Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
Monster?
-
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
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smcder
Guest
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound.
Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift:
very little
philosophy
is now carried out
in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy.
This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become axiomatic, in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:
Look for the major biopic out from Tristar/Lionsgate films starring Bruce Willis as Immanuel Kant and, in a star turn, Sascha Baron-Cohen as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift:
very little
philosophy
is now carried out
in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy.
This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become axiomatic, in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:
- Kant's Copernican revolution, that placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of inquiry into our knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they are independently of us or of how they are for us;
- His invention of critical philosophy, that is of the notion of being able to discover and systematically explore possible inherent limits to our ability to know through philosophical reasoning
- His creation of the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience" – that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions
- His theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind ... i.e. "the mind is green"
- His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity
- His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means
Look for the major biopic out from Tristar/Lionsgate films starring Bruce Willis as Immanuel Kant and, in a star turn, Sascha Baron-Cohen as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
S
smcder
Guest
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. - Fred Nietzsche
I like to do a little drawing/cartooning ... this one has a great looking alien ...
S
smcder
Guest
S
smcder
Guest
Lewis White Beck claimed that the chief interest of the Prolegomena to the student of philosophy is "the way in which it goes beyond and against the views of contemporary positivism."
(Positivism is the philosophy of science that information derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge and that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in this derived knowledge.)
He wrote: "The Prolegomena is, moreover, the best of all introductions to that vast and obscure masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason. … It has an exemplary lucidity and wit, making it unique among Kant's greater works and uniquely suitable as a textbook of the Kantian philosophy."
Cassirer asserted that "the Prolegomena inaugurates a new form of truly philosophical popularity, unrivaled for clarity and keenness."
Schopenhauer in 1819, declared that the Prolegomena was "the finest and most comprehensible of Kant's principal works, which is far too little read, for it immensely facilitates the study of his philosophy."
(Positivism is the philosophy of science that information derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge and that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in this derived knowledge.)
He wrote: "The Prolegomena is, moreover, the best of all introductions to that vast and obscure masterpiece, the Critique of Pure Reason. … It has an exemplary lucidity and wit, making it unique among Kant's greater works and uniquely suitable as a textbook of the Kantian philosophy."
Cassirer asserted that "the Prolegomena inaugurates a new form of truly philosophical popularity, unrivaled for clarity and keenness."
Schopenhauer in 1819, declared that the Prolegomena was "the finest and most comprehensible of Kant's principal works, which is far too little read, for it immensely facilitates the study of his philosophy."
S
smcder
Guest
Article on neo-Kantianism from SEP:
Neo-Kantianism
By its broadest definition, the term ‘Neo-Kantianism’ names any thinker after Kant who both engages substantively with the basic ramifications of his transcendental idealism and casts their own project at least roughly within his terminological framework. In this sense, thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, Strawson, Kuhn, Sellers, Nancy, Korsgaard, and Friedman could loosely be considered Neo-Kantian. More specifically, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to two multifaceted and internally-differentiated trends of thinking in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Centuries: the Marburg School and what is usually called either the Baden School or the Southwest School. The most prominent representatives of the former movement are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer. Among the latter movement are Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Several other noteworthy thinkers are associated with the movement as well.
Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in German universities from the 1870's until the First World War. Its popularity declined rapidly thereafter even though its influences can be found on both sides of the Continental/Analytic divide throughout the twentieth century. Sometimes unfairly cast as narrowly epistemological, Neo-Kantianism covered a broad range of themes, from logic to the philosophy of history, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, religion, and culture. Since then there has been a relatively small but philosophically serious effort to reinvigorate further historical study and programmatic advancement of this often neglected philosophy.
Table of Contents
1. Proto Neo-Kantians
During the first half of the Nineteenth-Century, Kant had become something of a relic. This is not to say that major thinkers were not strongly influenced by Kantian philosophy. Indeed there are clear traces in the literature of the Weimar Classicists, in the historiography of Bartold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), in Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language (1767-1835), and in Johannes Peter Müller's (1801-1858) physiology. Figures like Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), the Fries-influenced Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829-1897), the Frenchman Charles Renouvier (1815-1903), the evangelical theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), and the great historian of philosophy Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-1871), made calls to heed Kant’s warning about transgressing the bounds of possible experience. However, there was neither a systematic nor programmatic school of Kantian thought in Germany for more than sixty years after Kant's death in 1804.
The first published use of the term 'Neo-Kantianer' appeared in 1862, in a polemical review of Eduard Zeller by the Hegelian Karl Ludwig Michelet. But it was Otto Liebmann’s (1840-1912) Kant und die Epigonen (1865) that most indelibly heralds the rise of a new movement. Here Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Hegel (1770-1831), and Schelling (1775-1854), whose idealist followers held sway in German philosophy departments during the early decades of the 19th Century, are chided for taking over only Kant’s system-building, and for doing so only in a superficial way. They sought to create the world from scratch, as it were, by finding new, more-fundamental first principles upon which to create a stronghold of interlocking propositions, one following necessarily from its predecessor. Insofar as those principles were generated from reflection rather than experience, however, the ‘descendants’ would effectively embrace Kant’s idealism at the expense of his empirical realism. The steep decline of Hegelianism a generation later opened a vacuum which was to be filled by the counter-movement of scientific materialism, represented by figures like Karl Vogt (1817-1895), Heinrich Czolbe (1819-1873), and Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899). By reducing speculative philosophy to a system of naturalistic observation consistent with their realism, the materialists utilized a commonsense terminology that reopened philosophical inquiry for those uninitiated in idealist dialectics. Despite their successes in the realm of the natural sciences, the materialists were accused of avoiding serious philosophical problems rather than solving them. This was especially true about matters of consciousness and experience, which the materialists were inclined to treat unproblematically as ‘given’. Against the failings of both the idealists and the materialists, Liebmann could only repeatedly call, “Zurück zu Kant!” . . .
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94)outstripped even the scientific credentials of the materialists, combining his experimental research with a genuine philosophical sophistication and historical sensitivity. His advances in physiology, ophthalmology, audiology, electro- and thermo-dynamics duly earned him an honored place among the great German scientists. His Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847) ranks only behind The Origin of Species as the most influential scientific treatise of the Nineteenth-Century, even though its principle claim might have been an unattributed adoption of the precedent theories by Julius Robert von Mayer (1814-1878) and James Joule (1818-1889). His major philosophical contribution was an attempt to ground Kant’s theoretical division between phenomena and noumena within empirically verifiable sense physiognomy. In place of the materialist’s faith in sense perception as a copy of reality and in advance of Kant’s general ignorance about the neurological conditions of experience, Helmholtz noted that when we see or hear something outside us there is a complicated process of neural stimulation. Experience is neither a direct projection of the perceived object onto our sense organs nor merely a conjunction of concept and sensuous intuition, but an unconscious process of symbolic inferences by which neural stimulations are made intelligible to the human mind.
The physical processes of the brain are a safer starting point, a scientifically-verifiable ground on which to explain the a priori necessity of experience, than Kant’s supra-naturalistic deduction of conceptual architectonics. Yet two key Kantian consequences are only strengthened thereby. First, experience is revealed to be nothing immediate, but a demonstrably discursive process wherein the material affect of the senses is transformed by subjective factors. Second, any inferences that can possibly be drawn about the world outside the subject must reckon with this subjective side, thereby reasserting the privileged position of epistemology above ontology. Helmholtz and the materialists both thought that Newtonian science was the best explanation of the world; but Helmholtz realized that science must take account of what Kant had claimed of it: science is the proscription of what can be demonstrated within the limits of possible experience rather than an articulation about objects in-themselves. Empirical physiognomy would more precisely proscribe those limits than purely conceptual transcendental philosophy.
Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) was, at least in the Nineteenth-Century, more widely recognized as a theorist of pedagogy and advocate of Marxism in the Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereinethan as a forerunner to Neo-Kantianism. But his influence on the Marburg school, though brief, was incisive. He took his professorship at Marburg in 1872, one year before Cohen completed his Habilitationschrift there. Lange worked with Cohen for only three years before his untimely death in 1875.
Much of Lange’s philosophy was conceived before his time in Marburg. As Privatdozent at Bonn, Lange attended Helmholtz’s lectures on the physiology of the senses, and later came to agree that the best way to move philosophy along was by combining the general Kantian insights with a more firmly founded neuro-physiology. In his masterpiece, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866), Lange argues that materialism is at once the best explanation of phenomena, yet quite naïve in its presumptive inference from experience to the world outside us. The argument is again taken from the progress of the physiological sciences, with Lange providing a number of experiments that reveal experience to be an aggregate construction of neural processes.
Where he progresses beyond Helmholtz is his recognition that the physiognomic processes themselves must, like every other object of experience, be understood as a product of a subject’s particular constitution. Even while denying the given-ness of sense data, Helmholtz had too often presumed to understand the processes of sensation on the basis of a non-problematic empirical realism. That is, even while Helmholtz viewed knowledge of empirical objects as an aggregate of sense physiognomy, he never sufficiently reflected on the conditions for the experience of that very sense physiognomy. So even while visual experience is regarded as derivative from the physiognomy of the eyes, optic nerves, and brain, how each of these function is considered unproblematically given to empirical experience. For Lange, we cannot so confidently infer that our experience of physiognomic processes corresponds to what is really the case outside our experience of them—that the eyes or ears actually do work as we observe them to—since the argument by which that conclusion is reached is itself physiological. Neither the senses, nor the brain, nor the empirically observable neural processes between them permit the inference that any of these is the causal grounds of our experience of them. . . .
Neo-Kantianism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Neo-Kantianism
By its broadest definition, the term ‘Neo-Kantianism’ names any thinker after Kant who both engages substantively with the basic ramifications of his transcendental idealism and casts their own project at least roughly within his terminological framework. In this sense, thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, Strawson, Kuhn, Sellers, Nancy, Korsgaard, and Friedman could loosely be considered Neo-Kantian. More specifically, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to two multifaceted and internally-differentiated trends of thinking in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Centuries: the Marburg School and what is usually called either the Baden School or the Southwest School. The most prominent representatives of the former movement are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer. Among the latter movement are Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Several other noteworthy thinkers are associated with the movement as well.
Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in German universities from the 1870's until the First World War. Its popularity declined rapidly thereafter even though its influences can be found on both sides of the Continental/Analytic divide throughout the twentieth century. Sometimes unfairly cast as narrowly epistemological, Neo-Kantianism covered a broad range of themes, from logic to the philosophy of history, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, religion, and culture. Since then there has been a relatively small but philosophically serious effort to reinvigorate further historical study and programmatic advancement of this often neglected philosophy.
Table of Contents
1. Proto Neo-Kantians
During the first half of the Nineteenth-Century, Kant had become something of a relic. This is not to say that major thinkers were not strongly influenced by Kantian philosophy. Indeed there are clear traces in the literature of the Weimar Classicists, in the historiography of Bartold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), in Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language (1767-1835), and in Johannes Peter Müller's (1801-1858) physiology. Figures like Schleiermacher (1768-1834), Immanuel Hermann Fichte (1796-1879), Friedrich Eduard Beneke (1798-1854), Christian Hermann Weiße (1801-1866), the Fries-influenced Jürgen Bona Meyer (1829-1897), the Frenchman Charles Renouvier (1815-1903), the evangelical theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822-1889), and the great historian of philosophy Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-1871), made calls to heed Kant’s warning about transgressing the bounds of possible experience. However, there was neither a systematic nor programmatic school of Kantian thought in Germany for more than sixty years after Kant's death in 1804.
The first published use of the term 'Neo-Kantianer' appeared in 1862, in a polemical review of Eduard Zeller by the Hegelian Karl Ludwig Michelet. But it was Otto Liebmann’s (1840-1912) Kant und die Epigonen (1865) that most indelibly heralds the rise of a new movement. Here Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Hegel (1770-1831), and Schelling (1775-1854), whose idealist followers held sway in German philosophy departments during the early decades of the 19th Century, are chided for taking over only Kant’s system-building, and for doing so only in a superficial way. They sought to create the world from scratch, as it were, by finding new, more-fundamental first principles upon which to create a stronghold of interlocking propositions, one following necessarily from its predecessor. Insofar as those principles were generated from reflection rather than experience, however, the ‘descendants’ would effectively embrace Kant’s idealism at the expense of his empirical realism. The steep decline of Hegelianism a generation later opened a vacuum which was to be filled by the counter-movement of scientific materialism, represented by figures like Karl Vogt (1817-1895), Heinrich Czolbe (1819-1873), and Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899). By reducing speculative philosophy to a system of naturalistic observation consistent with their realism, the materialists utilized a commonsense terminology that reopened philosophical inquiry for those uninitiated in idealist dialectics. Despite their successes in the realm of the natural sciences, the materialists were accused of avoiding serious philosophical problems rather than solving them. This was especially true about matters of consciousness and experience, which the materialists were inclined to treat unproblematically as ‘given’. Against the failings of both the idealists and the materialists, Liebmann could only repeatedly call, “Zurück zu Kant!” . . .
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-94)outstripped even the scientific credentials of the materialists, combining his experimental research with a genuine philosophical sophistication and historical sensitivity. His advances in physiology, ophthalmology, audiology, electro- and thermo-dynamics duly earned him an honored place among the great German scientists. His Über die Erhaltung der Kraft (1847) ranks only behind The Origin of Species as the most influential scientific treatise of the Nineteenth-Century, even though its principle claim might have been an unattributed adoption of the precedent theories by Julius Robert von Mayer (1814-1878) and James Joule (1818-1889). His major philosophical contribution was an attempt to ground Kant’s theoretical division between phenomena and noumena within empirically verifiable sense physiognomy. In place of the materialist’s faith in sense perception as a copy of reality and in advance of Kant’s general ignorance about the neurological conditions of experience, Helmholtz noted that when we see or hear something outside us there is a complicated process of neural stimulation. Experience is neither a direct projection of the perceived object onto our sense organs nor merely a conjunction of concept and sensuous intuition, but an unconscious process of symbolic inferences by which neural stimulations are made intelligible to the human mind.
The physical processes of the brain are a safer starting point, a scientifically-verifiable ground on which to explain the a priori necessity of experience, than Kant’s supra-naturalistic deduction of conceptual architectonics. Yet two key Kantian consequences are only strengthened thereby. First, experience is revealed to be nothing immediate, but a demonstrably discursive process wherein the material affect of the senses is transformed by subjective factors. Second, any inferences that can possibly be drawn about the world outside the subject must reckon with this subjective side, thereby reasserting the privileged position of epistemology above ontology. Helmholtz and the materialists both thought that Newtonian science was the best explanation of the world; but Helmholtz realized that science must take account of what Kant had claimed of it: science is the proscription of what can be demonstrated within the limits of possible experience rather than an articulation about objects in-themselves. Empirical physiognomy would more precisely proscribe those limits than purely conceptual transcendental philosophy.
Friedrich Albert Lange (1828-1875) was, at least in the Nineteenth-Century, more widely recognized as a theorist of pedagogy and advocate of Marxism in the Vereinstag deutscher Arbeitervereinethan as a forerunner to Neo-Kantianism. But his influence on the Marburg school, though brief, was incisive. He took his professorship at Marburg in 1872, one year before Cohen completed his Habilitationschrift there. Lange worked with Cohen for only three years before his untimely death in 1875.
Much of Lange’s philosophy was conceived before his time in Marburg. As Privatdozent at Bonn, Lange attended Helmholtz’s lectures on the physiology of the senses, and later came to agree that the best way to move philosophy along was by combining the general Kantian insights with a more firmly founded neuro-physiology. In his masterpiece, Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (1866), Lange argues that materialism is at once the best explanation of phenomena, yet quite naïve in its presumptive inference from experience to the world outside us. The argument is again taken from the progress of the physiological sciences, with Lange providing a number of experiments that reveal experience to be an aggregate construction of neural processes.
Where he progresses beyond Helmholtz is his recognition that the physiognomic processes themselves must, like every other object of experience, be understood as a product of a subject’s particular constitution. Even while denying the given-ness of sense data, Helmholtz had too often presumed to understand the processes of sensation on the basis of a non-problematic empirical realism. That is, even while Helmholtz viewed knowledge of empirical objects as an aggregate of sense physiognomy, he never sufficiently reflected on the conditions for the experience of that very sense physiognomy. So even while visual experience is regarded as derivative from the physiognomy of the eyes, optic nerves, and brain, how each of these function is considered unproblematically given to empirical experience. For Lange, we cannot so confidently infer that our experience of physiognomic processes corresponds to what is really the case outside our experience of them—that the eyes or ears actually do work as we observe them to—since the argument by which that conclusion is reached is itself physiological. Neither the senses, nor the brain, nor the empirically observable neural processes between them permit the inference that any of these is the causal grounds of our experience of them. . . .
Neo-Kantianism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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Also helpful in tracing the history of presuppositional thinking in analytical-materialist philosophy, against which the phenomenological turn took place in the 20th century:
Dualism and Mind
Dualists in the philosophy of mind emphasize the radical difference between mind and matter. They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain, and some deny that the mind is wholly a product of the brain. This article explores the various ways that dualists attempt to explain this radical difference between the mental and the physical world. A wide range of arguments for and against the various dualistic options are discussed. . .
Table of Contents
. . .
3d. The Real Distinction Argument
A third argument in the Meditations maintains that the mind and body must really be separate because Descartes can conceive of the one without the other. Since he can clearly and distinctly understand the body without the mind and vice versa, God could really have created them separately. But if the mind and body can exist independently, they must really be independent, for nothing can constitute a part of the essence of a thing that can be absent without the thing itself ceasing to be. If the essence of the mind is incorporeal, so must be the mind itself. . . . .
Dualism and Mind | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Dualism and Mind
Dualists in the philosophy of mind emphasize the radical difference between mind and matter. They all deny that the mind is the same as the brain, and some deny that the mind is wholly a product of the brain. This article explores the various ways that dualists attempt to explain this radical difference between the mental and the physical world. A wide range of arguments for and against the various dualistic options are discussed. . .
Table of Contents
- Dualism
- Platonic Dualism in the Phaedo
- Descartes' Dualism
- Other Leibniz's Law Arguments for Dualism
- The Free Will and Moral Arguments
- Property Dualism
- Objections to Dualism Motivated by Scientific Considerations
- The Problem of Other Minds
- Criticisms of the Mind as a Thinking Thing
- References and Further Reading
. . .
3d. The Real Distinction Argument
A third argument in the Meditations maintains that the mind and body must really be separate because Descartes can conceive of the one without the other. Since he can clearly and distinctly understand the body without the mind and vice versa, God could really have created them separately. But if the mind and body can exist independently, they must really be independent, for nothing can constitute a part of the essence of a thing that can be absent without the thing itself ceasing to be. If the essence of the mind is incorporeal, so must be the mind itself. . . . .
Dualism and Mind | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
@Pharoah, coming back to this:
@smcder said in response to Soupie in post #459 {and asked you a question in regard to your response to Soupie's post in your post #461}:
↑
Steve wrote: "The issue isn't strictly labels ... here is my current understanding:
1. your view is physicalist/determinist and may be eliminativist - I think the only reason you don't say you are an eliminativist is that you say the mind is information we are information andthat information is immaterial ... but information in your view appears to be arrangements of matter and energy following a set of rules ... That I think is an ok way for a physicalist/eliminative reductionist to think and describe things
2. Will see what @Pharoah says to my question but I think he would question your difference in trees and information ... I'll save work on my ideas until we hear from him and - try to make sure they are coherent ...
Go back and have a look at his recent posts in light of this and also let me know where I'm wrong here - where you are not a physicalist and eliminativist - the definition of information you use I don't think is enough to say you aren't"
You responded to Steve's post and Soupie's response in your post #461:
"When you turn your head to look at a noise, the difference that you heard has informed you.
When an atom's parts exchange a glance, perhaps they just react as they do.
Perhaps we should think of information as a verb to describe any reactive impact that arises from interactions."
.
I, as well as Steve and no doubt Soupie, would like to hear what you mean in this and other relatively cryptic responses you've offered lately.
You wrote: "What am I responding to? What question?" and Steve pointed you to several recent questions called to your attention by embedding your user name.
It would be good if you would pick up this thread within the thread, Pharoah.
Unfortunately it's easy to lose track of the threads forming within a complex thread such as C&P within the Paracast Forum since responses to specific posts are not linked together in a descending string, so we often drop the opportunity to develop certain issues and questions. We have to make up for that lack in the organization of this forum by noting and coming back to questions addressed to us in particular.
@smcder said in response to Soupie in post #459 {and asked you a question in regard to your response to Soupie's post in your post #461}:
↑
Steve wrote: "The issue isn't strictly labels ... here is my current understanding:
1. your view is physicalist/determinist and may be eliminativist - I think the only reason you don't say you are an eliminativist is that you say the mind is information we are information andthat information is immaterial ... but information in your view appears to be arrangements of matter and energy following a set of rules ... That I think is an ok way for a physicalist/eliminative reductionist to think and describe things
2. Will see what @Pharoah says to my question but I think he would question your difference in trees and information ... I'll save work on my ideas until we hear from him and - try to make sure they are coherent ...
Go back and have a look at his recent posts in light of this and also let me know where I'm wrong here - where you are not a physicalist and eliminativist - the definition of information you use I don't think is enough to say you aren't"
You responded to Steve's post and Soupie's response in your post #461:
"When you turn your head to look at a noise, the difference that you heard has informed you.
When an atom's parts exchange a glance, perhaps they just react as they do.
Perhaps we should think of information as a verb to describe any reactive impact that arises from interactions."
.
I, as well as Steve and no doubt Soupie, would like to hear what you mean in this and other relatively cryptic responses you've offered lately.
You wrote: "What am I responding to? What question?" and Steve pointed you to several recent questions called to your attention by embedding your user name.
It would be good if you would pick up this thread within the thread, Pharoah.
Unfortunately it's easy to lose track of the threads forming within a complex thread such as C&P within the Paracast Forum since responses to specific posts are not linked together in a descending string, so we often drop the opportunity to develop certain issues and questions. We have to make up for that lack in the organization of this forum by noting and coming back to questions addressed to us in particular.
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A section of that book is available in this paper at academia.edu:
The Noumenon's New Clothes (Part 1) | Peter Wolfendale - Academia.edu_
It might enable us to discuss more fruitfully Pharoah's view of what he refers to as the 'noumenon' of consciousness in his current paper. The question is, first, does he find Graham Harmon's object-oriented philosophy to accord with or shed light on his idea of "the noumenon of consciousness"? If so, how? And if not, why not?
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Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
still can't see the question... but i am no eliminativist and i dont consider soupie to be either. Is that the answer?
the tree and infomotion thing... I cant remember how it went exactly but I do remember it as being a bit vague at the time anyway. perhaps the point could be clarified...
re: my being cryptic recently:
"When you turn your head to look at a noise, the difference that you heard has informed you.
When an atom's parts exchange a glance, perhaps they just react as they do.
Perhaps we should think of information as a verb to describe any reactive impact that arises from interactions."
Well, everything that exists is process and not rigid, though such things as matter may be defined as rigid; in truth matter often displays remarkable temporal stability and spatial consistency.
Information is not substantial but neither are "material" things; really.
Both matter and information are processes.
Information, from my stance, is merely a particular way of relating to or describing a characteristic of the process between interacting entities.
To say that information is immaterial or not substance in the way matter is, is a bit of a fudge (to put the point crudely)
S
smcder
Guest
"Information, from my stance, is merely a particular way of relating to or describing a characteristic of the process between interacting entities.
To say that information is immaterial or not substance in the way matter is, is a bit of a fudge (to put the point crudely)"
Yes! I think from @Soupie's view too ... right @Soupie? You've been fudging haven't you?
--------
Eliminativism:
All machine and no ghost?
"We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist. The eliminativist position attempts to dissolve the problem of explaining consciousness simply by declaring that there isn't any: there is no such thing - no seeing, hearing, thinking, and so on. There is just blank matter; the impression that we are conscious is an illusion. This view is clearly absurd, a form of madness even, and anyway refutes itself since even an illusion is the presence of an experience (it certainly seems to me that I am conscious). There are some who purport to hold this view but they are a tiny (and tinny) minority: they are sentient beings loudly claiming to be mindless zombies.
More subtly, there are many who insist that consciousness just reduces to brain states - a pang of regret, say, is just a surge of chemicals across a synapse. They are collapsers rather than deniers. Though not avowedly eliminative, this kind of view is tacitly a rejection of the very
existence of consciousness, because the brain processes held to constitute conscious experience consist of physical events that can exist in the absence of consciousness. Electricity in the brain correlates with mental activity but electricity in your TV presumably does not - so how can electrical processes be the essence of conscious experience? If there is nothing happening but electrochemical activity when I say, "My finger hurts," or, "I love her so," then there is nothing experiential going on when I say those things. So reduction is tantamount to elimination, despite the reductionist's intentions (it's like maintaining that people called "witches" are nothing but harmless old ladies – which is tantamount to saying that there are no witches)."
S
smcder
Guest
The C&P is a Heraclitian river of ideas!
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
@smcder Re fudging. No. As Doyle says on his site, and as I've always maintained, information can be viewed as physical or non-physical. Both of which are concepts.
The numeral 5 can be seen objectively, but the information it carries is subjective.
Put differently, if you put the numeral 5 in an MRI you won't see the information it carries.
So you can, gasp, have a Zombie Five!
It's no different imo then Chalmers human zombie: we can imagine a physical human with no mind! So a mind is "non-physical."
So what is it?
So, I maintain that information can be considered "non-physical" but it will always be physically embodied. Ergo, information is physical.
Here is a simple definition of information from Google:
So is genetically transmitted information physical? I'm comfortable using either label, but I've agreed that referring to information as physical is best. (It still won't show up on an MRI machine.)
And I just stumbled on this website:
mind, matter, meaning and information
The numeral 5 can be seen objectively, but the information it carries is subjective.
Put differently, if you put the numeral 5 in an MRI you won't see the information it carries.
So you can, gasp, have a Zombie Five!
It's no different imo then Chalmers human zombie: we can imagine a physical human with no mind! So a mind is "non-physical."
So what is it?
So, I maintain that information can be considered "non-physical" but it will always be physically embodied. Ergo, information is physical.
Here is a simple definition of information from Google:
2. what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.
"genetically transmitted information"
*Note that information is *not* the arrangement or sequence of things, but what is conveyed or represented. So it's not really a stretch to say information is non-physical imo.
So is genetically transmitted information physical? I'm comfortable using either label, but I've agreed that referring to information as physical is best. (It still won't show up on an MRI machine.)
And I just stumbled on this website:
mind, matter, meaning and information
“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of informationcould serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” Daniel C Dennett and John Haugeland
This site explains that theory.
Information is not just what's conveyed by our messages (like this one) but also what's conveyed by all five senses. It could be said metaphorically to be the sea in which we live, breathe and swim. There's a strong sense in which it's all we know. A metaphysics based upon it is long overdue.
Information is basically form. The concept of physical information is a way of viewing material form. Genetic and cultural information are differently encoded forms of physical information. Life and culture can be defined as the survival of encoded items of physical information. Genetic and cultural information both evolve.
The ordinary sort of information, which is “about something”, is called “intentional information”. Information processing is a particular take on (some) physical processes. A mind is a conscious information processor. Communication is the transfer of information between minds. Meaning is the intended, perceived or actual effect of such a transfer.Consciousness is a stream of intentional information. The concepts of consciousness and of matter, like all concepts, are items of cultural information. The attribution of consciousness is intersubjective, but that doesn't mean consciousness is illusory—in fact, consciousness is as real as matter. But no more so: both concepts (like all concepts) have limitations.
This site explains that theory.
Information is not just what's conveyed by our messages (like this one) but also what's conveyed by all five senses. It could be said metaphorically to be the sea in which we live, breathe and swim. There's a strong sense in which it's all we know. A metaphysics based upon it is long overdue.
Information is basically form. The concept of physical information is a way of viewing material form. Genetic and cultural information are differently encoded forms of physical information. Life and culture can be defined as the survival of encoded items of physical information. Genetic and cultural information both evolve.
The ordinary sort of information, which is “about something”, is called “intentional information”. Information processing is a particular take on (some) physical processes. A mind is a conscious information processor. Communication is the transfer of information between minds. Meaning is the intended, perceived or actual effect of such a transfer.Consciousness is a stream of intentional information. The concepts of consciousness and of matter, like all concepts, are items of cultural information. The attribution of consciousness is intersubjective, but that doesn't mean consciousness is illusory—in fact, consciousness is as real as matter. But no more so: both concepts (like all concepts) have limitations.
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smcder
Guest
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to conceive ...
@Pharoah ... Can you talk sense into the lad?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
But unfortunately one with recurring whirlpools, often giving way to quicksand at the bottom, into which we seem to step repeatedly. Is it the same whirlpool we step into again and again? If it's not, it might as well be.
That appears to be an online yahoo message board for discussion of issues treated in the JCS. Is there some reason why we should take the post you quoted as seriously as we take published scholarly papers and the philosophical texts that they work with? The first two statements in that post are:
"“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” Daniel C Dennett and John Haugeland
This site explains that theory."
What theory? What 'site'? Where is the 'explanation' of the promised 'theory'? Is one supposed to construct the 'theory' from the random assortment of other posts linked in the post you quoted?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
@Constance Click on the link called "contents." Make of it what you will.
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