Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11

[Constance]

Have two subjects enjoying a single event...simple.

Not simple. What if both don't 'enjoy' this event?

What is difficult to clone is their respective history of experiences. So in a way it isn't possible.

Memory does not consist of objective 'information', like individual cards in a library's card catalogue that can be copied and incorporated into a reading list. Our memories include both the objective and subjective aspects of what we have experienced. I'm reading a very good paper on language and nature in Merleau-Ponty and I'll link it for you and others below because I think it might quickly break through the wall of reductively objectivized categorical presuppositions which you and several others here attempt to apply to consciousness and mind.

Extract: ". . . We arrive, then, at the classical dilemma sense poses for phenomenology: is sense to be situated on the side of the subject, as the very principles of phenomenology seem to imply, or is sense in some way bestowed on us by the world, as a phenomenological investigation of our corporeality has been led to conclude? This latter position, that our embodied dialogue with nature gives rise to sense, has received considerable attention from ecological theorists over the last several years due to the efforts of David Abram, who himself builds on the foundation laid down by the earlier work of Merleau-Ponty.9 According to this position, sense arises at the conjunction of the world and the embodied subject and lies at the root of human expression and language. Although Merleau-Ponty usually discusses the human subject, it is clear that this description may be extended to animal life as well.10 Rather than to the world-subject conjunction, sense would be more accurately attributed to the meeting point of world and life. All life carries with it an evaluative projecting into the world. As Hans Jonas puts the point, metabolism is the“first form of freedom.”11 Life values and chooses; it throws a world up before itself and is therefore already intentionally engaged rather than merely causally connected. Life and sense go hand in hand. . . ."

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xm...532/Philo.Toadvine.Singing_OCR.pdf?sequence=2

 

[Randall]

@Randall, what is it that leads you to think that consciousness can be 'duplicated'?

Duplication is different than downloading in that with duplication all instances can be original whereas all downloaded versions must be copies, and therefore cannot be the same consciousness that they originated from. So duplication is possible, but downloading isn't. This is the key point that differentiates consciousness from information. This also seems to create a paradox wherein:

1. If everything that is information can be downloaded
2. and everything is information
3. then consciousness must also be information
4. therefore consciousness can be downloaded
5. yet consciousness cannot be downloaded without destroying it in the process
6. therefore consciousness cannot be downloaded

BTW: Hope it feels good to be yourself again .

 

[Constance]

Duplication is different than downloading in that with duplication all instances can be original whereas all downloaded versions must be copies, and therefore cannot be the same consciousness that they originated from. So duplication is possible, but downloading isn't. This is the key point that differentiates consciousness from information. This also seems to create a paradox wherein:

1. If everything that is information can be downloaded
2. and everything is information
3. then consciousness must also be information
4. therefore consciousness can be downloaded
5. yet consciousness cannot be downloaded without destroying it in the process
6. therefore consciousness cannot be downloaded

BTW: Hope it feels good to be yourself again .

Yes, it does. So I gather you do not support the notion that a consciousness can be downloaded to a machine or to another being (or otherwise in cases with animals, between animals)? Good. But I don't see how you're supporting the idea that a living consciousness could be 'duplicated' in another entity, whether a computational entity or a living one, unless you think the only thing that exists in the universe is 'information' -- whatever that is -- rather than natural environments within which living creatures born into them sense, feel, and eventually think about what they experience in their local world and, with the advent of human philosophy, its meaning. Meaning is constructed out of the experiences of living animals including us, and nothing could be reflected on or thought in the absence of grounding, situational, experiences in contact and relation with things, gestalts, and others in the world.

 

[Constance]

Have two subjects enjoying a single event...simple. What is difficult to clone is their respective history of experiences. So in a way it isn't possible.

You've only repeated what you said before. The question is how one clones the subjectivity that arises in the evolution of species.

 

[Pharoah]

Duplication is different than downloading in that with duplication all instances can be original whereas all downloaded versions must be copies, and therefore cannot be the same consciousness that they originated from. So duplication is possible, but downloading isn't. This is the key point that differentiates consciousness from information. This also seems to create a paradox wherein:

1. If everything that is information can be downloaded
2. and everything is information
3. then consciousness must also be information
4. therefore consciousness can be downloaded
5. yet consciousness cannot be downloaded without destroying it in the process
6. therefore consciousness cannot be downloaded

BTW: Hope it feels good to be yourself again .

I use the term replication rather than duplication to make the distinction.
re point 1., perhaps information does not exist? and point 2., perhaps there is no 'information-ether'.

 

[Michael Allen]

You've only repeated what you said before. The question is how one clones the subjectivity that arises in the evolution of species.

Do you mean generic subjectivity? Or of a particular living sentient's subjectivity?

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

 

[Soupie]

I use the term replication rather than duplication to make the distinction.
re point 1., perhaps information does not exist? and point 2., perhaps there is no 'information-ether'.

Even downloading is technically duplication. When one "downloads" a program, one is technically duplicating the program on their computer hard drive.

I argue that most "experts" understand this about information, that it is not a physical substance that moves through space, but rather is constituted by physical substances.

Form and substance, substance and form. Mind and matter, matter and mind.

 

[Constance]

I argue that most "experts" understand this about information, that it is not a physical substance that moves through space, but rather is constituted by physical substances.

Form and substance, substance and form. Mind and matter, matter and mind.

Excellent. It seems that both matter and antimatter constitute the grounds out of which life and consciousness evolve. See this fascinating article, published today, which I hope we'll read and talk about:

The Most Precise Measurement of Antimatter Yet Deepens the Mystery of Why We Exist

 

[Constance]

I use the term replication rather than duplication to make the distinction.
re point 1., perhaps information does not exist? and point 2., perhaps there is no 'information-ether'.

Hi @Pharoah. So good to see you here. Still following your thinking in HCT. Very interested to hear your responses to the article I just linked in a post to @Soupie.

 

[Constance]

Do you mean generic subjectivity? Or of a particular living sentient's subjectivity?

What do you mean by 'generic subjectivity'? The philosophical 'concept' of 'subjectivity' can only have become possible on the basis of humans' recognitions of their own experiential subjectivity, the subjective link to what we bring forward toward understanding of the objective pole of experience in the physical world, which is produced by the interaction and integration of subject and object as phenomenologically understood. Samuel Alexander recognized this experiential and ontological being-together of subject and object as a "compresence," a more accurate concept that points to the complexity of being as/in an actual physical world as experienced by aware and eventually conscious beings generated in the evolution of species. As always the 'concepts' we formulate are sourced in, originate within the grounds of our lived experience, grounds which we cannot express in limited and separate terms or capture in any concept or term we use in speaking together about the nature of the 'reality' in which we exist that permits and enables our constructions of cultural 'worlds' out of the materials of earth {expressed in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art"}.

Here's a link to Samuel Alexander's original writing concerning this 'compresence' , followed by a link to another book that might be very useful to us.

{Link won't take. Just search: Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity at amazon.

and also maybe check out, as I'm about to, this book linked by amazon to its page on the Samuel Alexander book:

Julian M. Galvez, Our Incorrigible Ontological Relations and Categories of Being

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NBB3QCV/?tag=rockoids-20

Amazon's description of this book:

"Despite its specificity and imperfections, this book should contitute a major turning point in modern philosophy. In addressing the issue of the ontological categories, its author, Julian M. Galvez, produces, what must be reasonably said to be, a series of radical novel theories in unexplored topics in the discipline, all of relevant consequence in the entirety of its branches.

In his endeavour, Mr. Galvez argues for “distinctions” as the subject matter of thought, judgment and language, which, among other things, contributes to a solution of the problems of linguistic semantics and content. He follows with an in depth study on ontological relations, topic, that jointly with the former of distinctions, has remained practically forsaken up to our day.

From these observations and conclusions, Mr. Galvez has proceeded to a very interesting reassessment of ontology and metaphysics. He shows how these ontological distinctions act both as primary premises of judgment and ultimate explanatory resources; how –though not empirically given- they enable knowledge of the world in itself, and are the very bounds of mathematics and logic, intellectually constraining the reach and nature of natural sciences.

In spite of their seeming insignificance, the findings of Mr. Galvez transcend the focus of this work, and open the door to solutions of many old problems, from issues in philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics, to questions of philosophy of mathematics or science, such as on the nature of number and time.

In particular, the theories on knowledge in it postulated deserve a wide space in epistemology, as valid arguments for an explanation of the nature, grounds, potential and limitations of cognition. Still further, his reflexions on the “relational” a priori content of the postulates of science, apply in metaphilosophy, revealing the scientific relevance of philosophical studies. This book should appeal to all those interested in being at the forefront of philosophical inquiry."

 

[Constance]

Here is a copy from my Word files of a portion of a review of Alexander's and several others' early thinking regarding emergence. This part of the review concerned a book not yet translated, at that point, into English. All I copied was the last name of the book's author and the title of his book: Stephan, Emergenz.

my subject line in Word:
"EMERGENCE, SAMUEL ALEXANDER (space, time, and deity – WS),
followed by the book review:

"Stephan’s Emergenz

Stephan’s book on the historical and philosophical aspects of the concept of emergence is, in my
opinion, the most interesting of the four. This book is a revised version of Stephan’s Habilitationsschrift at the
University of Karlsruhe. However, unlike most German Habilitationsschrifte, Stephan’s book is relatively
short (less than 300 pages) and is written in a clear, non-technical style.

Stephan begins by tracing the historical context in which reflection about emergence took place early
in the twentieth century. This is the debate between mechanist and vitalist worldviews. As a middle way, Samuel
Alexander, Conwy Lloyd Morgan, Roy Wood Sellars, and Charles Dunbar Broad came up with the concept of
emergence. Stephan identifies nine characteristics of their use of the concept of emergence and systematically
analyzes their interrelations. It is quite striking to find out that, unlike many emergentist thinkers nowadays,
these early emergentist thinkers were quite drastically committed to a deterministic worldview. The result of
Stephan’s analysis is a concise and useful ‘map’ which charts the different theories of emergence and their
emphases.

Next, Stephan traces the beginnings of British emergentist thought in J.S. Mill’s A System of Logic,
while also pointing to Continental theories of emergence. He outlines and analyses arguments against
emergentist theories and evaluates counter-arguments. Thereafter, he explores the contemporary renaissance
or ‘second wave’ of emergentist thought, in philosophy of mind, the sciences of self-organizing systems, and
chaos theory (arguing that, ironically, chaotic behavior may have more emergent characteristics than the selforganizing
processes described in many contemporary complexity theories). Stephan predicts that this wave of
interest for emergence will remain for a while.

For me this book has become a primer on emergence. A minor flaw may be that the author nowhere
specifically characterizes the difference between ‘emergence’ and ‘supervenience,’ or that he does not really
develop a position of his own with regard to the usefulness of the concept of emergence in scientific literature
(which, in personal communication, Stephan argued, was caused by his doubts about the scientific usefulness
of the concept of emergence). But these are merely minor points. The book’s strength is that it provides a
rigorous philosophical analysis of emergentist theories past and present, as well as a critical and systematic
apparatus which can be used to evaluate contemporary and future emergentist theories. Unfortunately for many
in the English-speaking community, the book is written in German. However, for those interested in acquiring
an English version of this book there is also good news, as an English translation is in preparation, probably due
for 2006."

{I'm now searching for access to Stephan's book in English translation and will copy any links I find to it.}

 

[Constance]

More importantly, and more to the point, we were enlightened about emergence several years ago by Steve [@smcder] when he brought Samuel Todes's Body and World to our attention and linked to it online. At about the same time we read Strawson's paper "Cognitive Phenomenology" and referenced two books (one a collection of papers by various consciousness researchers, both scientists and philosophers, and the other a book by Elijah Chudnoff (sp?) on the subject of cognitive phenomenology.

Here are some links from my notes at that time, but we should really try to reread the thread at that time, linked in my notes. Apologies for my notes being in all- caps (it's easier that way).

SAMUEL TODES, BODY AND WORLD
EXTENDS MP’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION DEEPER INTO PREREFLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS IN COPING AND SEEKING BEHAVIORS. SEE DREYFUS’S INTRODUCTION TO TODES’S BOOK.

CF COGNITIVE PHENOMENOLOGY
SEE Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

RE VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS BOOK
IN TODES’S WORK WE SEE CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGING FROM THE PREREFLECTIVE AND GROUNDING SKILLFUL COPING, AND THE DIFFERENT LAYER OF CONSCIOUSNESS THAT FOLLOWS IN REFLECTION AND PHILOSOPHY. AND WE SEE HOW CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGES FROM NATURAL ENDOWMENTS OF THE LIVING WITH PRECONCEPTUAL THINKING, JUDGMENT, BELIEF … MP’S “PERCEPTUAL FAITH.”

THE TODES BOOK IS HIGHLY RELEVANT FOR PHAROAH’S HCT PROJECT. SEE MY POSTS TO PHAROAH AT
Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

AND SEE Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

 

[Constance]

notes continuing, with relevant book references and a long extract from the Strawson paper:

TODES NOT CITED IN Cognitive Phenomenology (New Problems of Phil…(Paperback)
by Elijah Chudnoff
OR in Cognitive Phenomenology(Paperback) COLLECTION ED by Tim Bayne, Michelle Montague
SEE THE Bayne's and Montague's INTRODUCTION: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0198708033/?tag=rockoids-20 and SOME PAPERS IN THE BOOK AT Cognitive Phenomenology as the Basis of Unconscious Content - Oxford Scholarship

SEE KRIEGAL’S BOOK VARIETIES OF CONSCIOUSNESS at
(and ELSEWHERE FIND URIAH KRIEGAL “Understanding Conative Phenomenology: Lessons from Ricoeur”)

SEE ELIJA CHUDNOFF’S BOOK Cognitive Phenomenology
Routledge, Apr 10, 2015 - Philosophy - 194 pages

“Phenomenology is about subjective aspects of the mind, such as the conscious states associated with vision and touch, and the conscious states associated with emotions and moods, such as feelings of elation or sadness. These states have a distinctive first-person ‘feel’ to them, called their phenomenal character. In this respect they are often taken to be radically different from mental states and processes associated with thought.

This is the first book to fully question this orthodoxy and explore the prospects of cognitive phenomenology, applying phenomenology to the study of thought and cognition. Does cognition have its own phenomenal character? Can introspection tell us either way? If consciousness flows in an unbroken ‘stream’ as William James argued, how might a punctuated sequence of thoughts fit into it?

Elijah Chudnoff begins with a clarification of the nature of the debate about cognitive phenomenology and the network of concepts and theses that are involved in it. He then examines the following topics:
⦁ introspection and knowledge of our own thoughts
⦁ phenomenal contrast arguments
⦁ the value of consciousness
⦁ the temporal structure of experience
⦁ the holistic character of experience and the interdependence of sensory and cognitive states
⦁ the relationship between phenomenal character and mental representation.

Including chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking a clear and informative introduction to and assessment of cognitive phenomenology, whether philosophy student or advanced researcher. It will also be valuable reading for those in related subjects such as philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and epistemology.”


GALEN STRAWSON, COGNITIVE PHENOMENOLOGY

from a post of mine at the time: We have not so far in this six-part discussion taken up the discussions and debates concerning cognitive phenomenology. I've linked the paper below by Galen Strawson, but as I recall we did not read it together and discuss it. The last few days I've been exploring the current attention to cognitive phenomenology and the debates concerning it in two recent books entitled Cognitive Phenomenology -- one written by Elijah Kriegal, the other a collection of papers edited by Tim Bayne and _____. The introduction to the latter is available in part in amazon.com's sample from the book and provides orientation to the issues in the history of the philosophy of mind leading to the concept of cognitive phenomenology, a term that Strawson introduced. So his paper "Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life" is a key work in this subject matter. It's available at academia.edu in whole, and I quote an extract from the first several pages below. I do wish that the four of us would all read this paper for the clarity it brings in critiqueing the ways in which presuppositional thinking and poorly defined terms afforded by our language (such as it is) have blocked our attempts here to understand one another. I've complained several times in the past about how Chalmers's phrase 'what it feels like' has been used again and again by philosophers of the analytic persuasion and also by other researchers in consciousness studies to short-circuit our understanding of the phenomenology of human experience. Here goes:

"Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life"
Galen Strawson
[FINAL DRAFT (minus Appendix) forthcoming in
Cognitive Phenomenology, ed. T. Bayne & M. Montague (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Epigraphs:

"I will now utter certain words which form a sentence: these words, for instance: Twice two are four. Now,when I say these words, you not only hear them--the words--you also understand what they mean. That is to say, something happens in your minds--some act of consciousness--over and above the hearing of the words, some act of consciousness which may be called the understanding of their meaning." G. E. Moore (1910-11: 57)

"… let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard Street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there besideFindlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons at712d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of those anice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I loveflowers …" James Joyce
(1922: 642) (quoting one of Molly Bloom's streams of consciousness in Joyce's Ulysses}

"It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality." Saul Bellow (1970: 228)
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
1 Introduction
In recent analytic philosophy, as opposed to the Phenomenological tradition in philosophy initiated by Brentano and Husserl,1
phenomenology has standardly been taken to be restricted to the study of sensory experiences, including mental images of certain sorts, and feelings, including mood feelings and emotional feelings. I’ll say that phenomenology so understood is confined to
sense/feeling experience, or sense/feeling phenomenology, bringing under this heading all sensation-mood-emotion-image-feeling phenomena considered (so far as they can be) entirely independently of any cognitive mental phenomena.There’s a lot more to experience than sense/feeling experience. There’s also what I’llcall
cognitive experience, or cognitive phenomenology. There’s meaning-experience,thought-experience, understanding-experience. There is, most generally, everything about experience that isn’t just a matter of sense/feeling experience as just defined. In this paper I’ll take ‘sense/feeling experience’ and ‘cognitive experience’ to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive terms (some think that there’s experience that falls under neither head). It may be that there are no pure cases of sense/feeling alone,or cognitive experience alone, but the distinction may be valid and useful for all that. In analytic philosophy there is considerable resistance to the idea that anything rightly called ‘cognitive experience’ or ‘cognitive phenomenology’ exists. This is remarkablefor many reasons, one of which is that it’s doubtful that sense/feeling experience ever occurs without cognitive experience in the experience of an ordinary adult human being. Nor do the two things simply co-occur. They’re profoundly interwoven, although we can for purposes of philosophical analysis distinguish sense/feeling elements of experience sharply from cognitive elements of experience.I’m going to argue for the existence of cognitive experience or cognitive phenomenology, beginning with some assumptions and a few terminological remarks. The main action begins in §6.

2 Terminological preliminaries
In origin and full propriety, ‘phenomenology’ is the name of a theoretical discipline. Phenomenology is the general study, the -ology, of appearances, of the experiential character of experiences—the
experiential or qualitative or what-it’s-likeness character that experiences have for those who have them as they have them. Recently the term has come to be used for its own subject matter, so that one can now say that phenomenology (original sense) is the study of phenomenology (new sense). This is less than ideal, but the innovation doesn’t do any great harm. (Something similar happened with ‘ontological’, which is standardly used where ‘ontic’ or ‘ontical’ is more appropriate.)2 I assume that experiences (perceptual experiences, conscious thoughts, and so on) are spatially located events, neural electrochemical goings-on that have as such—in having mass, charge, shape, size, and so on—a certain non-experiential character.3 This non-experiential character is of no concern to phenomenology, which restricts itself to the study of the experiential character of experiences considered just as such: considered without any reference to any part or aspect of the reality of the experiences other than the part or aspect of reality which consists in the existence of their experiential character. Phenomenology also puts aside ‘the world’, considered as that which experiences are typically experiences of.4
In this respect, Husserl’s slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst !’—‘Back to the things themselves!’— is very misleading. I’ll use the plural-lacking mass term ‘experience’ to refer to: that part or aspect of reality that consists in the existence of experiential character considered just as such and nothing else; and I’ll use the plural-accepting count-noun ‘experience(s)’ as I already have, to talk of experiences (plural)
as things that we ordinarily take to have properties other than experiential-character properties, e.g. properties attributed by physics and neurophysiology. Experience, then, is the (experiential) what-it’s-likeness of experiences.5
Examples of experience? Basic examples will do—the experiential character of pain, tasting potatoes, seeing the colour blue, finding something funny. What are these things like? You know what they’re like from your own case. This answer, condemned by Wittgensteinians, is exactly right. It doesn’t matter if what it is like for you is qualitatively different from what it is like for me, just so long as it is like something for you, as of course it is.6

3 Real realism about experience
Phenomenology incorporates all-out realism about experience (experience is its whole subject matter). But by ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about experience. The pleonasm would be unnecessary if a number of analytic philosophers hadn’t in the last eighty years or so tried, more or less covertly, to ‘reduce’ the experiential to the non-experiential, continuing to speak of the experientialin a seemingly realist way while holding that, really, only the non-experiential exists. A good way to convey what it is to be a real realist about experience is to say that it’s to continue to take colour experience or taste experience, say, or experience of pain, or of an itch, to be what one took it to be wholly unreflectively—what one knew it to be in having it—before one did any philosophy, e.g. when one was five. However many new and surprising facts7 they learn about experience from scientists, real realists’ basic grasp—knowledge—of what experience is remains exactly the same as it was before they did any philosophy. It remains, in other words, entirely correct, grounded in the fact that to have experience at all is already to know what experience is, however little one reflects about it. I think this way of specifying what I mean by ‘experience’ is helpful because it guarantees that anyone who claims not to know what I mean is being disingenuous.8 When I say that experiences are neural goings-on, I’m not in any way denying the reality of experience as just defined. I’m assuming that materialism is true, for the purposes of this paper. I am, though, a real materialist, a realistic materialist, and a real materialist is someone who is fully realist (real-realist, five-year-old realist) about the thing whose reality is more certain than the reality of anything else—experience. I’m an ‘adductive’ materialist, not a reductive materialist. Adductive materialists don’t claim that experience is, in being wholly physical, anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be. They claim, rather, that the physical must be something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, if only because many of the wholly physical goings-on in the wholly
physical brain are experience, experience as defined above (experiential) what-it’s-likeness.
Many philosophers think that there’s a major puzzle in the existence of experience. But the appearance of a puzzle arises only given an assumption there is no reason to make. This is the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of the physical that gives us reason to think that it cannot itself be experiential. It’s not just that this assumption is false. There is in fact zero evidence for the existence of anything non-experiential in the universe. There never has been any evidence, and never will be. What we have instead is a wholly unsupported assumption about our capacity to know the nature of things (in particular the physical) which must be put severely in doubt by the fact that it seems to create this puzzle if by nothing else. One of the most important—revelatory—experiences a philosopher brought up in the Western tradition can have is to realize that this assumption has no respectable foundation. This experience is life-changing, philosophically, but it comes only to some—although the point is elementary.
The fact that physics has no terms specifically for experiential phenomena (I’m putting aside the view that reference to conscious observers is essential in quantum mechanics) is not evidence in support of the view that experience doesn’t exist. It isn’t even evidence in support of the view that something non-experiential exists.9

4 Cognitive experience (cognitive phenomenology)
The fact that experience has irreducibly cognitive aspects in addition to sense/feeling aspects was perhaps never questioned throughout the history of philosophy until the advent of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century.10 It was only that curious and in many respects admirable academic culture (to which I belong) which gave rise to the view I want to dispute,
The Remarkable View
that the subject matter of phenomenology (the completely general study of the experiential character of experience) is nothing more than sense/feeling experience as characterized above. This view achieved such dominance that the phrase ‘qualitative character’, used to refer quite generally to the experiential character of experience, came to many to sound synonymous with ‘sense/feeling’. In this way the mistake was built into the words with which the question was discussed.11 We can put aside here the remarkable fact that the Remarkable View grew up alongside
The Astonishing View
that there’s actually no such thing as the experiential character of experience (no such thing as conscious experience, experiential what-it’s-likeness, as real realists understand it), from which it follows that there’s really no such thing as the discipline of phenomenology. And we can put aside
The Astonishing Fact
that the Astonishing View was for a considerable period of time the dominant view among a significant number who considered themselves, and were by some others considered, to be at the forefront of their subject, along with its bedfellow
The Truly Incredible Fact
that this was part of a movement one of whose openly stated aims— under various names, such as ‘behaviourism’ and ‘functionalism, and now, it seems, ‘strong representationalism’ — was to reduce the experiential to the non-experiential, i.e. to show that the experiential was, in some way, really wholly non-experiential.12

We can put aside the Astonishing and Truly Incredible Facts in order to focus on the Remarkable View: the view that the subject matter of phenomenology is nothing more than sense/feeling experience; the view, in other words, that one can in principle give an exhaustive account of all aspects of human experience, all aspects of the actual character that experience has for us as we have it from moment to moment and from day to day—everything about human lived experience, everything that our lives are to us and for us—purely by reference to sense/feeling experience.

It was because the Remarkable View was prevalent at the end of the last century that I adopted the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’, rather than simply ‘phenomenology’, when trying to describe what it is to experience oneself as a free agent, or as a ‘self’ in the sense of an inner mental presence distinct from the whole human being (Strawson1986, 1997). The discussion of free will was ‘centrally concerned with what one might call the “general cognitive phenomenology” of freedom … with our beliefs, feelings, attitudes, practices, and ways of conceiving or thinking about the world, in so far as these involve the notion of freedom’ (1986: p. v, new edn. p. vi); the aspects of the sense of the self that were under consideration were ‘conceptual rather than affective: it is the cognitive phenomenology of the sense of the self that is fundamentally in question, i.e. the conceptual structure of the sense of the self, the structure of the sense of the self considered (as far as possible) independently of any emotional aspects that it may have’.13
These are wide uses of the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’ or ‘cognitive experience’. I want now to consider something more specific: the experience one has— one could call it ‘understanding-experience’ or ‘meaning-experience’14 — when (for example) one hears someone speak in a language one understands. I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive (or semantic) experience understood in this narrow sense.

5 Definition of ‘content’, ‘internal content’, ‘external content’
I say I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive experience. I could equally well say that I’m going to argue for the reality of
cognitive-experiential content as something that exists over above sense/feeling content. It may seem unwise to introduce another term at this stage, especially one as troublesome as ‘content’, but I think it will be helpful. The content of an experience, as I take the term, is
absolutely everything that is experienced in the having of the experience, everything that is experientially registered in any way.15
It’s everything that the experience is an experience of, where ‘of’ is understood in the widest possible manner, and, in particular, in such a way that it covers everything that it is like to have the experience, experientially, in addition to whatever external objects the experience may have. So all experience, what-it’s-likeness, considered just as such, is mental content. When I look at a tree, the whole experiential being of my experience of the tree is a matter of the content of the experience, just as much as the tree is in being the thing in the world that my experience is an experience of. Suppose (temporarily and for purposes of argument) that sensation isn’t in itself intentional or representational in any way. It certainly doesn’t follow that sensation isn’t a matter of mental content. It is of course a matter of mental content: it’s ‘sensory content’. Mental content doesn’t have to be of anything other than itself in order to be mental content. All experiential what-it’s-likeness is phenomenological content, quite independently of whether or not it can be said to be intentional in any way.16
Consider a few of my philosophical ‘Twins’, my ‘Instant Twin’ my ‘Brain in a Vat Twin’, and my ‘Perfect Twin Earth Twin’.17 Our four courses of experience are very different, when it comes to the question what they are of, non-experientially speaking; they have in that sense very different contents. But there’s a no less fundamental sense in which they have identical content, simply because they are by hypothesis experientially-qualitatively identical: they’re of the same phenomenological-content type, although they are of course numerically distinct occurrences of content. May we say that they have different external content and identical internal content?Perhaps—but the internal/external content (or narrow/wide broad content) distinction is very unclear.18 This is partly because philosophers have thought too much about trees, mountains, natural kinds, and so on, when characterizing external content, and not enough about other equally concrete, equally worldly items like other people’s pains and colour experiences (or indeed their own pains and colour experiences). We can certainly distinguish between phenomenological content and non-phenomenological content, but this distinction doesn’t line up neatly with the distinction between internal and external content. In this situation of unclarity, I propose to define ‘internal content’ as follows.
Internal content is concretely occurring phenomenological content. It’s concretely occurring experiential what-it’s-likeness considered just as such. The internal content of an experience is if you like the actual intrinsic phenomenological being of that experience.
What about external content? External content is every other sort of mental content. It not only includes trees, and so on; it can also include mental states, including phenomenological states. Internal (phenomenological) content can itself be external content, for it is part of the world, and can be an object of thought. I can think about concretely occurring phenomenological content, yours or mine, for I can think about anything real.19
So we can consider internal content, as defined, both as internal content and as external content. We consider it simply as internal content when we consider it as immediately phenomenologically given. When it’s thought about (say), it’s also external content. The internal/external distinction remains in place; it’s robust as defined. For although external content can include internal content (although internal content can be external content), still the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having external content is never the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having internal content. . . . ."
. . . continues at
Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life
Best to read the whole paper at that link so that you can also read Strawson's footnotes, which are substantive.

 

[Michael Allen]

What do you mean by 'generic subjectivity'? The philosophical 'concept' of 'subjectivity' can only have become possible on the basis of humans' recognitions of their own experiential subjectivity, the subjective link to what we bring forward toward understanding of the objective pole of experience in the physical world, which is produced by the interaction and integration of subject and object as phenomenologically understood. Samuel Alexander recognized this experiential and ontological being-together of subject and object as a "compresence," a more accurate concept that points to the complexity of being as/in an actual physical world as experienced by aware and eventually conscious beings generated in the evolution of species. As always the 'concepts' we formulate are sourced in, originate within the grounds of our lived experience, grounds which we cannot express in limited and separate terms or capture in any concept or term we use in speaking together about the nature of the 'reality' in which we exist that permits and enables our constructions of cultural 'worlds' out of the materials of earth {expressed in Heidegger's "The Origin of the Artwork."

Here's a link to Samuel Alexander's original writing concerning this 'compresence' , followed by a link to another book that might be very useful to us.

{Link won't take. Just search: Samuel Alexander, Space, Time and Deity at amazon.

and also see:

Julian M. Galvez, Our Incorrigible Ontological Relations and Categories of Being

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NBB3QCV/?tag=rockoids-20

Amazon's description of this book:

"Despite its specificity and imperfections, this book should contitute a major turning point in modern philosophy. In addressing the issue of the ontological categories, its author, Julian M. Galvez, produces, what must be reasonably said to be, a series of radical novel theories in unexplored topics in the discipline, all of relevant consequence in the entirety of its branches.

In his endeavour, Mr. Galvez argues for “distinctions” as the subject matter of thought, judgment and language, which, among other things, contributes to a solution of the problems of linguistic semantics and content. He follows with an in depth study on ontological relations, topic, that jointly with the former of distinctions, has remained practically forsaken up to our day.

From these observations and conclusions, Mr. Galvez has proceeded to a very interesting reassessment of ontology and metaphysics. He shows how these ontological distinctions act both as primary premises of judgment and ultimate explanatory resources; how –though not empirically given- they enable knowledge of the world in itself, and are the very bounds of mathematics and logic, intellectually constraining the reach and nature of natural sciences.

In spite of their seeming insignificance, the findings of Mr. Galvez transcend the focus of this work, and open the door to solutions of many old problems, from issues in philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics, to questions of philosophy of mathematics or science, such as on the nature of number and time.

In particular, the theories on knowledge in it postulated deserve a wide space in epistemology, as valid arguments for an explanation of the nature, grounds, potential and limitations of cognition. Still further, his reflexions on the “relational” a priori content of the postulates of science, apply in metaphilosophy, revealing the scientific relevance of philosophical studies. This book should appeal to all those interested in being at the forefront of philosophical inquiry."

Right. I think you just answered both of our questions

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

 

[Constance]

Re the Galvez book linked above -- Galvez, Our Incorrigible Ontological Relations and Categories of Being -- I've searched in the samples available at amazon and see that he's read almost nothing in phenomenological philosophy or consciousness studies in general. From the available part of the bibliography it appears that he has read only two essays by Heidegger and there is only one citation to Husserl, a paper entitled "The Metaphysics of Hyperspace," which I have not previously heard of but will seek out. So I'm passing on purchasing this book, but one of the objectivists in our group might find support for their way of thinking in Galvez.

 

[Constance]

This article from livescience.com today carries significant information concerning 'uploading' of brains by a corporation formerly sponsoring research at MIT, which has disconnected itself from the corporation and the project.

Brain-Uploading Company Has No Immediate Plans to Upload Brains

 

[Constance]

Re the Galvez book linked above -- Galvez, Our Incorrigible Ontological Relations and Categories of Being -- I've searched in the samples available at amazon and see that he's read almost nothing in phenomenological philosophy or consciousness studies in general. From the available part of the bibliography it appears that he has read only two essays by Heidegger and there is only one citation to Husserl, a paper entitled "The Metaphysics of Hyperspace," which I have not previously heard of but will seek out. So I'm passing on purchasing this book, but one of the objectivists in our group might find support for their way of thinking in Galvez.

Here is a book on Husserl's paper or book "The Metaphysics of Hyperspace" available at amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199282579/?tag=rockoids-20

Amazon's description of the book:

"Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He explores non-theistic reasons in the first chapter and theistic ones towards the end; in the intervening sections he inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace or else informed by it, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics, and many philosophers of religion, will find much to stimulate them here."

Additional note from amazon:

"Hudson is also the author of several other books including: A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person (Cornell University Press 2001), and Kant’s Compatibilism (Cornell University Press 1994).

He (and his friend, Xerxes) invite you to their blog -- now in its eleventh year -- in which they post reflections on their weekly readings: Hud Hudson's Home Page

The blog looks to be very interesting based on the links to blogs on what he's reading listed at the live link to his home page.

 

[Constance]

The whole text of Hudson's book The Metaphysics of Hyperspace is available in pdf form at this link:

http://avalonlibrary.net/ebooks/Hud Hudson - The Metaphysics of Hyperspace.pdf

 

[Constance]

It's good to see this, and I think it is timely for us at present in this discussion:

Elon Musk Worries That AI Research Will Create an 'Immortal Dictator'

 

[Constance]

https://phys.org/news/2018-04-artificial-intelligence-likelihood-life-worlds.html#jCp

In response to the first commentator there, I offer this:

Edge: LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!

Read especially in that EDGE conference pdf the paper by Dimitar Sasselov: "Dimitar Sasselov, Planetary Astrophysicist, and Director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, has made recent discoveries of exo-planets ("Super-Earths"). He looks at new evidence to explore the question of how chemical systems become living systems."