@Constance What phenomenological insights have allowed
you to determine that consciousness cannot be wholly explained as information arising in the brain? That is,
what first-person experiences/knowledge allowed you to arrive at that strong conclusion?
That's a good question and I want to respond to it as fully as I can. I should first distinguish experiences and a general inclination/orientation I already had in childhood from the philosophical insights I obtained later in graduate school. In early grade school years I already gravitated toward nature as the most wondrous and significant mileau in which I existed. I was more attentive to and affected by life existing beyond the human world than my friends were, and I approached animals, birds, insects, and fish with a sense of their awareness and a consequent concern for them and their well being. I have no doubt that these inclinations were expanded and deepened by my years as a Girl Scout under the influence of my troop's leader, who led us on field trips and weekends in the Wisconsin wilderness to learn as much as possible about the natural world. I've forgotten her name but I remember her vividly, her zest for exploring and understanding nature and life, her energy and charisma, and her joy in opening the world to her troop members. She was a grandmother by then, much older than our mothers and in many ways more vigorous, and totally at home in the natural world. She was our guide and taught us more about the ecology and intricacy of the natural world than we were learning in school. So I would say I was to begin with more than normally open to and responsive to the natural world and became much more so because of the tutelage of this woman over four or five years.
It was also likely influential for me that I grew up in an aesthetically beautiful place, close by the shore of Lake Michigan, which was itself a constant lure in every season and also provided forested bluffs to explore on the way down to the lake. The water itself and the life in it were sensually captivating, and the varying winds off the lake, heavily humid and scented by the water even several miles inland, were a constant reminder of the lake's presence. I still remember an occasion when I stayed up all night writing a paper for a college course. It was spring and the windows of the house were open to an increasingly active outer atmosphere. The winds coming in off the lake rose during the night, knocking the trees and undergrowth around. Lilac bushes were in bloom so the air was drenched with their fresh scent mingled with the vibrant lake air. The whole atmosphere was heady, and I had to keep getting up from the kitchen table to go outside into the yard to experience it fully. I might in fact have been in love with the natural world.
Some years later, in graduate school, I first read Sartre with my husband at the time, who was writing his dissertation on freedom in Schiller and Sartre and I began then to think about the relationship of consciousness and mind to the natural world in which it has evolved and the cultural world we overlay upon it. Later, in a different graduate school, I read the poetry of Wallace Stevens and decided to write my dissertation on it. I approached my Modern Poetry professor and asked if he would be my diss. director, and I informed him that I would be taking an existentialist approach to the poetry. He said I'd have to get a member of the Philosophy Department on my committee, so I sought out E. F. Kaelin, the specialist in existentialism and phenomenology, took his seminar in phenomenological aesthetics and then a course on Heidegger taught by William Werkmeister. Kaelin became my mentor in the dissertation work. I read the books of Merleau-Ponty and other philosophers that he recommended to me and also his own books and papers in phenomenological and existential aesthetics. Merleau-Ponty put it all together for me, and his philosophy and Stevens's poetry illuminated one another. I've never known anyone who enjoyed writing a dissertation as much as I did.
I should add that in my experience studying literature is an efficacious introduction to reading philosophy because novels, poetry, and drama provide a historical panorama of humanly lived experience in multiple places and times, including the pressures of social and cultural influences on thinking, the dominant scientific and philosophical ideas circulating in various historical epochs, the diverse interactions of the characters with others in their lives, and their sense of the worlds they lived in, overlapping one another. Some novels and poetry are categorized as 'philosophical' because their characters/personae -- and the authors of the works in which they appear -- all express struggles with ideas and points of view on philosophical, social, and ethical issues. This is the phenomenological 'thickness' of literary works, that they contain layered expressions of reality as lived, felt, and thought in the literary artwork as a whole and in particular streams of consciousness of major characters and of the persona (the voice speaking) in poetry, which does not always coincide with that of the author behind the work. So the complexity of reading literary works prepares one in a useful way for reading philosophy, particularly for reading phenomenological philosophy, since one is used to reading and interpreting what is presented and represented from a variety of positions and presuppositions in thinking about the self, others, and the world.
I found the following
summary of Sarte's work from Wikipedia interesting:
Phenomenological ontology[edit]
In Sartre's opinion, consciousness does not make sense by itself: it arises only as an awareness of objects. Consciousness is therefore always and essentially consciousness of something, whether this "something" is a thing, a person, an imaginary object, etc. Phenomenologists often refer to this quality of consciousness as "intentionality". Sartre's contribution, then, is that in addition to always being consciousness of something, consciousness is always consciousness of itself.
That's accurate but is far from representing Sartre's only contribution to the understanding of consciousness.
In other words, all consciousness is, by definition, self-consciousness. By "self-consciousness", Sartre does not mean being aware of oneself thought of as an object (e.g., one's "ego"), but rather that, as a phenomenon in the world, consciousness both appears and appears to itself at the same time. By appearing to itself, Sartre argues that consciousness is fully transparent; unlike an ordinary "object" (a house, for instance, of which it is impossible to perceive all of the sides at the same time), consciousness "sees" all aspects of itself at once. This non-positional quality of consciousness is what makes it a unique type of being, a being that exists for itself.
I have two arguments with that summary (given that misleading summaries are what we can expect from the limited presentations in encyclopedias). Sartre's early philosophy in Being and Nothingness begins with an explication of the ontological meaning of phenomenological consciousness, but much of that volume is concerned with the deepening differentiation between authenticity and inauthenticity in the ways in which individuals realize or fail to realize the intersubjective implications of their own and others' consciousness. Also, it's inexact to say that consciousness is immediately "fully transparent to itself" and "'sees' all aspects of itself at once." What one becomes aware of is first one's positional relationship to that which is other than the self and -- in germinal form -- the fact that one is in oneself the location of that awareness. It's a kind of fissure that takes place between the being of what-is that surrounds the individual and his or her own consciousness as a point of openness to it, an awareness of it, and a point of view on it -- all of which exist in intimate connection with these surroundings. This fissure or tear occurs at the point when prereflective consciousness passes into the capability of reflective consciousness, and the difference once disclosed can never quite be overcome.
In this sense, Sartre uses
phenomenology to describe ontology
[to reveal our ontological situation in the world].
Thus, the subtitle An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology or, alternatively, A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology: what truly makes Sartre's a phenomenological ontology is that consciousness's structure is the way that it appears.
Philosopher Kenneth Williford suggests that Sartre's reasoning turns on a logic of full phenomenal transparency that might not withstand scrutiny. In other words, Sartre implicitly argues that if consciousness "seems" to possess a certain property, then it actually possesses that property. But, conversely, if consciousness does not seem to possess a certain property, Williford argues that it would be hasty to conclude from this "seeming" that consciousness does not actually possess that property. (For example, consciousness might not "seem", upon reflection, to be brain process, but it is not clear from this "seeming" that consciousness is not, in fact, a brain process.)[8]
I've made a slight correction in red in the first line of that paragraph. The situation is that the phenomenology of consciousness produces a new ontology. Re Professor Williford's comments, whether consciousness is in fact existentially, temporally, open to the encountered world and affected by it is demonstrated in the analysis of consciousness presented in the writing of the phenomenological philosophers, and is to be discovered by anyone who reflects long enough and deeply enough on his or her own consciousness to recognize that in standing slightly apart from the world one is also interfused with it. As MP expressed it, the world
worlds [becomes a world] for and by virtue of consciousness.
(1) Consciousness always being conscious of itself:
Interesting. This relates to the concept I was trying to capture with my (confusing) statement, "The mind is green." That is, there may be wavelengths of a certain amplitude "out there," but the corresponding/correlating existence of "green" is consciousness. However, I believe that phenomenal green can exist in the absence of an ego, or a mental self, but there can be a meta-awareness; an awareness of phenomenal green. An awareness of awareness. Sarte seems to assert that there is by default an awareness of awareness...
So would Sarte say "green" is consciousness but also arises within consciousness; so despite manifesting as green, green is still consciousness. Thus, an awareness of green is an awareness of consciousness?
I will accept your metaphor as a metaphor. As it happens green is my favorite colors -- all the greens I can see and appreciate in the natural world, seconded by the blue-greens, the aquas, the turquoises, and so forth. But the colors I see are always mixed with others, in the way that the visible world overflows any single perception and can't be contained by any consciousness.
(2) For example, consciousness might not "seem", upon reflection, to be brain process, but it is not clear from this "seeming" that consciousness is not, in fact, a brain process.
Both/and . . .[/quote]
Unquestionably the brain is involved in consciousness, as is the body as a whole, and the brain certainly facilitates consciousness. It is necessary but not sufficient to account for how we and other animals world our worlds, bring them about.
As noted, this has been my main criticism of studying consciousness using phenomenology alone.
That was while you understood phenomenology as merely concerned with
"the feeling of what it is like" to be a bat or a mouse or a dolphin or a raven or a human. I don't think it stands the same way with you at this point. If you read the paper on Varela and the one by Thompson you will appreciate the way in which phenomenologists and cognitive-affective neuroscientists participate in a common inquiry.
