This is also interesting. In the paper you're working on will you be developing your theory of 'reflexivity' to clarify where standard neuroscientists go wrong?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 11
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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This is also interesting. In the paper you're working on will you be developing your theory of 'reflexivity' to clarify where standard neuroscientists go wrong?
Here's a paper potentially useful for this discussion:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14697/1/Folk_Explanation15_rewrite6_FINAL EDITS2.pdf
Why One Model is Never Enough: A Defense of Explanatory Holism
Eric Hochstein
Forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy
"Abstract: Traditionally, a scientific model is thought to provide a good scientific explanation to the extent that it satisfies certain scientific goals that are thought to be constitutive of explanation (e.g. generating understanding, identifying mechanisms, making predictions, identifying high-level patterns, allowing us to control and manipulate phenomena). Problems arise when we realize that individual scientific models cannot simultaneously satisfy all the scientific goals typically associated with explanation. A given model’s ability to satisfy some goals must always come at the expense of satisfying others. This has resulted in philosophical disputes regarding which of these goals are in fact necessary for explanation, and as such which types of models can and cannot provide explanations (e.g. dynamical models, optimality models, topological models, etc). Explanatory monists argue that one goal will be explanatory in all contexts, while explanatory pluralists argue that the goal will vary based on pragmatic considerations. In this paper, I argue that such debates are misguided, and that both monists and pluralists are incorrect. Instead of any goal being given explanatory priority over others in a given context, the different goals are all deeply dependent on one another for their explanatory power. Any model that sacrifices some explanatory goals to attain others will always necessarily undermine its own explanatory power in the process. And so when forced to choose between individual scientific models, there can be no explanatory victors. Given that no model can satisfy all the goals typically associated with explanation, no one model in isolation can provide a good scientific explanation. Instead we must appeal to collections of models. Collections of models provide an explanation when they satisfy the web of interconnected goals that justify the explanatory power of one another."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/14697/1/Folk_Explanation15_rewrite6_FINAL EDITS2.pdf
Why One Model is Never Enough: A Defense of Explanatory Holism
Eric Hochstein
Forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy
"Abstract: Traditionally, a scientific model is thought to provide a good scientific explanation to the extent that it satisfies certain scientific goals that are thought to be constitutive of explanation (e.g. generating understanding, identifying mechanisms, making predictions, identifying high-level patterns, allowing us to control and manipulate phenomena). Problems arise when we realize that individual scientific models cannot simultaneously satisfy all the scientific goals typically associated with explanation. A given model’s ability to satisfy some goals must always come at the expense of satisfying others. This has resulted in philosophical disputes regarding which of these goals are in fact necessary for explanation, and as such which types of models can and cannot provide explanations (e.g. dynamical models, optimality models, topological models, etc). Explanatory monists argue that one goal will be explanatory in all contexts, while explanatory pluralists argue that the goal will vary based on pragmatic considerations. In this paper, I argue that such debates are misguided, and that both monists and pluralists are incorrect. Instead of any goal being given explanatory priority over others in a given context, the different goals are all deeply dependent on one another for their explanatory power. Any model that sacrifices some explanatory goals to attain others will always necessarily undermine its own explanatory power in the process. And so when forced to choose between individual scientific models, there can be no explanatory victors. Given that no model can satisfy all the goals typically associated with explanation, no one model in isolation can provide a good scientific explanation. Instead we must appeal to collections of models. Collections of models provide an explanation when they satisfy the web of interconnected goals that justify the explanatory power of one another."
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
The term "property" is not so clear as seems to be the norm for metaphysics philosophy etc.
Property, quality, nature, character, etc seem to overlap.
Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
"Properties (also called ‘attributes,’ ‘qualities,’ ‘features,’ ‘characteristics,’ ‘types’) are those entities that can be predicated of things or, in other words, attributed to them."
(In any case, the claim that science can/does only reveal so-called relational properties is problematic methinks. I'll need to hash it out with @smcder though.)
"What is first precipitated in the mind's conception is being. A thing is knowable because existence is pointed to. Therefore being is the proper object of mind; it is the primary intelligible as sound is the primary audible."
St. Augustine/Augustine of Hippo
I post this again because it still astonishes me that Augustine was able at such an early stage of human philosophical thought to recognize the fact that the temporality and therefore the continual change of the being of 'what-is' is the essential recognition that grounds phenomenological philosophy. Sixteen years after Augustine wrote that, Wallace Stevens wrote these lines concerning the character of what we see (and otherwise sense) in the world as not 'infection' of the world with our ideas but expression of the nature of our being within the world's being:
"What we say of it becomes a part of what it is."
Another relevant extract from Stevens's poetry, from a poem entitled "Things of August":
When was it that the particles became
The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became
Temper and belief and that differences lost
Difference and were one?"
I've continually argued, from the basis of phenomenological philosophy, that in order to understand what we are capable of thinking and understanding concerning the existential nature of our being and the being of the world in which we find ourselves thinking we must begin by investigating the actual ground out of which we are able to first experience and later reflect on the temporality of being. Of Being as the Whole within which we become conscious of our being we know nothing. Thus to attempt to define our lived/experiential being and the nature/structure of Being (Itself) in solely objective terms, as in some fashion a mechanical operandum, effaces the empirical grounds of what we see and are capable of knowing, and the recognition of the limits of that which we can come to know.
In "Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly," a poem I've posted here a number of times in the past, Stevens almost remains caught between two contrary ideas about the nature of reality, of 'what-is', but concludes the poem with a metaphor for the open-endedness and radical temporality disclosed in the human capacity for imagination, for thinking and testing reality beyond the limits of the immediately given, the immediately experienced, while avoiding the compulsion to come to rest in any final conception. The history of science itself exemplifies this openness to what is possible and to some extent discoverable, but for the most part seeks explanations such as the one Stevens describes early in the poem as "A pensive nature, a mechanical / And slightly detestable operandum." Here's the whole poem again:
Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,
Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free
From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,
In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,
Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,
What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,
And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,
A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,
Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,
That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field
Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.
A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.
The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,
The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can."
A last note: Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "the imagination is present in the first human perception."
St. Augustine/Augustine of Hippo
I post this again because it still astonishes me that Augustine was able at such an early stage of human philosophical thought to recognize the fact that the temporality and therefore the continual change of the being of 'what-is' is the essential recognition that grounds phenomenological philosophy. Sixteen years after Augustine wrote that, Wallace Stevens wrote these lines concerning the character of what we see (and otherwise sense) in the world as not 'infection' of the world with our ideas but expression of the nature of our being within the world's being:
"What we say of it becomes a part of what it is."
Another relevant extract from Stevens's poetry, from a poem entitled "Things of August":
When was it that the particles became
The whole man, that tempers and beliefs became
Temper and belief and that differences lost
Difference and were one?"
I've continually argued, from the basis of phenomenological philosophy, that in order to understand what we are capable of thinking and understanding concerning the existential nature of our being and the being of the world in which we find ourselves thinking we must begin by investigating the actual ground out of which we are able to first experience and later reflect on the temporality of being. Of Being as the Whole within which we become conscious of our being we know nothing. Thus to attempt to define our lived/experiential being and the nature/structure of Being (Itself) in solely objective terms, as in some fashion a mechanical operandum, effaces the empirical grounds of what we see and are capable of knowing, and the recognition of the limits of that which we can come to know.
In "Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly," a poem I've posted here a number of times in the past, Stevens almost remains caught between two contrary ideas about the nature of reality, of 'what-is', but concludes the poem with a metaphor for the open-endedness and radical temporality disclosed in the human capacity for imagination, for thinking and testing reality beyond the limits of the immediately given, the immediately experienced, while avoiding the compulsion to come to rest in any final conception. The history of science itself exemplifies this openness to what is possible and to some extent discoverable, but for the most part seeks explanations such as the one Stevens describes early in the poem as "A pensive nature, a mechanical / And slightly detestable operandum." Here's the whole poem again:
Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:
To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,
Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free
From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,
In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,
Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,
What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,
And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,
A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,
Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,
That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field
Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.
A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.
The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,
The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can."
A last note: Merleau-Ponty wrote in the Phenomenology of Perception that "the imagination is present in the first human perception."
smcder
Paranormal Adept
The problem with bringing consciousness in from the beginning is where do you stop? Saying the least bit of matter has mental properties is to risk claiming there is something it is like to be a quark - "proto-consciousness" or atomistic, particulate ideas of consciousness - if we just get it IN in the very beginning we are in a much better position, I think is a problem - subjectivity, point of view, intention, etc would still have to emerge or be fundamental, we end up bringing mind fully formed in from the very beginning - that is real Idealism.
Posing the hard problem as getting consciousness from "dead" matter is to pose the Impossible Problem. Strawson says we don't know that matter is dead - the matter, what little I understand of modern physics, is not the atomistic, billard balls of the 1700s - this is not to make the
QM is weird, consciousness is weird, therefore ...
argument but to strike a note of caution in thinking of matter in a simple way. And to think of consciousness in a material way -
To take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental and to discard the metaphors of physics when thinking about it, is to refuse to be "stuffy".
Posing the hard problem as getting consciousness from "dead" matter is to pose the Impossible Problem. Strawson says we don't know that matter is dead - the matter, what little I understand of modern physics, is not the atomistic, billard balls of the 1700s - this is not to make the
QM is weird, consciousness is weird, therefore ...
argument but to strike a note of caution in thinking of matter in a simple way. And to think of consciousness in a material way -
To take seriously the idea that consciousness is fundamental and to discard the metaphors of physics when thinking about it, is to refuse to be "stuffy".
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Soupie says:
Besides all the problems with weak and strong emergence, the other elephant in the room is that even if consciousness does somehow weakly or strongly emerge from the brain as a new substance or thing, and regardless if it is a material or non-material thing, we still won't be able to perceive it in-itself. Which means we will be in the exact same situation we are in now; that is, our state of the art science seems to indicate that almost all conscious experience shares a powerful nexus with a small locus of the human brain—but our phenomenology seems radically different from this small locus of brain tissue.
So some people insist that our minds therefore cannot be identical to this tissue. No, the mind must somehow emerge from this tissue (or be something else other than the brain itself). Ufology, for instance, suggests that the mind is emitted from the brain in the way that a magnet emits a magnetic field. Do we suppose that if we somehow get a magnifying glass on this field that we will see someone's thoughts, feelings, and perceptions playing like some kind of movie?
The answer is no, we would not. We cannot perceive consciousness in-itself. (We cannot perceive anything in-itself.)
Our perception of (our own) consciousness will never "look like" (our own) consciousness.
We can't get behind it.
smcder as I understand it:
The answer is no, we would not. We cannot perceive consciousness in-itself. (We cannot perceive anything in-itself.)
Our perception of (our own) consciousness will never "look like" (our own) consciousness.
We can't get behind it.
This is exactly what Strawson and Russell say we do - consciousness (the intrinsic nature of matter) is the only thing we know directly, we are behind it - or rather, we are what is behind. That is consciousness. Our perception of our own consciousness is our own consciousness.
It's still a speculation to claim that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. And I don't think Strawson's papers concerning 'conscious realism', or whatever he calls it, are persuasive that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter because he continually refers to the presence of/our presence to the things we variously sense in the world around us. I think that if Strawson were to sit down for a half-year and read the major texts of phenomenological philosophy he would revise his thinking, become a phenomenologist.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
It's still a speculation to claim that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. And I don't think Strawson's papers concerning 'conscious realism', or whatever he calls it, are persuasive that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter because he continually refers to the presence of/our presence to the things we variously sense in the world around us. I think that if Strawson were to sit down for a half-year and read the major texts of phenomenological philosophy he would revise his thinking, become a phenomenologist.
Do you mean "real materialism"? Strawson also writes on "cognitive phenomenology", both papers are available at Academia.edu.
Real Materialism 2003
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
while making the claim that mind and matter are identical, I feel that I have been able to avoid making mind stuffy. If you think I still am, please indicate in which way.
I'm very loosely and informally suggesting that the properties of interaction (causation?), differentiation, and thus structure are properties of both mind and matter.
The perception that nature is "stuffy" I argue is a byproduct (an artifact) of perception; in order to perceive, the organism has to take a "snap shot" of reality. This gives the organism the sense that nature is finite and discreet, when in reality it is not.
Perception is not the process of modeling nature as it is, but modeling nature in a way that is helpful to the organism. Modeling nature as stuffy is helpful.
Splitting hairs, I think this is what Planck was saying. We can't get behind consciousness to study it because we are consciousness.
Splitting more hairs, if we perceive our own consciousness in the technical sense of perceiving (using our sense organs and nervous system) we would perceive a body/brain.
However, we can also introspect or think about our phenomenal experiences which is different than perception.
(Although there are apparently models in which introspection is theorized to be a form of perception.)
Will need to read the 2003 paper.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
It is absolutely a speculation. However I have to note Constance that we clarified some time ago that phenomenological philosophy does not and cannot rule out/in strong emergence, nor cannot rule out monism. That is, phen phil is compatible with monism, dualism, and neutral monism.It's still a speculation to claim that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. And I don't think Strawson's papers concerning 'conscious realism', or whatever he calls it, are persuasive that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter because he continually refers to the presence of/our presence to the things we variously sense in the world around us. I think that if Strawson were to sit down for a half-year and read the major texts of phenomenological philosophy he would revise his thinking, become a phenomenologist.
So even if we assume strawson is not familiar with the major texts of phenomenology—which I actually doubt to be the case—they would not impact his real materialist position as you suggest.
Yes, we read Strawson's "Cognitive Phenomenology" here maybe a year ago and I think it's a very good paper. There are other philosophers who preceded him in exploring this topic and I remember linking their works back then. (will search out that discussion and link it) I also remember reading his "Real Materialism" and thinking at that time that he's wasn't clear. I'd be game for a discussion we might have now based on reading both of those papers again.
On the way to looking up FN 18 in "Real Materialism" I noted FN 13, which points up distinctions Strawson makes that might not be valid, are not valid on a phenomenologically informed reading:
"13 One needs to distinguish between mental and experiential phenomena because although all experiential phenomena are mental, not all mental phenomena are experiential, on the ordinary view of things. Certain
dispositional states—beliefs, preferences, and so on—are generally acknowledged to be mental phenomena although they have no experiential character (there are also powerful reasons for saying that there are
occurrent mental phenomena that are non-experiential)."
Valley Glosa
Shaune Bornholdt
". . . the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament."
—Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”
Come now, to this dry creek-bed where the shale
lay layered, sparkling, oozing—wet slick slabs,
thick, big enough to make a poor man’s flagstone,
the “terrace” that they bragged about, those stones
that slipped in rain, and rocked when stepped on, cracks
revealing insect trails. Now, conjure ghosts:
Parents hauling those rocks uphill, their hands
setting each down just so in patterned pride.
Can words embody? How abstract, that boast!—
“The theory of description matters most.”
It’s concrete change that’s sapped this soil. No fish,
no salamanders. Worms encased in clay
react to touch; spring freshets might bring life,
but up the road—macadam now—the barn
will go for boards. The silo sags, doors gape,
and birds fly out and in. Can one suppose
their nests will last the season? In the meadow:
roads, driveways, heaps of lumber, basements dug.
Description tries to clothe one form it knows
it is the theory of, the word for those
who dream an attic windowsill, cupped chin,
light slanting on that terrace far below,
new-made; the smells of supper, and the bell
a call to grace. Nostalgia of long walks,
child-hand on mother’s skirt, and each thing named
grows real—the fiddlehead ferns that bowed and curled
grow green in the green woods, the bluets blue,
and fat bees creep and dip in yellow clover,
gifts to a child for whom a world unfurled,
for whom the word is the making of the world.
Long before that time, here in my valley—
great Lehigh, fecund, quiet in huge night—
the Poet’s candle that conversed the stars
burned: flame, then image. But the wind blew twice.
New children, from your tract homes rising here,
will you come out before all light is spent,
speak wizened stars into new infancy,
and summon reddening fruit to radiance?
Stanza my stone. Describe into intent
the buzzing world and lisping firmament."
Shaune Bornholdt
". . . the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament."
—Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place”
Come now, to this dry creek-bed where the shale
lay layered, sparkling, oozing—wet slick slabs,
thick, big enough to make a poor man’s flagstone,
the “terrace” that they bragged about, those stones
that slipped in rain, and rocked when stepped on, cracks
revealing insect trails. Now, conjure ghosts:
Parents hauling those rocks uphill, their hands
setting each down just so in patterned pride.
Can words embody? How abstract, that boast!—
“The theory of description matters most.”
It’s concrete change that’s sapped this soil. No fish,
no salamanders. Worms encased in clay
react to touch; spring freshets might bring life,
but up the road—macadam now—the barn
will go for boards. The silo sags, doors gape,
and birds fly out and in. Can one suppose
their nests will last the season? In the meadow:
roads, driveways, heaps of lumber, basements dug.
Description tries to clothe one form it knows
it is the theory of, the word for those
who dream an attic windowsill, cupped chin,
light slanting on that terrace far below,
new-made; the smells of supper, and the bell
a call to grace. Nostalgia of long walks,
child-hand on mother’s skirt, and each thing named
grows real—the fiddlehead ferns that bowed and curled
grow green in the green woods, the bluets blue,
and fat bees creep and dip in yellow clover,
gifts to a child for whom a world unfurled,
for whom the word is the making of the world.
Long before that time, here in my valley—
great Lehigh, fecund, quiet in huge night—
the Poet’s candle that conversed the stars
burned: flame, then image. But the wind blew twice.
New children, from your tract homes rising here,
will you come out before all light is spent,
speak wizened stars into new infancy,
and summon reddening fruit to radiance?
Stanza my stone. Describe into intent
the buzzing world and lisping firmament."
Set this poem aside for the moment; I just wanted to get it copied and pasted here for discussion a little later on. Though it wouldn't hurt to read it now and then again later. It is a poem written in a kind of dialogue with Stevens concerning what he wrote in "Description without Place," at a time when he was reflecting on the way in which language itself distances cannot capture the thing, "the fluid thing", as and in the way that we experience. That was before the "linguistic turn" in analytical philosophy in the mid-20th century, the premises of which he anticipated and opposed.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
"Husserl would have had great difficulty in understanding why anyone should feel a need to write a paper like this one."
Here another extract from that point in the paper:
"I don’t mean that all aspects of what is going on, in the case of conscious experience, can be described by current physics, or some non-revolutionary extension of it. Such a view amounts to radical ‘eliminativism’ with respect to consciousness,14 and is mad. My claim is different. It is that the experiential (considered just
as such)15 —the feature of reality we have to do with when we consider experiences specifically and solely in respect of the experiential character they have for those who have them as they have them—that ‘just is’ is physical. No one who disagrees with this is a remotely realistic materialist."
We need to explore exactly what Strawson is thinking when he refers to "the experiential (considered just
as such)15."
A bit further on Strawson gives us this:
"4 Materialism further defined
Materialism, then, is the view that every real concrete phenomenon is physical in every respect, but more needs to be said, for experiential phenomena—together with the subject of experience, assuming that that is something extra—are the only real, concrete phenomena that we can know with certainty to exist,16 and as it stands this definition of materialism doesn’t even rule out ‘idealism’—the view that mental phenomena are the only real phenomena and have no non-mental being—from qualifying as a form of materialism! There’s a sense in which this consequence of the definition is salutary (see e.g. §§14–15 below), but it may nonetheless seem silly to call an idealist view ‘materialism’. Russell is right to say that ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’ (1912: 19), but it still seems terminologically reasonable to take materialism to be committed to the existence of non-experiential being in the universe, in addition to experiential being, and I shall do so in what follows. In fact I think the most plausible version of materialism is panpsychist or panexperientialist materialism (see Strawson 1994: 62, and the quotation from Eddington on p. 000 below), in which case we should override this terminological preference. But that is a subject for a different paper. . . ."
"4 Materialism further defined
Materialism, then, is the view that every real concrete phenomenon is physical in every respect, but more needs to be said, for experiential phenomena—together with the subject of experience, assuming that that is something extra—are the only real, concrete phenomena that we can know with certainty to exist,16 and as it stands this definition of materialism doesn’t even rule out ‘idealism’—the view that mental phenomena are the only real phenomena and have no non-mental being—from qualifying as a form of materialism! There’s a sense in which this consequence of the definition is salutary (see e.g. §§14–15 below), but it may nonetheless seem silly to call an idealist view ‘materialism’. Russell is right to say that ‘the truth about physical objects must be strange’ (1912: 19), but it still seems terminologically reasonable to take materialism to be committed to the existence of non-experiential being in the universe, in addition to experiential being, and I shall do so in what follows. In fact I think the most plausible version of materialism is panpsychist or panexperientialist materialism (see Strawson 1994: 62, and the quotation from Eddington on p. 000 below), in which case we should override this terminological preference. But that is a subject for a different paper. . . ."
Let's also bring into this discussion Chalmers's 'panprotopsychism'.
http://newdualism.org/papers/D.Chalmers/Chalmers-2013_ALP.pdf
smcder
Paranormal Adept
The perception that nature is "stuffy" I argue is a byproduct (an artifact) of perception; in order to perceive, the organism has to take a "snap shot" of reality. This gives the organism the sense that nature is finite and discreet, when in reality it is not.
I think all of that is couched in a historical/cultural/linguistic context ... Western philosophy was affected by the revolutions in physics and our perception/cognition is heavily affected by that. What I am suggesting is to see if we can step outside of stuffy assumptions/images and language - can we shift our perception? What is it like to take the mental as fundamental seriously?
- Status