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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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S
smcder
Guest
Thought O' the Day in re: brain scanners and the inevitability (?) of technology and progress generally:
"Now of course there are plenty of arguments that could be deployed against this modest proposal. For example, it could be argued that progress doesn’t have to generate a rising tide of externalities.
The difficulty with this argument is that externalization of costs isn’t an accidental side effect of technology but an essential aspect—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every technology is a means of externalizing some cost that would otherwise be borne by a human body.
Even something as simple as a hammer takes the wear and tear that would otherwise affect the heel of your hand, let’s say, and transfers it to something else: directly, to the hammer; indirectly, to the biosphere, by way of the trees that had to be cut down to make the charcoal to smelt the iron, the plants that were shoveled aside to get the ore, and so on.
For reasons that are ultimately thermodynamic in nature, the more complex a technology becomes, the more costs it generates. In order to outcompete a simpler technology, each more complex technology has to externalize a significant proportion of its additional costs, in order to compete against the simpler technology. In the case of such contemporary hypercomplex technosystems as the internet, the process of externalizing costs has gone so far, through so many tangled interrelationships, that it’s remarkably difficult to figure out exactly who’s paying for how much of the gargantuan inputs needed to keep the thing running. This lack of transparency feeds the illusion that large systems are cheaper than small ones, by making externalities of scale look like economies of scale."
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
short (700) and long (7500) versions of my paper to be submitted to Synthese and TN.
Pw: Paracast
www.mind-phronesis.co.uk/knowledge-and-the-three-transcendent-classes-of-justified-truth
Comments most welcome
Pw: Paracast
www.mind-phronesis.co.uk/knowledge-and-the-three-transcendent-classes-of-justified-truth
Comments most welcome
Thanks. I'll read both. What is TN?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I'm not sure if they had brain scans. None were mentioned.
I imagine to get any meaningful information this would have to be down with a large number of folk. Im not sure how large, but definitely more than, say, 5 people.
So getting scans of say, 250 villagers as they looked at the circle of color swatches before they had been taught to identify "blue," and then get scans of 250 villagers as they looked at the circle of color swatches afterward.
What would be ideal would be to design the study in such a way that we could get pre and post scans when we knew they were looking at the boue swatch. Maybe have them arrange the swatches in some way.
Would the brain light up differently when they were looking at the blue swatch pre and post?
Its very fascinating. They were apparently able to tell that the swatch differed from the others... because obviously it does. But they uad a hard time noticing this difference. This difference, for us, is subjectively very strong. Fascinating.
It may have been in this very thread, but I was reading about people who work with their fingers to do some job, their fingers become so sensitive they can immediately notice minute details that the unintiated would never discern.
One of the first things, beside animal "sounds" that Western children are taught is colors. As noted, the tribe members were able to discern green shades they werent as noticable to us.
What fascinated me was that we can "see" something without "seeing" it.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
That would be cool.
TNagel... I'm goiing over his "the view from nowhere". I think he would be able to compartmentalise HCT within his deep understanding of the mind-body problem.
S
smcder
Guest
Just started the What Is Philosophy book ... already very helpful.
Did I link the interview with Evan Thompson? An interesting intellectual biography he has.
S
smcder
Guest
Glad to hear it. I think it's excellent.
Yes, like you he grew up with the benefits of an academic household and first knew Varela through his father as I recall. The continuation of their friendship and work together was fortuitous for us all.
It's great to hear that Nagel will be reading your paper; you'll no doubt benefit from his responses. I'm reading the paper now and think that the way you are proceeding here is a big improvement in clarity over the earlier version of this paper.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
I owe improvements to the comments I have received from this forum, so a big thank you for that.
Having read my introductory book on Hegel I am not convinced he is the place for me to start, so I will move on to the next. I didn't realise how much he may have influenced Marx... v interesting.
The view from nowhere by Nagel is an excellent book for me and I would recommend it highly. The mind-body problems are articulated and clarified for me. He would say that HCT is a objective side explanation not a subjective explanation I think:
The idea of objective knowledge: "The question is how limited beings like ourselves can alter their conception of the world so that it is no longer just the view from where they are but in a sense a view from nowhere, which includes and comprehends the fact that the world contains beings which possess it, explains why the world appears to them as it does prior to the formation of the conception, and explains how they can arrive at the conception itself." p.70
As I understand it, I would accept Nagel's analysis and terms of reference and reject my own. On that issue however, I am not sure that I understand his distinction of the subjective and its relation to the personal identity that is "me" rather than anyone else. Only half way through book though.
S
smcder
Guest
His father left academia in the early 70s and started the Lindsfarne Association:
Lindisfarne Fellows
S
smcder
Guest
I'm not sure about his interpretation of Kants use of "ungereimt" but that's a place to go looking.
S
smcder
Guest
On the Continental side (and especially in France), poststructuralism represented a volatile mix of various doses of Nietzsche (via Heidegger), phenomenology(via Levinas and Merleau-Ponty), structuralism (via Barthes), psychoanalysis (on Lacan’s reading), and assorted other more political currents such as Marxism and feminist theory.
Most of its major representatives,such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudrillard, rejected even the term ‘poststructuralism,’ agreeing mainly (though often not explicitly) that texts (mostly written) were the central focus of intellectual inquiry,
that philosophy itself consisted primarily of a rather indefinite set of written texts,and that various strategies for the interpretation of these texts would reveal both their intrinsic instability, their ideological biases, and, ultimately, the impossibility of providing any more positive image of philosophy that would permit distinguishing it from other types of texts such as literary, scientific,or religious.
While most of the poststructuralists had abandoned any frontal assault on philosophy in the form of a single coup de grace, the strategy now seemed to be more a matter of ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ philosophy thus expiring with a whimper rather than a scream.
I've received my copy of Russon but haven't begun to read it yet. I will get to it because of its significance for my own project.
That's a more than intriguing passage from Nagel's The View from Nowhere, which I plan to obtain and read sooner rather than later.
Coming back to your much-improved paper, I want to congratulate you on the clarity you've achieved. I especially enjoyed the way you articulate the construct stage of "qualitative relevancy" in sections 9.1 and 9.2. Bravo.
I would still disagree with you here, though, in section 11:
"That the mechanisms from each class are causally distinct in their mode of operation is effectively to describe each as transcendentally separate from the other: The causal mechanisms that create conceptual representation transcend the causal mechanisms that generate phenomenal representation, which in turn transcend those that generate physiological representation. . . . The mechanisms of each level interact with the world in a way that has no direct downward causal influence. For example, the facts derived from one’s conceptual representations do not causally impinge on the mechanisms that generate phenomenal experience, nor they on the mechanisms that generate the innate biochemistries of the body, nor they on the interactions of matter. This is one way of appreciating why concepts and facts never invoke the phenomenal conditions they explain; there is a causal disjunct that the conceptualising mind can never hurdle."
The reason I disagree is that in my view phenomenological experience, moving across the cusp of prereflective and reflective experience, is also conceptual experience in a stage of extended conscious openness to the world. Eventually, 'concepts' tend to foreclose openness and possibility, to move beyond the liminal level of experience in which additional information about the nature of reality might be obtained. Indeed, I think that, in the midst of the passage from prereflective to reflective experience, the conscious mind is open to information streaming upward from the subconscious (which is the repository of former phenomenological experiences of our forebears in human and pre-human evolution and, more closely related to us, our own embedded memories of significant events in our childhood and before our childhood). The question is how far back does our memory go, and even, possibly, how far forward?
But those are directions for further discussions and explorations in this thread entitled 'Consciousness and the Paranormal'. You've done a magnificent job in presenting your theory of how experience, awareness, consciousness, and mind arise in the history of living organisms and evolve to the state at which we look back and contemplate our relationship to the physical world we are embedded in.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
I've received my copy of Russon but haven't begun to read it yet. I will get to it because of its significance for my own project.
That's a more than intriguing passage from Nagel's The View from Nowhere, which I plan to obtain and read sooner rather than later.
Coming back to your much-improved paper, I want to congratulate you on the clarity you've achieved. I especially enjoyed the way you articulate the construct stage of "qualitative relevancy" in sections 9.1 and 9.2. Bravo.
I would still disagree with you here, though, in section 11:
"That the mechanisms from each class are causally distinct in their mode of operation is effectively to describe each as transcendentally separate from the other: The causal mechanisms that create conceptual representation transcend the causal mechanisms that generate phenomenal representation, which in turn transcend those that generate physiological representation. . . . The mechanisms of each level interact with the world in a way that has no direct downward causal influence. For example, the facts derived from one’s conceptual representations do not causally impinge on the mechanisms that generate phenomenal experience, nor they on the mechanisms that generate the innate biochemistries of the body, nor they on the interactions of matter. This is one way of appreciating why concepts and facts never invoke the phenomenal conditions they explain; there is a causal disjunct that the conceptualising mind can never hurdle."
The reason I disagree is that in my view phenomenological experience, moving across the cusp of prereflective and reflective experience, is also conceptual experience in a stage of extended conscious openness to the world. Eventually, 'concepts' tend to foreclose openness and possibility, to move beyond the liminal level of experience in which additional information about the nature of reality might be obtained. Indeed, I think that, in the midst of the passage from prereflective to reflective experience, the conscious mind is open to information streaming upward from the subconscious (which is the repository of former phenomenological experiences of our forebears in human and pre-human evolution and, more closely related to us, our own embedded memories of significant events in our childhood and before our childhood). The question is how far back does our memory go, and even, possibly, how far forward?
But those are directions for further discussions and explorations in this thread entitled 'Consciousness and the Paranormal'. You've done a magnificent job in presenting your theory of how experience, awareness, consciousness, and mind arise in the history of living organisms and evolve to the state at which we look back and contemplate our relationship to the physical world we are embedded in.
Thank you for your positive comments.
1. It's funny you like sections 9.1/2. I felt least secure in these specific passages and contemplated cutting them.
2. I will have a think about section 11. I can't say I disagree with your response: this indicates that my passage is not written clearly probably.
I do think that the levels feed into each other in marvellous ways (revelatory impressions etc); if I have interpreted what you are saying correctly (not sure).
What I am trying to get at with the transcendent thing is the sense that the mechanisms for each level are distinct (though undoubtedly influenced by one another). This is an important consideration for free will and determinism. Whilst we are instruments of physical mechanics there is a causal separation: our conceptual acts and beliefs (i.e., their mechanisms and the nature of their interactive representation about reality) are distinct from causal/effect physical mechanisms. When we consider free will (whether we have it or not) we do not have to go down the route of causal/effect determinism but can note instead, that the conceptual mechanisms are of their own construction; their possess their own cause/effect interactive realm.
I have not tried to articulate this before in any of my writing nor read about free will etc so it has some way to go yet.
You are still just getting your feet wet in phenomenology, but I celebrate your progress
I'm not saying you should rewrite part of your conclusions, but a reviewer might question one or two related statements there (related to what you write in 9.1/2). You could preempt those questions by foregrounding the point you make next here:
I think the growth of the mind (the potentiality for conceptual thinking) is dependent on many 'revelations' obtainable at the level of reflective phenomenological experience, revelations of various kinds about the connections between ourselves and other animals, about the feelings inspired in us by nature and natural beings, and about the profound interconnections evidently woven throughout nature as it appears to us in local macroreality. Reflective phenomenological experience also opens us to/turns us toward awareness of the levels of our own consciousness so that our consciousness and thinking become a subject of equal importance to us. Phenomenal consciousness -- in discerning the birth of reflection and thinking out of our prereflective awareness of being in a world among other beings and things -- becomes a major part of our understanding of reality and therefore that upon which the mind works conceptually. I don't think your second and third 'constructs' can be radically separated. As you say above, "the levels feed into each other in marvellous ways," and these are already becoming the subject of the most interesting philosophy and science available to us now.
I think you are on the cusp of articulating the situation well. But what needs further exploration is the explanatory gap that exists between mind and world and how it comes into being. Can 'mechanisms' radically closed and separate from one another be understood to produce our reflexivity, our insights, and our freedom? How do we come to thinking, about ourselves in and of the natural world, and yet recognize our unique position as standing apart from -- and conceptualizing -- that which contains us, enabling in us in Nagel's words 'the view from nowhere'. Both the expansion of our conceptualization of the world and the freedom of our minds emerge in nature and are -- in some way yet undefined -- integral with nature. As Wallace Stevens expressed the idea,
". . . 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."
Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly Poem by Wallace Stevens - Poem Hunter
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Blue
That two individuals with essentially the same physiologies can look at roughly a dozen square color swatches, and one can easily point out the blue swatch while the other struggles to do so is utterly fascinating. I wonder if/how this relates to @Pharoah 's idea of phenomenal consciousness being related to qualitative relevancy.
While the tribes people couldnt identify the blue swatch, they could easily identify (to us, very subtle) shades of green; one would assume identifying different shades of green is qualitatively relevant to the tribe, hence their ability to do so.
Again, i go back to the Helen Keller acount. Its clear that she was conscious pre language, that is, she was having experiences and even thinking. However, not until she possessed conceptual language did she consider herself conscious.
I think a similar process unfolds as a child develops. Very young children display an ability to perceive much of their environment at a very early age—sounds, sights, smells, tastes, etc—but it is only as language and conceptual thinking emerges that "reflective" consciousness emerges (what I have referred to as meta-awareness).
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