Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 13

[smcder]

In terms of phenomenology, its insights are

Yes, but how does our ( lower case ) phenomenology relate to ( upper case ) reality.

I understand that we can introspect all day and discover some interesting things. As well as experiment with psychedelics and observe the “expanding” mind.

But at the end of the day, what is behind all this? What is behind this funhouse we call conscious experience, and how does it relate to this objective reality we infer?

see next comment.

• "I understand that we can introspect all day and discover some interesting things." Soupie *YAWNS*
• "As well as experiment with psychedelics and observe the “expanding” mind. Soupie *YAWNS*

 

[smcder]

Yes, but how does our ( lower case ) phenomenology relate to ( upper case ) reality.

I understand that we can introspect all day and discover some interesting things. As well as experiment with psychedelics and observe the “expanding” mind.

But at the end of the day, what is behind all this? What is behind this funhouse we call conscious experience, and how does it relate to this objective reality we infer?

see next comment.

Is there something it is like to solve the hard problem?
Is there something it is like to be behind the funhouse?
What is behind the funhouse's behind?

 

[Constance]

I've seen the Matrix - and a couple of sequels. One way to think about it - is how much philosophy can you read in a couple of hours? Or how much can you learn about philosophy from the first lecture of your first philosophy class in college? Not much.

Now, take out all the time for the movie to do everything else it does ... and how much philosophy could be conveyed? Even allowing for a picture to be worth a thousand words. In terms of its being a great movie ... I wouldn't push anything off the top 100 lists to make room for it and strictly in terms of being a film you wouldn't be at a loss if you'd never seen compared to say something by Kurosawa or Tarkovsky or Bergman. Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are both ostensibly science fiction films and both are great films. The Matrix, however, is an influential film.

Agreed on all counts. I went back to focus on the sprichtwort you used that we've all heard a hundred times and even spoken ourselves, even if we don't believe it's valid -- i.e., that 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. At the moment it called my attention to how surrounded we are in our time by images, flashed in sequences across movie, television, and computer screens every day, and the influence they have, the assumed weight they have, if we take them at face value without analyzing the ways in which they are constructed and in which our responses are intended to be shaped. The most vivid example I've seen today is the Trump campaign's new image of the heads carved on Mt. Rushmore with the image of Trump's face overlaid ahead of Washington's and larger than Washington's face. This image will confirm his adoring followers' view of him while for most of us our response will be revulsion at the manipulation and intended coercion involved in its construction. Film studies and media studies in general have developed the critical distance and analyses needed to identify these manipulations, but I don't think all that work has trickled down to inform unsuspecting viewers of the extent to which they read and accept meaning in representations that are intended to mislead them. These are subjects and devices that should be taught in schools but normally aren't. Thus we as a society (I can hardly say a 'culture') and societies like our own elsewhere are flooded daily by memes rather than rational discourse about the world we are living in.

I may not be saying this very well, but I think you get the point. I or anyone else might easily deconstruct in a thousand words the inherent manipulation and coercion involved in the new Trump image against Mr. Rushmore. But when it comes to the interpretation and necessary accumulation of interpretations that can open up and realize the meanings embedded in a painting, or a work of literary or cinematic art, far more than a thousand words are required by many interpreters to uncover the complexity of the work. I recently linked Merleau-Ponty's "Eye and Mind" and recommend it as an example of what paintings can and have contributed to our ability to understand the nature of 'reality'. I will find and watch the Tarkovsky films you mention.

Better still, watch The Animatrix a series of short animated films that explore the universe of The Matrix.

And I will do that first.

 

[smcder]

Agreed on all counts. I went back to focus on the sprichtwort you used that we've all heard a hundred times and even spoken ourselves, even if we don't believe it's valid -- i.e., that 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. At the moment it called my attention to how surrounded we are in our time by images, flashed in sequences across movie, television, and computer screens every day, and the influence they have, the assumed weight they have, if we take them at face value without analyzing the ways in which they are constructed and in which our responses are intended to be shaped. The most vivid example I've seen today is the Trump campaign's new image of the heads carved on Mt. Rushmore with the image of Trump's face overlaid ahead of Washington's and larger than Washington's face. This image will confirm his adoring followers' view of him while for most of us our response will be revulsion at the manipulation and intended coercion involved in its construction. Film studies and media studies in general have developed the critical distance and analyses needed to identify these manipulations, but I don't think all that work has trickled down to inform unsuspecting viewers of the extent to which they read and accept meaning in representations that are intended to mislead them. These are subjects and devices that should be taught in schools but normally aren't. Thus we as a society (I can hardly say a 'culture') and societies like our own elsewhere are flooded daily by memes rather than rational discourse about the world we are living in.

I may not be saying this very well, but I think you get the point. I or anyone else might easily deconstruct in a thousand words the inherent manipulation and coercion involved in the new Trump image against Mr. Rushmore. But when it comes to the interpretation and necessary accumulation of interpretations that can open up and realize the meanings embedded in a painting, or a work of literary or cinematic art, far more than a thousand words are required by many interpreters to uncover the complexity of the work. I recently linked Merleau-Ponty's "Eye and Mind" and recommend it as an example of what paintings can and have contributed to our ability to understand the nature of 'reality'. I will find and watch the Tarkovsky films you mention.



And I will do that first.

I would watch Tarvosky first! ;-) He was an extraordinary filmmaker, working behind the iron curtain and around the censors. He could be compared with Kubrick in terms of the care with which he composed his images. Sculpting in time - he called it. There should be Criterion collection releases readily available - they have good additional resources on these disks and there I believe three short films also available, student films.

 

[Constance]

OK, I will do that. I don't currently have a DVD player but I can order the disks and watch the films on my computer. I don't yet know anything about Tarkovsky but I have long admired Eastern European films and thinkers from Eastern Europe.

 

[Constance]

Is there something it is like to solve the hard problem?

Is there something it is like to be behind the funhouse?

What is behind the funhouse's behind?

Excellent questions. Meaning is felt as much as it is thought, and it is from what we feel in our embodied conscious existence that we begin to think our thoughts. Let's pursue these questions. Let me start with the first: "Is there something it is like to solve the hard problem?"

I think that rather than hoping for Chalmers or McGinn or more likely Max Velmans to do that for us one day {and perhaps he already has; must get back to him}, we need to help ourselves by diving into the phenomenology of our own experience, paying attention to its carnal nature, the ways in which light and color strike our eyes and appeal to us or repel us; the ways in which sound touches us physically, in the tangible senses of an acoustic guitarist's fingers striking, stroking, or touching the strings of his instrument (we even hear the sounds of that touch itself in the resistance given by the strings, beneath the notes and chords struck, their tones and colors), and beyond that we feel the harmonic resonances stirred up by the movements and transitions of chords against chords, changes of keys, and satisfying resolutions of tensions aroused in the music that are so thick that we can almost taste them. I have in mind Djavan's performances and will link one in a minute to test for yourself. Merleau-Ponty's late works describe the 'flesh' of the world as of ourselves as part of the tangible, sensable, and sensible environments in which we draw our breath and live our lives and love what we love. Try this performance, more than one hearing, to enable you to concentrate on what reaches you from his guitar, not only his voice:

{I hope i've set the auto-play button correctly so that it's easy to replay the music several times}

 

[Randall]

How many vague gestures toward defensible theories have emerged in the sources we've been reading lately; where do they agree and disagree; and how do they persuade us that their hypotheses are valid and demonstrable?

Exactly.

Almost equally fascinating as the 'matrix' idea has been in popular culture in our time is the decades-long intrigue exercised in the subject of 'mind control' in various forms supposed to have been achieved by secret agencies seeking to manipulate individuals and even whole societies. You seem to be suggesting that 'alternate signals' in 'The Matrix' produce illusions that block natural consciousness in its inhabitants, but that they can recognize the situation and escape it. If so, the film seems to me to present a cautionary tale concerning the over-technologization of our society and culture. Or perhaps another illustration, like Plato's cave, of how easily people can be brain-washed by restricting what they are able to sense and see in and of their actual environing world.

You are on the right track. The film definitely has social commentary built into its symbolism.

I can get a vague sense of what you're saying here, but it seems to amount to saying that we living creatures on this planet have been fitted by evolution and adaptation to physically survive as best possible in the natural environments we exist in.

In a general sense I would say that you have that correct. I'm not so sure about the "as best as possible" part. But generally speaking, survival can provide an answer to the "why" question of comsciousness.

Are you also saying that our natural dispensations of awareness, consciousness, and mind might be somehow 'filtered' in our neurons, neural nets, and brains to produce false impressions of what-is?

I guess that depends on what we mean by "false impressions". Because you haven't seen The Matrix, it might benefit you to watch it as it has been the focus of many a philosophical discussion. It's become a form of shorthand for these concepts.

I would have thought that most of us would like the panpsychism of Christian de Quency, which we referred to around the end of Part 12 and into Part 13. The direction of your thought in this post reminds of his attempt to locate and identify physical fields, forces, and processes in the quantum substrate and their merging into the world as 'classically' described in physics as affecting us at subtle and deeper levels of our physical and mental experiences.

The difference between panpsychism and the NFH is that unlike panpsychism, consciousness isn't mapped onto objects, and therefore we don't run into problems where atoms and particles might be presumed to possess consciousness. Nor do we run into the combination problem where a whole bunch of independent consciousnesses in individual atoms, molecules, cells, and so on, combine to form a single new consciousness in us.

Instead the NFH proposes a situation where there is another layer in the basic structure of reality that when filtered by brains like ours results in the experience of consciousness. It might be considered analogous to how a prism filters light into a rainbow. The colors are there all along, but not experienced until the appropriate filter is exposed to the light.

Which video did I post that you cannot link?

I think it was a music video. It's in this post: Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 13

 

[Randall]

I've seen the Matrix - I wouldn't push anything off the top 100 lists to make room for it ...

You obviously didn't take the red pill. The Matrix is in a number of top 100 or higher lists, and those it's not in are assembled by bozos who would actually include ET The Extraterrestrial in it instead. Consider this analysis ...

Why The Matrix may be the Best Movie Ever !

Just for fun of course ​

 

[Soupie]

I've seen the Matrix - and a couple of sequels. One way to think about it - is how much philosophy can you read in a couple of hours? Or how much can you learn about philosophy from the first lecture of your first philosophy class in college? Not much.

Now, take out all the time for the movie to do everything else it does ... and how much philosophy could be conveyed? Even allowing for a picture to be worth a thousand words. In terms of its being a great movie ... I wouldn't push anything off the top 100 lists to make room for it and strictly in terms of being a film you wouldn't be at a loss if you'd never seen compared to say something by Kurosawa or Tarkovsky or Bergman. Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker are both ostensibly science fiction films and both are great films. The Matrix, however, is an influential film.

Better still, watch The Animatrix a series of short animated films that explore the universe of The Matrix.

Just for the record the matrix has nothing to do with the “perspectival nature” of the mbp. ( And I agree that the animatrix is worthwhile though I haven’t watched it in a coon’s age. )

 

[smcder]

Just for the record the matrix has nothing to do with the “perspectival nature” of the mbp. ( And I agree that the animatrix is worthwhile though I haven’t watched it in a coon’s age. )

So I'm actually drawing racoons now. My wife's family have fun animal themes for gifts...and she recently got hers, with her birthday coming up, I've got to make her something raccoon related!

 

[smcder]

You obviously didn't take the red pill. The Matrix is in a number of top 100 or higher lists, and those it's not in are assembled by bozos who would actually include ET The Extraterrestrial in it instead. Consider this analysis ...

Why The Matrix may be the Best Movie Ever !

Just for fun of course ​

Yeah I know those guys. And by "or higher" I assume you mean lower number - about 20 to be exact because that's where they run out of things to count... ;-)

Seriously, it's not a bad film but we can say something about what makes a film great (as film) - if The Matrix stands the test of time, it will be for its content, but again, how much can you put into a two hour film? If you can wake someone up to philosophy that's good - but the film itself doesn't point such a viewer in any particular direction (except to the sequels). Although a philosophical cottage industry did spring up around the films.

 

[Constance]

Just for the record the matrix has nothing to do with the “perspectival nature” of the mbp. ( And I agree that the animatrix is worthwhile though I haven’t watched it in a coon’s age. )

I remember your speaking recently of 'the perspectival nature of the mbp. Would you link me back to where you spoke about, or else restate the idea here? Thanks.

 

[Constance]

So I'm actually drawing racoons now. My wife's family have fun animal themes for gifts...and she recently got hers, with her birthday coming up, I've got to make her something raccoon related!

Can you share your drawings here? I find racoons to be adorable..

 

[Constance]

Yeah I know those guys. And by "or higher" I assume you mean lower number - about 20 to be exact because that's where they run out of things to count... ;-)

Seriously, it's not a bad film but we can say something about what makes a film great (as film) - if The Matrix stands the test of time, it will be for its content, but again, how much can you put into a two hour film? If you can wake someone up to philosophy that's good - but the film itself doesn't point such a viewer in any particular direction (except to the sequels). Although a philosophical cottage industry did spring up around the films.

Question is: how much of this philosophical discussion has to be read, and where can I find the best of it?

ETA, I've just read a Guardian review of the Tarkovsky films and am somewhat alarmed by what the reviewer refers to as 'psychological horror'. I'm in general and have always been averse to horror, and psychological horror might not keep me watching. Anyway, I think I've found a link where I can view both of the films online, so I'll try both of them and escape from the one depicting psychological horror if necessary. The Guardian review:

I've never seen … Solaris

I mean, what can I learn from depictions of psychological horror if I'm perfectly comfortable in my sanity? Though I gather the point of the psychological horror and new experiences (mental ones?) with those from the past well-lost on the part of the protagonist is to suggest that wherever in space these encounters take place there is something that sucks up the memories of visitors and carries them into the assumed present where they undo the victim. It's not my favorite kind of speculation. I'll stop whinging now.

 

[smcder]

The mind and the body are constituted of the same reality ( substance, process, substrate, whatever ). We don’t know the fundamental nature of that reality.

The reason there appears to be a mismatch between mind and body ( the mbp ) is due to the perspectival nature of the mbp. Not just a subjective perspective on reality, but specifically a subjective perspective on the process constituting the subjective perspective itself.

I believe that related problems such as the combination problem, structural mismatch, mental causation, and overdetermination are or can either be solved or resolved on this view.

I suppose this is a proclamation. However I’m not trying to convert anyone. Ive just been trying to get a grip on the mbp for myself.

What I mean by philosophy by proclamation is simply asserting something to be so (we can do this in an argument when we say "assume this" and then go on to show something that then strengthens why we should assume that ... but proclamations don't do this) and this is usually in service to describing rather than solving a problem.

"The mind and the body are constituted of the same reality ( substance, process, substrate, whatever ). We don’t know the fundamental nature of that reality."

That's a whole smorgasbord of options - eliminating, I think, only the more dualistic of dualisms.

"The reason there appears to be a mismatch between mind and body ( the mbp ) is due to the perspectival nature of the mbp. Not just a subjective perspective on reality, but specifically a subjective perspective on the process constituting the subjective perspective itself."

I'm not sure what is new here ... this is one of Nagel's points after all, "a subjective perspective on the process constituting the subjective perspective itself" so a subjective perspective is just subjectivity and the process constituting the subjective perspective itself is (the process of) phenomenal consciousness...so we have "Not just a subjective view on reality but specifically a subjective view on the process of phenomenal consciousness." (and I have to assume the process of phenomenal consciousness is included in reality ... so the "not just" isn't needed) so that boils down to:

"The reason there appears to be a mismatch between mind and body is due to subjectivity."

Now, if that is offered as an answer, my response would be to ask you to phrase the mind body problem without that "answer" as a fundamental part. I think what you have done is rephrase it or describe rather than solve the problem.

 

[smcder]

Question is: how much of this philosophical discussion has to be read, and where can I find the best of it?

ETA, I've just read a Guardian review of the Tarkovsky films and am somewhat alarmed by what the reviewer refers to as 'psychological horror'. I'm in general and have always been averse to horror, and psychological horror might not keep me watching. Anyway, I think I've found a link where I can view both of the films online, so I'll try both of them and escape from the one depicting psychological horror if necessary. The Guardian review:

I've never seen … Solaris

I mean, what can I learn from depictions of psychological horror if I'm perfectly comfortable in my sanity? Though I gather the point of the psychological horror and new experiences (mental ones?) with those from the past well-lost on the part of the protagonist is to suggest that wherever in space these encounters take place there is something that sucks up the memories of visitors and carries them into the assumed present where they undo the victim. It's not my favorite kind of speculation. I'll stop whinging now.

Yes - that's the gist of it - Stanislaw Lem wrote the story about a sentient planet that mirrors back memories perhaps in an attempt to communicate with the astronauts. But the film is very much Tarvosky's and has much more to do with his faith than with science fiction, as does Stalker which was very loosely based on Roadside Picnic. I wouldn't describe it as horror - but it would be the only film that might contain such unnerving elements, the horror is more to do with the characters being haunted by their relationships. I think one of the "ghosts" (planet created) is a suicide
after a relationship ended with one of the astronauts. I don't remember any particular gruesomeness or violence, but there could be.

https://www.reddit.com/r/criterion/comments/bttyyv

 

[smcder]

This is a useful guide:

- IMDb

on IMDb: Movies, TV, Celebs, and more...

www.imdb.com

Remember too, that he would have had to watch out for the Russian censors ... though I think on his own devices, Tarkovsky wouldn't have put much in terms of sex, violence, or especially cursing in his films. Solaris is a PG-13 roughly.

 

[smcder]

Just for the record the matrix has nothing to do with the “perspectival nature” of the mbp. ( And I agree that the animatrix is worthwhile though I haven’t watched it in a coon’s age. )

By the way, I haven't heard the phrase "a coon's age" in ... a coon's age!

 

[smcder]

Can you share your drawings here? I find racoons to be adorable..

Sure, let me practice a bit more!

 

[Randall]

If you can wake someone up to philosophy that's good - but the film itself doesn't point such a viewer in any particular direction (except to the sequels). Although a philosophical cottage industry did spring up around the films.

The film doesn't advertise philosophy books, but it did "point" me to the books below, and interestingly, the Ultimate Matrix Collection includes interviews with a number of philosophers, including one of our favorites, David Chalmers.



https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00007FYQX/?tag=rockoids-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195181077/?tag=rockoids-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812695720/?tag=rockoids-20
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1405125241/?tag=rockoids-20

Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation was also in the actual movie, and required reading for the cast. However Baudrillard may have been ticked off because in the film, his book was hollowed out to store Neo's stash of white hat software. Or maybe it's just because Baudrillard is French ?. Whatever the reason, he trashed the film, and even declined a consulting position for the sequels.