationally, it's a religious ethic. Jordan Peterson pointed this gap out in an interview I listened to recently:

Peterson is something of a YouTube phenomena right now and has been involved in some controversy, that's where the large font title "Sam Harris is Wrong" comes from - from those who post up his videos, not from Peterson himself.

 

[smcder]

I think his opening statements that people are far crazier and far greater than the rationalists would have it - speaks to what @Constance writes above, touches on it -

 

[smcder]

I do think SG points to phenomenology's insight into the nature of prereflective consciousness as grounded in preconscious/prethetic experience (the territory that, imo, most needs investigation in consciousness studies), but recognition of prereflective experience and the kinds of apprehesions and knowledge it bodies forth in the evolution of animals and humans does not constitute the whole of phenomenology's discoveries concerning reflective consciousness and mind and the consequent moral and ethical nature of human feeling and thought. Phenomenology has encompassed the investigation of many layers and dimensions of human experience, a range of inquiry that cannot be appreciated without one's reading the major texts of this school of modern philosophy.



? Perhaps you should go ahead and do that. I am interested in what source(s) you consider authoritative for defining and/or describing these topics.



I wish you would not react so defensively. What I said was not a criticism of 'you' but of the ambiguity I've sometimes noted in your usage [and the usages of theorists you've cited] of key terms concerning experience and consciousness whenever phenomenology is proposed as distinctly useful for the understanding of consciousness. I've objected several times over our last two years here to the ambiguity concerning the hard problem perpetuated by Chalmers's influential description of qualia as "what it feels like." It seems to me that Chalmers's catch phrase has opened the way for misunderstandings of forms of knowledge born through feelings, emotions, protoconscious senses of situated being, of inchoate selfhood and otherness, in animals as well as in humans from birth forward. One of the misunderstandings, most prominent in materialist sciences, is that experience consists of 'raw feels' {whatever those are meant, intended, to mean}. Another misunderstanding, also dominant among materialists in science and philosophy, is that phenomenology deals only with unreliable ideas derived from individual 'introspection', generally understood to be a capacity developed only at the level of reflective consciousness in our species. There is no spectrum of evolution and species development recognized in these notions. It is as if consciousness remains a complete mystery in terms of life itself, of lived experience and what is understood in it -- a light that suddenly, inexplicably, turns on in our species somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 years ago. Phenomenology recognizes that we can't understand ourselves and our capacities without understanding the history of biological evolution of our species and our cultural evolution in historical times. MP might have been the first phenomenological philosopher to call for an archaeology of consciousness, but I think Heidegger clearly attempted to take the same direction (though not as far back into the evolutionary past as MP has been willing to go). Bataille, too, has been willing to explore the animal aspects of our psychology and behaviors, but limited by a layer of theological and mythological ideation that seems to have blocked his own openness to the recognition of values and meaning felt already in the lived experiences of our animal forebears.



What 'we' {which 'we'?} consider to be the approach most likely to yield understanding of consciousness and mind is, as you say, "based on what we know." And we all know different things, different subject matters and disciplines, and possess varying degrees of access to/understanding of the many disciplines involved in the contemporary project of consciousness studies. In such a situation I think its incumbent on us all to attempt to explain and justify how we use the handful of words we casually trade back and forth in this contentious interdisciplinary field. It's appalling to me how little most scientists, including cognitive neuroscientists, understand about the exploration of the complexity of consciousness undertaken in phenomenology and affective neuroscientists led by Panksepp, foregrounded in the thought of three or four of his forebears in theoretical biology.



Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference' to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence, especially in an age in which we know that we do not know the nature of Nature.

 

[smcder]

Possibly the best quote in the entire thread ...

"Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke
deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness
in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference'
to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence,
especially in an age in which we know that
we do not know the nature of Nature."

- Constance Oct 05 2017


Bloody frame it and put in on your wall !
​

lol

 

[Constance]

 

[smcder]

I do think SG points to phenomenology's insight into the nature of prereflective consciousness as grounded in preconscious/prethetic experience (the territory that, imo, most needs investigation in consciousness studies), but recognition of prereflective experience and the kinds of apprehesions and knowledge it bodies forth in the evolution of animals and humans does not constitute the whole of phenomenology's discoveries concerning reflective consciousness and mind and the consequent moral and ethical nature of human feeling and thought. Phenomenology has encompassed the investigation of many layers and dimensions of human experience, a range of inquiry that cannot be appreciated without one's reading the major texts of this school of modern philosophy.



? Perhaps you should go ahead and do that. I am interested in what source(s) you consider authoritative for defining and/or describing these topics.



I wish you would not react so defensively. What I said was not a criticism of 'you' but of the ambiguity I've sometimes noted in your usage [and the usages of theorists you've cited] of key terms concerning experience and consciousness whenever phenomenology is proposed as distinctly useful for the understanding of consciousness. I've objected several times over our last two years here to the ambiguity concerning the hard problem perpetuated by Chalmers's influential description of qualia as "what it feels like." It seems to me that Chalmers's catch phrase has opened the way for misunderstandings of forms of knowledge born through feelings, emotions, protoconscious senses of situated being, of inchoate selfhood and otherness, in animals as well as in humans from birth forward. One of the misunderstandings, most prominent in materialist sciences, is that experience consists of 'raw feels' {whatever those are meant, intended, to mean}. Another misunderstanding, also dominant among materialists in science and philosophy, is that phenomenology deals only with unreliable ideas derived from individual 'introspection', generally understood to be a capacity developed only at the level of reflective consciousness in our species. There is no spectrum of evolution and species development recognized in these notions. It is as if consciousness remains a complete mystery in terms of life itself, of lived experience and what is understood in it -- a light that suddenly, inexplicably, turns on in our species somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 years ago. Phenomenology recognizes that we can't understand ourselves and our capacities without understanding the history of biological evolution of our species and our cultural evolution in historical times. MP might have been the first phenomenological philosopher to call for an archaeology of consciousness, but I think Heidegger clearly attempted to take the same direction (though not as far back into the evolutionary past as MP has been willing to go). Bataille, too, has been willing to explore the animal aspects of our psychology and behaviors, but limited by a layer of theological and mythological ideation that seems to have blocked his own openness to the recognition of values and meaning felt already in the lived experiences of our animal forebears.



What 'we' {which 'we'?} consider to be the approach most likely to yield understanding of consciousness and mind is, as you say, "based on what we know." And we all know different things, different subject matters and disciplines, and possess varying degrees of access to/understanding of the many disciplines involved in the contemporary project of consciousness studies. In such a situation I think its incumbent on us all to attempt to explain and justify how we use the handful of words we casually trade back and forth in this contentious interdisciplinary field. It's appalling to me how little most scientists, including cognitive neuroscientists, understand about the exploration of the complexity of consciousness undertaken in phenomenology and affective neuroscientists led by Panksepp, foregrounded in the thought of three or four of his forebears in theoretical biology.



Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference' to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence, especially in an age in which we know that we do not know the nature of Nature.

for reference:

"But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." - Thomas Nagel What Is It Like To Be a Bat?

"The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Humans beings have subjective experience: there is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense – or is phenomenally conscious, as it is sometimes put—when there is something it is like to be that being. A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state. Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid
green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state." - David Chalmers Consciousness and Its Place in Nature

 

[Constance]

The above YT video occurs in the middle of a magnificent album from a performance of songs written by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes to celebrate Vinicius after his death in 2009. It's a greatly moving and beautiful album and if you like this music it might be best to begin at the beginning of the concert at this link:

Hope nobody minds my posting so many music videos here tonight. Once I listen to one or two pieces of Brazilian music I can't stop for hours at a time.

 

[Constance]

for reference:

"But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." - Thomas Nagel What Is It Like To Be a Bat?

"The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. Humans beings have subjective experience: there is something it is like to be them. We can say that a being is conscious in this sense – or is phenomenally conscious, as it is sometimes put—when there is something it is like to be that being. A mental state is conscious when there is something it is like to be in that state. Conscious states include states of perceptual experience, bodily sensation, mental imagery, emotional experience, occurrent thought, and more. There is something it is like to see a vivid
green, to feel a sharp pain, to visualize the Eiffel tower, to feel a deep regret, and to think that one is late. Each of these states has a phenomenal character, with phenomenal properties (or qualia) characterizing what it is like to be in the state." - David Chalmers Consciousness and Its Place in Nature

Thanks for posting these quotations Steve. I have not read Consciousness and Its Place in Nature and should. And will.

 

[smcder]

Thanks for posting these quotations Steve. I have not read Consciousness and Its Place in Nature and should. And will.

I think you have - it's just been a while, we read it very early on. I was thinking about the source of the inadequacies you mention in the

what is it like/ something it is like

language and the quotes show where it came from in Nagel - Chalmers started there and that phrase then took on a life of its own

(which prompts the question: is there something it is like to be a "something it is like"? ;-)

But I think it started with Chalmers attempt to answer Nagel. Now, looking back, I can better see how much is left out from the phenomenological side. And just now, I noticed this at the end of Nagel's paper:

I should like to close with a speculative proposal. It may be possible to approach the gap between subjective and objective from another direction. Setting aside temporarily the relation between the mind and the brain, we can pursue a more objective understanding of the mental in its own right. At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without relying on the imagination-without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method-an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination. Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.

That's interesting.

 

[smcder]

I think this is very interesting:

@Constance writes:

Bataille, too, has been willing to explore the animal aspects of our psychology and behaviors, but limited by a layer of theological and mythological ideation that seems to have blocked his own openness to the recognition of values and meaning felt already in the lived experiences of our animal forebears.

I'll have to think about that. I think there may be a partial answer to Stephen Pinker/Sam Harris in that, too.

Meanwhile, I don't think of "strong emergence" (if we have to have labels) but rather I think this is all captured very nicely in a little tune of some phenomenological importance:

Quarks do it, quail do it
Even Harvard dons do it
Let's do it, let's be in the world!
In maths, bounded upper sets do it
Irradiated ions and let's do it
Let's do it, lass uns In-der-Welt-sein!

 

[Constance]

Possibly the best quote in the entire thread ...

"Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke
deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness
in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference'
to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence,
especially in an age in which we know that
we do not know the nature of Nature."

- Constance Oct 05 2017


Bloody frame it and put in on your wall !
​

Thanks Randle. Much appreciated.

 

[Constance]

Quarks do it, quail do it
Even Harvard dons do it
Let's do it, let's be in the world!
In maths, bounded upper sets do it
Irradiated ions and let's do it
Let's do it, lass uns In-der-Welt-sein!

Ausgezeichnet!!!

 

[Soupie]

Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference' to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence, especially in an age in which we know that we do not know the nature of Nature.

Yes, it does require more than a preference to justify "adhering" to a particular model of consciousness. It requires some form of evidence. I agree with you on that.

However the point I'm making that you and @Usual Suspect may be missing is that there is no evidence strongly supporting one model over the other.

There are the mainstream paradigms (what-is consists of insentient matter/energy) and there are loads of suppositions (phenomenal consciousness emerges from the body) but alas no evidence!

That is why I say our positions boil down to preferences.

I for one think there are reasons to believe:

1 phenomenal consciousness is fundamental. (That is, it does not weakly or strongly emerge from an insentient matter/energy.)

2 the brain and mind are ontologically identical

Do I have evidence to support this position? Nothing that would sway someone who is skeptical of this approach.

You, @smcder, and @Usual Suspect on the other hand consider dualism to be a viable model.

1 You all are open to the idea that matter/energy are fundamental with respect to phenomenal consciousness and are open to the possibility that consciousness strongly emerges as something ontologically new from matter/energy.

2 You all are open to mind-body/brain dualism as you maintain that the mind may be something generated by, and distinct from, the body/brain.

Is there evidence to support this approach? No more evidence than that supporting the above approach.

 

[smcder]

Yes, it does require more than a preference to justify "adhering" to a particular model of consciousness. It requires some form of evidence. I agree with you on that.

However the point I'm making that you and @Usual Suspect may be missing is that there is no evidence strongly supporting one model over the other.

There are the mainstream paradigms (what-is consists of insentient matter/energy) and there are loads of suppositions (phenomenal consciousness emerges from the body) but alas no evidence!

That is why I say our positions boil down to preferences.

I for one think there are reasons to believe:

1 phenomenal consciousness is fundamental. (That is, it does not weakly or strongly emerge from an insentient matter/energy.)

2 the brain and mind are ontologically identical

Do I have evidence to support this position? Nothing that would sway someone who is skeptical of this approach.

You, @smcder, and @Usual Suspect on the other hand consider dualism to be a viable model.

1 You all are open to the idea that matter/energy are fundamental with respect to phenomenal consciousness and are open to the possibility that consciousness strongly emerges as something ontologically new from matter/energy.

2 You all are open to mind-body/brain dualism as you maintain that the mind is something generated by, and distinct from, the body/brain.

Is there evidence to support this approach? No more evidence than that supporting the above approach.

I will state it (again) that I don't think any current view is likely correct.

I wouldn't use the word "preferences". I prefer chocolate (who doesn't??) to vanilla but I don't have the same free choice simply according to taste to chose my theory of mind - rather I weigh the various arguments:

arguments -------> BLACK BOX --------> most likely

and out comes the most likely choice (as it seems to me).

This has a degree of arbitrariness, because as I read more texts in one area, the evidence seems to tip in that direction a bit and so on - but that is where a "commitment" comes in - so you can mark me, for the moment as "uncommitted" in terms of theories of mind - again none of them seem adequate.

To your points:

1 You all are open to the idea that matter/energy are fundamental with respect to phenomenal consciousness and are open to the possibility that consciousness strongly emerges as something ontologically new from matter/energy.

"fundamental with respect to phenomenal consciousness" means matter/energy are fundamental and consciousness is not? OK, I have a certain degree, call it "x" of openness for this ... but I also have a certain degree, "x1" of openness that consciousness is fundamental along with matter/energy and "x2" that consciousness is fundamental and matter/energy are not ... on any given day x1>x>x2. I'm not really a big fan of strong emergence.

2 You all are open to mind-body/brain dualism as you maintain that the mind is something generated by, and distinct from, the body/brain.

I'm not really a fan of "generated by" but distinct from - I suppose the smoke is distinct from the choo-choo but were it not for the choo-choo, no smoke ... and lots of other things make smoke ... not a big fan of consciousness is "secreted" by the brain either. All of this seems to "substantify" consciousness - which goes back to substance dualism - also not a big fan.

So... it is not correct to say: "you maintain that the mind is something generated by, and distinct from, the body/brain."

Hope this helps!

Hope we don't have to do it again! ;-)

 

[Constance]

So... it is not correct to say: "you maintain that the mind is something generated by, and distinct from, the body/brain."

Hope this helps!

Hope we don't have to do it again! ;-)

Oh so do I. The question whether there is only one rather than two [or possibly more] 'ontological primitives' involved in the evolution and development of the 'world'/'universe' as (to the extent that) we presently comprehend it might never be answerable from the experience of beings such as ourselves existing within it. @Soupie has conceded, in the first sentence of his post today, that

"Yes, it does require more than a preference to justify "adhering" to a particular model of consciousness. It requires some form of evidence."

In my view it will require a great deal of specific evidence to support any 'model' yet proposed to explain/account for consciousness. It seems obvious to me that we have been spinning our wheels for a long time in this thread arguing about 'ontological models' that all lack adequate evidence to define the ontological origin(s) of consciousness. Fortunately, that question is not the only question we can pursue in our desire to understand more about the nature and capacities of consciousness as experienced inwardly and expressed outwardly and comprehensibly in the activities of our species and others in our known history on this planet. All of that is far more interesting to me, and I hope for others, than this endless round of speculative claims about 'models'.

 

[smcder]

a couple of further thoughts:

@Soupie writes

Yes, it does require more than a preference to justify "adhering" to a particular model of consciousness. It requires some form of evidence. I agree with you on that.

However the point I'm making that you and @Usual Suspect may be missing is that there is no evidence strongly supporting one model over the other.

smcder

1. to justify adhering to a particular model of consciousness requires some form of evidence.
2. there is no evidence strongly supporting one model over the other.

So the question is do you adhere to a particular model of consciousness?

If you do, that means that, while there is no evidence strongly supporting one model over the other

1) you feel there is enough evidence to justify your adherence
or 2) your adherence is unjustified.

If 1) there is enough evidence to justify your adherence, then that would seem that there is (for you) evidence strongly (enough) to justify one model over the other.

If 2) ... then you may need to re-assess your adherence!

@Soupie writes

There are the mainstream paradigms (what-is consists of insentient matter/energy) and there are loads of suppositions (phenomenal consciousness emerges from the body) but alas no evidence!

smcder I would disagree - I think there is evidence and there is also evidence for consciousness being fundamental.

Corvid intelligence and (possibly) consciousness being derived from quite a different biological structure could argue:

1. consciousness is a product of biological function, necessary for intelligence, as it can be "generated" by somewhat different structures - the way that various modes of swimming and flying have evolved
2. consciousness is fundamental - because even significantly different structures can exploit this fundamental aspect of the universe to produce consciousness as we know it -

So the question is, what is the best response in the face of a lack of evidence for either view?

Part of the answer to that question for me is to examine my own preferences and figure out why I would want to "believe" one way or the other.