Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[smcder]

I finished reading Velmas's "Evolution of Consciousness" and found it very helpful. In particular, his description of continuous and discontinuous approaches to consciousness was very helpful. I wonder how @Pharoah would categorize HCT?

This description of the continuous approach (which is compatible with a dual-aspect/property metaphysics) is interesting:

The co-evolution of conscious experiences with their associated material forms

Continuity theorists do not face this problem for the simple reason that they do not believe that consciousness suddenly emerged at any stage of evolution. Rather, as Sherrington suggests above, consciousness is a “development of mind from unrecognisable intorecognisable.” On this panpsychist or panexperientialist view, all forms of matter have anassociated form of consciousness (see Skrbina, 2005a, b; De Quincy, 2002; Weber & Desmond,2008; Seager, 2012; Weekes, 2012). In the cosmic explosion that gave birth to the universe,consciousness co-emerged with matter and co-evolves with it. As matter became moredifferentiated and developed in complexity, consciousness became correspondinglydifferentiated and complex. The emergence of carbon-based life forms developed into creatures with sensory systems that had associated sensory “qualia.” The development of representation was accompanied by the development of consciousness that is of something.The development of self-representation was accompanied by the dawn of differentiated self-consciousness and so on. On this view, evolutionary theory can in principle account for the different forms that consciousness takes. But, consciousness, in some primal form, didnot emerge at any particular stage of evolution. Rather, it was there from the beginning. Its emergence, with the birth of the universe is neither more nor less mysterious than the emergence of matter and energy.​

This approach continues to have a lot of appeal to me; it manages to address/avoid the hard problem, and it explains why experience is correlated with physical forms/processes.

It brings me back to the concept of Unbound Telesis and the Unus Mundus. And I think @Pharoah HTC addresses this as well.

Why does energy/matter differentiate into the particular forms in which it does? (I'm in no way qualified to discuss the concept, but I think codependent origination fits here too.) Why does experience differentiate into the particular forms (qualities) which it does?

I've BSd about this as well: the forms that arise and persist in nature do so because they are self-persisting. But no form is truly self dependent; all forms are causally interconnected — or as Pharoah's might say, informed.

At its most primal level, nature has two aspects: an object, physical aspect and a subjective, experiential aspect.

As nature differentiates various physical and experiential qualities emerge.

Interestingly, this approach leads me to the noumenal problem. If phenomenal qualities co-evolve with physical qualities, a problem arises.

The boundaries between differentiated physical forms are not firm as I understand it. I could be wrong on this; however, it seems to me that physically speaking, everything in nature is really one physical process.

If phenomenal forms/qualities co-evolve with physical forms/qualities, then it would follow that boundaries between phenomenal qualities would be blurred as well. So the combination problem enters here, I think. For example, why don't my feet and brain all have minds?

If there is a continuity of experience in physical forms, why doesn't a human body—composed of billions of physical forms—have billions of minds?

How do differentiated physical forms with co-evolved/differentiated qualitative forms combine to create one unified phenomenal point of view.

I don't think this problem is insurmountable and sees easier then Chalmers hard problem.

Another thing that this approach addressed that I like, as noted in the quoted paragraph, is that experience is fundamental in nature; but the question then becomes how experience differentiates and evolves along with physical forms. This is the question I am most interested in, even more than the hard problem.

So, how does nature evolve from differentiating into the experience "green" to the experience "I am seeing green." That is, as Velman's notes above: the evolution from representation to self-representation. This I have referred to as experience and meta-experience.

I'm not sure Dependent Co-Arising is going to do what you want it to ... this is a translation from the Pali text (earliest recorded material attribued to the Buddha, about 500 years after his death - from a well developed oral tradition, Thanissaro Bikkhu is an excellent source, Western born but works in the Thai Forest tradition and very orthodoc in that sense)

Paticca-samuppada-vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Co-arising
translated from the Pali by
Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Paticca-samuppada-vibhanga Sutta: Analysis of Dependent Co-arising

You might also find this helpful by Ajahn Geoff:
http://www.dhammatalks.org/Archive/Writings/TheShapeOfSuffering_v140624.pdf

The Shape of Suffering: A Study of Dependent Co-arising. An explanation of dependent co-arising through the analogy of feeding and pulling from the vocabulary of complex, non-linear systems.

 

[Soupie]

David Chalmers Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness (1995)

Since Chalmers is seen as the one to bring attention (recently) to the hard problem, I want to include a little more material - although I would not his defintion is the same as Nagel's.

Nagel: But fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

"The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience."
"This subjective aspect (what it is like) is experience."
"Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does."

1. the easy problem
2. the hard problem
3. why those who claim to solve the hard problem have been wrong

The easy problems of consciousness include those of explaining the following phenomena:

• the ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;

• the integration of information by a cognitive system;

• the reportability of mental states;

• the ability of a system to access its own internal states;

• the focus of attention;

• the deliberate control of behavior;

• the difference between wakefulness and sleep.

(@Soupie - does "the mind is green" fit in here?)

If these phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem. Although we do not yet have anything close to a complete explanation of these phenomena, we have a clear idea of how we might go about explaining them. This is why I call these problems the easy problems. Of course, "easy" is a relative term. Getting the details right will probably take a century or two of difficult empirical work. Still, there is every reason to believe that the methods of cognitive science and neuroscience will succeed.
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience.

When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect.

As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism.

This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.

(@Soupie ... or here?)

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?

It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

 

[smcder]

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:
body/self/experience
That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?
What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.
I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences

LOL ... my mind isn't green ... I'm quite sure of that, because I'm color-blind.

... the distinction between the mental self and experience, can you find that quote - where I said that? Is it me or is it me quoting another source ... I try to be clear when I'm quoting but I think there have been several times you've attributed something I've quoted to "my view". It will be helpful if you can quote what I've said.

The last quote I remember is a quote from OOBE research:

Who am I in Out of Body Experiences? Implications from OBEs for the explanandum of a theory of self-consciousness

body
ownership
subjectivity

Conclusion
OBEs provide a striking set of unusual experiences of the self which should be accounted for by a theory of self-consciousness. More than this, OBEs have been used to propose distinctions between forms of self-consciousness, generally between experience of a mental and experience of a bodily self. I have argued that the phenomenology of OBEs does not straightforwardly support this distinction.

However, by proposing a tripartite distinction between the sense of embodiment, the sense of ownership and the sense of subjectivity, a more accurate description of the phenomenology of OBEs can be given.

A consideration of OBEs thus suggests that a theory of self-consciousness should explain at least these three forms of self-consciousness.

 

[smcder]

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

THIS IS FROM EJ LOWE'S "NO EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS"
WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE:

http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf

Thus, although conscious thought is not, of course, the same thing as perceptual experience, the conceptual content of thought is intimately related to the content, both phenomenal and intentional, of perceptual experience.

Thoughts differ from perceptual experiences in possessing only intentional, and not sensuous content;

yet, even so, the intentional content of our thought depends inescapably, by way of its conceptual structure, upon our capacity to enjoy perceptual experiences with sensuous or phenomenal characteristics. And, at the same time, our perceptual experiences possess intentional content — often, the very same content as may be possessed by our thoughts — because we are able to bring concepts to bear upon the deliverances of our sense organs and so clothe our perceptual sensations with representational properties.

 

[smcder]

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

"soupie / green"

Oringinal Hulk ... grey!

Hulk *SMASH* trichotomous view!!

Hulk have unochotomous view! Uno nothing!! Hulk *SMASH* non-hulk, ALL become Hulk!

Hulk *SMASH* hippopotomous too!

 

[smcder]

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

Read Chpt 10 of What is Philosophy - it's helped me with what a philosophical text is ... language is excessive to the ideas expressed and the ideas are excessive to the language ... think, imagine! a world where thought and language are one ...

wait, wait

you are going to tell me they are one ... right?

I think in this case "the mind is green" is a kind of private expression ... it kicks, it hits you where it lives but it doesn't convey ... remember I suggested reading "the whiteness of the whale" - in which Melville makes it unforgettable clear what he means by this "simply" by listing example after example ... but this isn't always possible ... I remember having lots of words, images and sensations that were meaningful to me because they stood in for a complex idea or complex of ideas ... I think much of my writing is this way still - a kind of point "that, over there, don't you see it?" ... when I think of the hard problem I have specific imagery that is visual and kinesthetic ... and it has real meaning to me, but I can't describe it to you ... in Buddhism this came home when I heard a talk, the teacher said you were to focus on the mind and notice when it is "so" and then the mind is "like this" and there are no words, but gradually you build up a "vocabulary" of mind states, ah yes, now I am in this state - if it makes more sense think of a basin in a search space, an attractor, or a relatively solidified, stable state of something that is otherwise fluid ... most of the states of mind we have are in between these nodes or points and that corresponds to the language used in Chpt 10 of WHat is Philosophy? Ideas are stable points but we are mostly in between these points when we think or do philosophical activity - what we can convey then is these points but we mistake that for convey all this other informaiton and so we expcet to be understood more than we can be ...

One of the nice things about meditation is being able to dwell in a stable space for a period of time.

 

[Constance]

I find myself increasingly uninterested in issues such as this one, which seem to me to miss the forest of experience by concentrating on the categorization of the species of a few trees.

Steve (et al), by a convenient three-part synchronicity, my comment above (which was a kind of inchoate eruption of impatience) turns out to be related to (and articulated by) a viewpoint shared by the two new sources you linked just afterward: the site drawing together various 'constructionist' theories and the academia.edu paper you received entitled "Introspective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies." The latter attempts to go beyond constructivism's attempt to overcome a misleading epistemological dualism residing stubbornly in many approaches to consciousness. Here is an extract from halfway through that paper in which the author expresses his claim most succinctly (after repeating it less succinctly at least four times earlier in the paper):

"My target is what all of these views have in common: the idea that phenomenal knowledge involves an epistemically dualistic acquaintance relationship between a knowing subject and a knowing object, regardless of what the nature of that object itself maybe (sense data, qualia, properties of things in the world, etc.). {note, pg. 136}

Instead, we need to start anew and attempt to conceptualize introspection from the ground up, on the basis of its unique epistemic character in experience. This is what I will attempt to do in what follows."

I need to take a break from this repetitious writer before continuing, but I mention the paper now in the hope that you, Soupie, and Pharoah will read it in the next day so we can discuss it.

 

[smcder]

Steve (et al), by a convenient three-part synchronicity, my comment above (which was a kind of inchoate eruption of impatience) turns out to be related to (and articulated by) a viewpoint shared by the two new sources you linked just afterward: the site drawing together various 'constructionist' theories and the academia.edu paper you received entitled "Introspective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies." The latter attempts to go beyond constructivism's attempt to overcome a misleading epistemological dualism residing stubbornly in many approaches to consciousness. Here is an extract from halfway through that paper in which the author expresses his claim most succinctly (after repeating it less succinctly at least four times earlier in the paper):

"My target is what all of these views have in common: the idea that phenomenal knowledge involves an epistemically dualistic acquaintance relationship between a knowing subject and a knowing object, regardless of what the nature of that object itself maybe (sense data, qualia, properties of things in the world, etc.). {note, pg. 136}

Instead, we need to start anew and attempt to conceptualize introspection from the ground up, on the basis of its unique epistemic character in experience. This is what I will attempt to do in what follows."

I need to take a break from this repetitious writer before continuing, but I mention the paper now in the hope that you, Soupie, and Pharoah will read it in the next day so we can discuss it.

I will start now ...

 

[smcder]

"The mind is green" is my idiosyncratic way of saying "the mind is experience."

Chalmers says explaining how experience might arise from objective, physical process is a hard problem.

Just above, you quote Chalmers as saying "it's undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience."

I have no problem with that statement. Here's is how "the mind is green" relates:

body/experience

soupie/green

That is, Soupie's body is experiencing green. Soupie's mind is green.

This mirrors what Chalmers says above about physical bodies being subjects of experience.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

body/self/experience

That is, when Soupie is experiencing green, it's unclear who/what is doing the experiencing: Soupies body or a (mental?) self?

What the relationship between the physical body, phenomenal experiences, and the self is I don't know.

I'm not sure how a self could exist independent of a body and independent of experiences.

You seem to have a different approach. You've said your mind isn't green. You've said there is (may be?) as distinction between the (mental) self and experience. I've described your approach as trichotomous:

I think the best label for my position is Quixotomous.

 

[smcder]

Kojève on Hegel: "The Concept" is Time itself | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

"Having read many commentaries on and interpretations of Hegel’s Phenomenology, I’ve found Alexandre Kojève’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit

to be the best written and most helpful. The language is terse, direct, powerful, fresh, and compelling. It’s always struck me as an example of how philosophy ought to be articulated, and I return to it often for inspiration."

"The book records Kojève’s 1930s lectures in France on Hegel, which were attended by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, among others. These lectures were a huge influence on 20th-century French philosophy — all that crazy phenomenological, existential, and post-structuralist theory which later invaded the American humanities and continues to hold sway there. Kojève is also the Hegel interpreter behind Francis Fukuyama‘s infamous 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man,

which — like or dislike — brought Hegel roaring back into mainstream philosophical and political debate."

 

[smcder]

The Hard Problem - in its own words

I'm going to let this represent those who deny that there is a hard problem ... there's not necessarily one line to sumhis position up, but the article is short.

First, this definition of philosophy:

It’s just inquiry, unbounded (in principle at least) by any fixed assumptions. While scientific and religious endeavors can be self-questioning as well, there’s a limit to that self-questioning; you have to grant some foundational principles as true (e.g. about natural laws or the existence of God) as true before you can get far enough into your inquiry to figure out what questions are still to be answered. The same is true, of course, of particular philosophic inquiries (arguably, particular sciences are just more narrowly focussed, empirical strains of philosophy; that’s certainly how the creation of sciences has played out historically), but for philosophy as a whole, nothing is off limits to questioning.

Which is to say I think this article is science, not philosophy. And so Pigliucci has no choice but to see the issue as he does ... I'm skeptical that Nagel and Chalmers would make a simple category mistake.

What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

Pigliucci says some interesting things:

1. the consciousness he refers to has its appearance "in a certain lineage of hominids" - it's not clear if this means he thinks the hard problem is about self consciousness or if he thinks consciounsess in general doesn't occur in other animals - or something else?

2. consciousness is "metabolically expensive" - but he doesn't say how he knows this

3. and therefore is plays an important role in cognition - but again he doesn't say how he knows this or even how subjective experience could have an effect on cognition

1 -3 reinforce this as a science article, not a piece of philosophy.

 

[Constance]

Steve wrote:

"And also what you make of this:

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/188_s05/pdf/Carman_Sensation.pdf

but typically we see objects and hear noises made by things and events. This is in part just to say that perceptual experience is intentional, that it is of something, whereas impressions, sensations, and sense data are supposed to be the non intentional stuff from which the mind somehow extracts or constructs an experience of something.

But the of in “sensation of pain” is not the of in “sensation of red,” for the latter is intentional while the former is not. In the latter case, that is,

we can draw a distinction in principle between the red thing and our sensation of it,

whereas a sensation of pain just is the pain. And even pains are not just feelings that we associate with parts of our bodies; rather, my pain is my leg, my hand, my head hurting. Perception is essentially interwoven with the world we perceive, and each feature of the perceptual field is interwoven with others: Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. …The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a “field.” … The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4)The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.

Can you distinguish the two "ofs" above?"


Yesterday I expressed my own increasing loss of interest in the continuing repetitive discussions about this ‘distinction’. That doesn’t mean that I think that this discussion should be dropped, even if it reaches no resolution. But I am interested in the reason why it fails to reach resolution of the points of view on perception and sensation expressed by you and Soupie. The blue-highlighted portion of your extract above from the Carman paper points to the reason, expressing the profound difference between the analytical and phenomenological attempts to characterize and understand consciousness. Analytic philosophy attempts to analyze, separate, and firmly categorize/compartmentalize parts of humanly lived experience affecting and effecting human consciousness [going so far as to deny that much of what is experienced is part of consciousness], whereas phenomenological philosophy approaches experience and consciousness holistically, recognizing that it incorporates an interconnecting web of experience both prereflective and reflective, involving the entire body-mind complex in the interrogation and exploration of the environing world.

The paper I offered for reading -- Jesse Butler, I"ntrospective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies" -- is less articulate than I had hoped, but it works toward the same recognition, and it is indebted to constructivism as the author admits. Constructivism, growing out of Varela’s approach to consciousness (based in phenomenology, biology, and neuroscience), might provide the path to resolving the difference(s) between your and Soupie’s ideas about consciousness. (In any case, that is the approach I plan to pursue for awhile, and I’ll link papers I come across that might be helpful).


Steve, you also linked the Lowe paper (no easy problems of consciousness) which I have found persuasive in several readings in the past, and you quoted this extract, which makes the same essential point made in the Carman extract above:


“THIS IS FROM EJ LOWE'S "NO EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS"
WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE:

http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf

Thus, although conscious thought is not, of course, the same thing as perceptual experience, the conceptual content of thought is intimately related to the content, both phenomenal and intentional, of perceptual experience.

Thoughts differ from perceptual experiences in possessing only intentional, and not sensuous content;

yet, even so, the intentional content of our thought depends inescapably, by way of its conceptual structure, upon our capacity to enjoy perceptual experiences with sensuous or phenomenal characteristics. And, at the same time, our perceptual experiences possess intentional content — often, the very same content as may be possessed by our thoughts — because we are able to bring concepts to bear upon the deliverances of our sense organs and so clothe our perceptual sensations with representational properties.”


What’s expressed in the Taylor and Lowe extracts and in phenomenology, constructivism, and neurophenomenology in general is the recognition of the multilayered and interpenetrating nature of consciousness in its radically open relationship with the environment in which it develops. Reductive and categorical approaches to consciousness, as to the world in which we exist, have been inadequate to describe consciousness as we know it individually and as it is expressed socially and culturally in our history. Reductive approaches to ‘reality’ are still dominant in the thinking of our time, but we have reason enough by now to pursue the thinking that moves beyond and overcomes them, and consciousness studies provides the interdisciplinary opportunity to do so.

 

[Constance]

The Hard Problem - in its own words

I'm going to let this represent those who deny that there is a hard problem ... there's not necessarily one line to sumhis position up, but the article is short.

First, this definition of philosophy:

It’s just inquiry, unbounded (in principle at least) by any fixed assumptions. While scientific and religious endeavors can be self-questioning as well, there’s a limit to that self-questioning; you have to grant some foundational principles as true (e.g. about natural laws or the existence of God) as true before you can get far enough into your inquiry to figure out what questions are still to be answered. The same is true, of course, of particular philosophic inquiries (arguably, particular sciences are just more narrowly focussed, empirical strains of philosophy; that’s certainly how the creation of sciences has played out historically), but for philosophy as a whole, nothing is off limits to questioning.

Which is to say I think this article is science, not philosophy. And so Pigliucci has no choice but to see the issue as he does ... I'm skeptical that Nagel and Chalmers would make a simple category mistake.

What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

Pigliucci says some interesting things:

1. the consciousness he refers to has its appearance "in a certain lineage of hominids" - it's not clear if this means he thinks the hard problem is about self consciousness or if he thinks consciounsess in general doesn't occur in other animals - or something else?

2. consciousness is "metabolically expensive" - but he doesn't say how he knows this

3. and therefore is plays an important role in cognition - but again he doesn't say how he knows this or even how subjective experience could have an effect on cognition

1 -3 reinforce this as a science article, not a piece of philosophy.

Do you have access to the whole article? You seem to quote from more than is available at the link. If you have obtained access to the whole article please guide us to the place where we also can obtain access to it. I agree that neither the hard nor the easy problems of consciousness are trivial or nonexistent and can be represented as 'a category mistake'.

 

[smcder]

Steve wrote:

"And also what you make of this:

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/188_s05/pdf/Carman_Sensation.pdf

but typically we see objects and hear noises made by things and events. This is in part just to say that perceptual experience is intentional, that it is of something, whereas impressions, sensations, and sense data are supposed to be the non intentional stuff from which the mind somehow extracts or constructs an experience of something.

But the of in “sensation of pain” is not the of in “sensation of red,” for the latter is intentional while the former is not. In the latter case, that is,

we can draw a distinction in principle between the red thing and our sensation of it,

whereas a sensation of pain just is the pain. And even pains are not just feelings that we associate with parts of our bodies; rather, my pain is my leg, my hand, my head hurting. Perception is essentially interwoven with the world we perceive, and each feature of the perceptual field is interwoven with others: Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. …The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a “field.” … The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4)The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.

Can you distinguish the two "ofs" above?"


Yesterday I expressed my own increasing loss of interest in the continuing repetitive discussions about this ‘distinction’. That doesn’t mean that I think that this discussion should be dropped, even if it reaches no resolution. But I am interested in the reason why it fails to reach resolution of the points of view on perception and sensation expressed by you and Soupie. The blue-highlighted portion of your extract above from the Carman paper points to the reason, expressing the profound difference between the analytical and phenomenological attempts to characterize and understand consciousness. Analytic philosophy attempts to analyze, separate, and firmly categorize/compartmentalize parts of humanly lived experience affecting and effecting human consciousness [going so far as to deny that much of what is experienced is part of consciousness], whereas phenomenological philosophy approaches experience and consciousness holistically, recognizing that it incorporates an interconnecting web of experience both prereflective and reflective, involving the entire body-mind complex in the interrogation and exploration of the environing world.

The paper I offered for reading -- Jesse Butler, I"ntrospective Knowledge of Experience and Its Role in Consciousness Studies" -- is less articulate than I had hoped, but it works toward the same recognition, and it is indebted to constructivism as the author admits. Constructivism, growing out of Varela’s approach to consciousness (based in phenomenology, biology, and neuroscience), might provide the path to resolving the difference(s) between your and Soupie’s ideas about consciousness. (In any case, that is the approach I plan to pursue for awhile, and I’ll link papers I come across that might be helpful).


Steve, you also linked the Lowe paper (no easy problems of consciousness) which I have found persuasive in several readings in the past, and you quoted this extract, which makes the same essential point made in the Carman extract above:


“THIS IS FROM EJ LOWE'S "NO EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS"
WHICH CAN BE FOUND HERE:

http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf

Thus, although conscious thought is not, of course, the same thing as perceptual experience, the conceptual content of thought is intimately related to the content, both phenomenal and intentional, of perceptual experience.

Thoughts differ from perceptual experiences in possessing only intentional, and not sensuous content;

yet, even so, the intentional content of our thought depends inescapably, by way of its conceptual structure, upon our capacity to enjoy perceptual experiences with sensuous or phenomenal characteristics. And, at the same time, our perceptual experiences possess intentional content — often, the very same content as may be possessed by our thoughts — because we are able to bring concepts to bear upon the deliverances of our sense organs and so clothe our perceptual sensations with representational properties.”


What’s expressed in the Taylor and Lowe extracts and in phenomenology, constructivism, and neurophenomenology in general is the recognition of the multilayered and interpenetrating nature of consciousness in its radically open relationship with the environment in which it develops. Reductive and categorical approaches to consciousness, as to the world in which we exist, have been inadequate to describe consciousness as we know it individually and as it is expressed socially and culturally in our history. Reductive approaches to ‘reality’ are still dominant in the thinking of our time, but we have reason enough by now to pursue the thinking that moves beyond and overcomes them, and consciousness studies provides the interdisciplinary opportunity to do so.

... blue ... ? ;-)

it makes the point that "sensation" is firmly in our category but not in our experience ... I wonder what other words are like that.

 

[smcder]

Do you have access to the whole article? You seem to quote from more than is available at the link. If you have obtained access to the whole article please guide us to the place where we also can obtain access to it. I agree that neither the hard nor the easy problems of consciousness are trivial or nonexistent and can be represented as 'a category mistake'.

Should be this one:

What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

I think this article can stand in for various views that eliminate or dismiss the hard problem.

So far, we have Nagel, Chalmers definitions and one example of the hard problem is "why am I me and not you" ... which still intrigues me, I want to find a few others defintion: like Searle, Fodor ...

OK, Here is the whole article:

Science

What Hard Problem?
Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks.

The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searle’s Chinese Room, David Chalmers’ Philosophical Zombies, Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room, and Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ among others. Many of these experiments and the endless discussions that follow them are predicated on what Chalmers famously referred as the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness: for him, it is ‘easy’ to figure out how the brain is capable of perception, information integration, attention, reporting on mental states, etc, even though this is far from being accomplished at the moment. What is ‘hard’, claims the man of the p-zombies, is to account for phenomenal experience, or what philosophers usually call ‘qualia’: the ‘what is it like’, first-person quality of consciousness.

I think that the idea of a hard problem of consciousness arises from a category mistake. I think that in fact there is no real distinction between hard and easy problems of consciousness, and the illusion that there is one is caused by the pseudo-profundity that often accompanies category mistakes.

A category mistake occurs when you try to apply a conceptual category to a given problem or object, when in fact that conceptual category simply does not belong to the problem or object at hand. For instance, if I were to ask you about the color of triangles, you could be caught off guard and imagine that I have some brilliant, perhaps mystical, insight into the nature of triangles that somehow makes the category ‘color’ relevant to their description as geometrical figures. But of course this would be a mistake (on my part as well as on yours): triangles are characterized by angles, dimensions, and the ratios among their sides, but definitely not by colors.

The same, I am convinced, goes for Chalmers’ hard problem (or Nagel’s question, and so on). The hard problem is often formulated as the problem of accounting for how and why we have phenomenal experience. Chalmers and Nagel think that even when all the scientific facts are in (which will take a lot more time, by the way) we will still be missing something fundamental. This led Chalmers to endorse a form of dualism, and Nagel to reject the current scientific understanding (which amounts to pretty much the same thing, really).

Let’s unpack this. Why phenomenal consciousness exists is a typical question for evolutionary biology. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like blood circulation, so its appearance in a certain lineage of hominids seems to be squarely a matter for evolutionary biologists to consider (they also have a very nice story to tell about the evolution of the heart). Not that I expect an answer any time soon, and possibly ever. Historical questions about behavioral traits are notoriously difficult to tackle, particularly when there are so few (any?) other species to adequately compare ourselves with, and when there isn’t much that the fossil record can tell us about it, either. Second, how phenomenal consciousness is possible is a question for cognitive science, neurobiology and the like. If you were asking how the heart works, you’d be turning to anatomy and molecular biology, and I see no reason things should be different in the case of consciousness.

But once you have answered the how and the why of consciousness, what else is there to say? “Ah!” exclaim Chalmers, Nagel and others, “You still have not told us what it is like to be a bat (or a human being, or a zombie), so there!” But what it is like is an experience – which means that it makes no sense to ask how and why it is possible in any other senses but the ones just discussed. Of course an explanation isn’t the same as an experience, but that’s because the two are completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you. To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word ‘explanation’.

At this point the gentle reader may smell echos of Daniel Dennett’s or Patricia Churchland’s ‘deflationary’ or ‘eliminativist’ responses to Chalmers & co. That, however, would be a mistake. Unlike Dennett, I don’t think for a moment that consciousness is an ‘illusion’; and unlike Churchland I reject the idea that we can (or that it would be useful to) do away with concepts such as consciousness, pain, and the like, replacing them with descriptions of neurobiological processes. On this I’m squarely with Searle when he said that “where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality” (chew on that for a bit, if you don’t mind).

Consciousness as we have been discussing it is a biological process, explained by neurobiological and other cognitive mechanisms, and whose raison d’etre can in principle be accounted for on evolutionary grounds. To be sure, it is still largely mysterious, but (contra Dennett and Churchland) it is no mere illusion (it’s too metabolically expensive, and it clearly does a lot of important cognitive work), and (contra Chalmers, Nagel, etc.) it does not represent a problem of principle for scientific naturalism.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2013
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the co-editor, with Maarten Boudry, of Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (University of Chicago Press). His philosophical musings can be found at www.rationallyspeaking.org.

 

[Constance]

... blue ... ? ;-)

it makes the point that "sensation" is firmly in our category but not in our experience ... I wonder what other words are like that.

re: blue, sorry I always forget that you are colorblind; anyway, note the underscoring which I usually (and here) use with the blue type.

I'm not understanding the rest of your post. Would you clarify what you're saying there (and also the referent of the pronoun 'it')? Thanks.

 

[Constance]

OK, Here is the whole article:

Thanks. I'll read it and come back to comment.

In the meantime I want to comment on the editorial introduction to this issue of the Philosophy Now magazine, which you can read at this link:

French Lessons | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

If I picked up this magazine in a book store and read that editorial introduction I would put the magazine back on the rack and walk away. The author's reliance on standard (and by now very tired) pop culture representations of modern and postmodern French philosophy and on shallow rhetorical coercion as a general style is a pathetically unworthy substitute for serious engagement with serious and complex issues.

 

[smcder]

re: blue, sorry I always forget that you are colorblind; anyway, note the underscoring which I usually (and here) use with the blue type.

I'm not understanding the rest of your post. Would you clarify what you're saying there (and also the referent of the pronoun 'it')? Thanks.

No worries ... and the "it" is noting how sensation is in our vocabulary but not in our experience:

The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4)The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.

... and I wonder what other words find no support in our actual experience?

But this also raises another question:

Perception is essentially interwoven with the world we perceive, and each feature of the perceptual field is interwoven with others: Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. …The perceptual “something” is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a “field.” … The pure impression is therefore not just undiscoverable, but imperceptible and thus inconceivable as a moment of perception. (PP 9–10/4/4)The concept of sensation in philosophy and psychology thus finds virtually no support in our actual experience, however firmly planted the word may be in ordinary discourse.
He says that pure impression is not discoverable and is imperceptible and inconceivable as a moment of perception, that therefore sensation really doesn't occur in our actual experience. This is along the lines of the discussion of ideas in Chapter 10 of "What is Philosophy" - that ideas are similary in a field, that what a philosopher says is subject to all the same kinds of things as sensation in the paragraph above, so a text, a philosophical text is just the words, but the ideas behind it, the philosphical activity has left much unsaid and even the text has much that can be developed that wasn't "there" - I will find a quote on this I posted above ... so we tend to take a philosophical text as an exact expiession of the philosophers thought when it is really embedded in a field, the way sensations are above ... it's very hard to put this all into words ... but it's to say that for me, reductive explanations really fail - I fail to see myself in their descriptions of the mind ... with phenomenology, I may contest the experience or description, but I can understand where they are coming from in terms of personal experience.

Do I feel that a perceptual "something" is always in the middle of something else and that pure impresion is inconceivable as a moment of perception? I'm not sure ... some of my experiences in meditation or just intense concentration make me wonder if this is always true, but I can understand the author's claiming it as true from phenomenological expression.

 

[smcder]

Thanks. I'll read it and come back to comment.

In the meantime I want to comment on the editorial introduction to this issue of the Philosophy Now magazine, which you can read at this link:

French Lessons | Issue 107 | Philosophy Now

If I picked up this magazine in a book store and read that editorial introduction I would put the magazine back on the rack and walk away. The author's reliance on standard (and by now very tired) pop culture representations of modern and postmodern French philosophy and on shallow rhetorical coercion as a general style is a pathetically unworthy substitute for serious engagement with serious and complex issues.

Yes! I took this magazine back in the day, or one like it - and dropped my subscription after one go around ... Skeptical Inquirer or something like that actually lasted longer ... I also had only one go around on my Mensa subescription!

 

[Constance]

Should be this one:

What Hard Problem? | Issue 99 | Philosophy Now

I think this article can stand in for various views that eliminate or dismiss the hard problem.

So far, we have Nagel, Chalmers definitions and one example of the hard problem is "why am I me and not you" ... which still intrigues me, I want to find a few others defintion: like Searle, Fodor ...

OK, Here is the whole article:

Science

What Hard Problem?
Our philosophical science correspondent Massimo Pigliucci asks.

The philosophical study of consciousness is chock full of thought experiments: John Searle’s Chinese Room, David Chalmers’ Philosophical Zombies, Frank Jackson’s Mary’s Room, and Thomas Nagel’s ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ among others. Many of these experiments and the endless discussions that follow them are predicated on what Chalmers famously referred as the ‘hard’ problem of consciousness: for him, it is ‘easy’ to figure out how the brain is capable of perception, information integration, attention, reporting on mental states, etc, even though this is far from being accomplished at the moment. What is ‘hard’, claims the man of the p-zombies, is to account for phenomenal experience, or what philosophers usually call ‘qualia’: the ‘what is it like’, first-person quality of consciousness.

I think that the idea of a hard problem of consciousness arises from a category mistake. I think that in fact there is no real distinction between hard and easy problems of consciousness, and the illusion that there is one is caused by the pseudo-profundity that often accompanies category mistakes.

A category mistake occurs when you try to apply a conceptual category to a given problem or object, when in fact that conceptual category simply does not belong to the problem or object at hand. For instance, if I were to ask you about the color of triangles, you could be caught off guard and imagine that I have some brilliant, perhaps mystical, insight into the nature of triangles that somehow makes the category ‘color’ relevant to their description as geometrical figures. But of course this would be a mistake (on my part as well as on yours): triangles are characterized by angles, dimensions, and the ratios among their sides, but definitely not by colors.

The same, I am convinced, goes for Chalmers’ hard problem (or Nagel’s question, and so on). The hard problem is often formulated as the problem of accounting for how and why we have phenomenal experience. Chalmers and Nagel think that even when all the scientific facts are in (which will take a lot more time, by the way) we will still be missing something fundamental. This led Chalmers to endorse a form of dualism, and Nagel to reject the current scientific understanding (which amounts to pretty much the same thing, really).

Let’s unpack this. Why phenomenal consciousness exists is a typical question for evolutionary biology. Consciousness is a biological phenomenon, like blood circulation, so its appearance in a certain lineage of hominids seems to be squarely a matter for evolutionary biologists to consider (they also have a very nice story to tell about the evolution of the heart). Not that I expect an answer any time soon, and possibly ever. Historical questions about behavioral traits are notoriously difficult to tackle, particularly when there are so few (any?) other species to adequately compare ourselves with, and when there isn’t much that the fossil record can tell us about it, either. Second, how phenomenal consciousness is possible is a question for cognitive science, neurobiology and the like. If you were asking how the heart works, you’d be turning to anatomy and molecular biology, and I see no reason things should be different in the case of consciousness.

But once you have answered the how and the why of consciousness, what else is there to say? “Ah!” exclaim Chalmers, Nagel and others, “You still have not told us what it is like to be a bat (or a human being, or a zombie), so there!” But what it is like is an experience – which means that it makes no sense to ask how and why it is possible in any other senses but the ones just discussed. Of course an explanation isn’t the same as an experience, but that’s because the two are completely independent categories, like colors and triangles. It is obvious that I cannot experience what it is like to be you, but I can potentially have a complete explanation of how and why it is possible to be you. To ask for that explanation to also somehow encompass the experience itself is both incoherent, and an illegitimate use of the word ‘explanation’.

At this point the gentle reader may smell echos of Daniel Dennett’s or Patricia Churchland’s ‘deflationary’ or ‘eliminativist’ responses to Chalmers & co. That, however, would be a mistake. Unlike Dennett, I don’t think for a moment that consciousness is an ‘illusion’; and unlike Churchland I reject the idea that we can (or that it would be useful to) do away with concepts such as consciousness, pain, and the like, replacing them with descriptions of neurobiological processes. On this I’m squarely with Searle when he said that “where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality” (chew on that for a bit, if you don’t mind).

Consciousness as we have been discussing it is a biological process, explained by neurobiological and other cognitive mechanisms, and whose raison d’etre can in principle be accounted for on evolutionary grounds. To be sure, it is still largely mysterious, but (contra Dennett and Churchland) it is no mere illusion (it’s too metabolically expensive, and it clearly does a lot of important cognitive work), and (contra Chalmers, Nagel, etc.) it does not represent a problem of principle for scientific naturalism.

© Prof. Massimo Pigliucci 2013
Massimo Pigliucci is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. He is the co-editor, with Maarten Boudry, of Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem (University of Chicago Press). His philosophical musings can be found at www.rationallyspeaking.org.

Pigliucci is a case in point of blinkered reductiveness. All empty claims for physicalist-objectivist answers to life as we experience it with promissory notes that one day Science will explain ourselves and the world to us. Not unless Science expands the phenomena it investigates. Next . . .