Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[Pharoah]

Hmmm ... This sounds familiar, give it all a chance on it's own terms before you start looking for ways to undermine it or prove it illogical ... or "wrong"?

In other words ... before you go Socratic on it. ;-)

(See Nietzsche on Socrates and Heraclitus and note Heidegger also goes back to Heraclitus.)

I do think when I read... sorry if this troubles you. I am not placing any value judgment either... I agree with MH (so far) and it makes perfec sense (so far). The word I used was "curious" how the analysis can go beyond description without undermining "itself". I would be delighted if MH shows me how. I am excited at the prospect. Neither do I have a problem with description per se.

 

[smcder]

From the series

Self Under Seige

1/5 Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism - YouTube

Transcript

302 Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism (1993) - Rick Roderick

@Soupie - around 7 minutes in, maybe earlier, check out his examples:

"Picking out patches of blue"

Vs

Certain west Texas rituals of machismo

It comes after a description of throwness.

@Soupie -

Rock Roderick is green:

"In a way, the deep and powerful blow that Heidegger lays against philosophy is as a discipline that could start from scratch and tell us who we are, that just starts with a clean slate and build it up… no, the way we experience our lives is we wake up, and hell, we are already here. We are in his phrase “thrown into the world”; you are born somewhere, some when, some race, some class, some gender, and all of that already comes along and from the minute you begin to speak a language and learn a culture… and learning a culture, contrary to what analytic philosophers say, is not like learning to pick out patches of blue, or being sure

(here, he waves his hand - smcder)

That this is your hand.

Learning a culture; to live in it, is more like learning how to dance the Virginia Reel than it is learning how to pick out patches of blue. Involves many complex steps before you are in one, and I mean, even in a crude and vicious culture like West Texas – that’s true, the one I come from – I mean, there is a lot of subtle machismo rituals that if you don’t know they will beat you to death. You just have to learn them. They are complex. They are much more complex than the standard philosophical examples, which are picking out patches of blues and so on."

 

[smcder]

302 Heidegger and the Rejection of Humanism (1993) - Rick Roderick

"I mean, the culture that really scares me is the one in which death has no significance for our projects. That’s the culture that… in which the self is under siege."

'I have no future' (2007) | Galen Strawson - Academia.edu

 

[smcder]

.

 

[Soupie]

@Soupie -

Rock Roderick is green:

"In a way, the deep and powerful blow that Heidegger lays against philosophy is as a discipline that could start from scratch and tell us who we are, that just starts with a clean slate and build it up… no, the way we experience our lives is we wake up, and hell, we are already here. We are in his phrase “thrown into the world”; you are born somewhere, some when, some race, some class, some gender, and all of that already comes along and from the minute you begin to speak a language and learn a culture… and learning a culture, contrary to what analytic philosophers say, is not like learning to pick out patches of blue, or being sure

(here, he waves his hand - smcder)

That this is your hand.

Learning a culture; to live in it, is more like learning how to dance the Virginia Reel than it is learning how to pick out patches of blue. Involves many complex steps before you are in one, and I mean, even in a crude and vicious culture like West Texas – that’s true, the one I come from – I mean, there is a lot of subtle machismo rituals that if you don’t know they will beat you to death. You just have to learn them. They are complex. They are much more complex than the standard philosophical examples, which are picking out patches of blues and so on."

Interesting. However I'm not sure how to apply this to the explanatory gap, which my interest in the conscious or non-conscious experience of blue is geared toward.

 

[Pharoah]

@Constance. You might like "wonder" by R hepburn

 

[Pharoah]

I can understand the 'in-the-world' bit as being unitary.
I happy to accept for argument that the 'Being' bit is unitary, but would counter that this need not necessarily be the case .
Ref chp II sec. 12 para 3 line 1-3

 

[Constance]

Steve, I'll spend some time reading and viewing all your links. Pharoah, I'll try to understand why you think that thinking somehow takes us out of being. Soupie, I'll try to understand what you mean by "the un-conscious experience of blue." I'll need some help with groking all of these perspectives. In the meantime, here is a relevant Stevens poem.


CONVERSATION WITH THREE WOMEN OF NEW ENGLAND

The mode of the person becomes the mode of the world,
For that person, and, sometimes, for the world itself.
The contents of the mind become solid show
Or almost solid seem show – the way a fly bird
Fixes itself in its inevitable bush . . .
It follows that to change modes is to change the world.

Now, you, for instance, are of this mode. You say
That in that ever-dark central, wherever it is,
In the central of earth or sky or air or thought,
There is a drop that is life’s element,
Sole, single source and minimum patriarch,
The one thing common to all life, the human
And inhuman same, the likeness of things unlike.

And you, you say that the capitol things of the mind
Should be as natural as natural objects,
So that a carved king found in a jungle, huge
And weathered, should be part of a human landscape,
That a figure reclining among columns toppled down,
Stiff in eternal lethargy, should be,
Not the beginning but the end of artifice,
A nature of marble in a marble world.

And then, finally, it is you that say
That only in man’s definitions of himself,
Only encompassed in humanity, is he
Himself. The author of man’s canons is man,
Not some outer patron and imaginer.

In which one of these three worlds are the four of us
The most at home? Or is it enough to have seen
And felt and known the differences we have seen
And felt and known in the colors in which we live,

In the excellences of the air we breathe,
The bouquet of being – enough to realize
That the sense of being changes as we talk,
That talk shifts the cycles of the scenes of kings?

 

[Constance]

I can understand the 'in-the-world' bit as being unitary.
I happy to accept for argument that the 'Being' bit is unitary, but would counter that this need not necessarily be the case .
Ref chp II sec. 12 para 3 line 1-3

On what basis would you counter the unitarity of Being? Would you quote the source you mention, apparently in B&T, since I do not have a copy of that work at hand?

 

[smcder]

Re Morton's book and Harman's outlook in general, I think it's good for us to think in terms of our own species' temporality, recognizing the persistence of things way beyond us and into the full extent of the planet's past.

Found the post!

 

[smcder]

.

 

[Constance]

Some perceptions of the world related to blackbirds:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
By Wallace Stevens 1879–1955

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

 

[smcder]

I remember that. You and Soupie were still discussing it when we moved over to the forum Pharoah set up on google. As I recall, the woman researcher was a psychologist (her name might have been Barrett?) who wrote in opposition to the reductive neuroscientific propositions postulating seven circuits and seven types of emotion that Panksepp considered as some point. Let's try to track back to those sources, probably in Part 2 of the thread. I also want to search out Panksepp's most recent articles pursuing his (and other's) work in Affective Neuroscience.

Allison Gopnik has an article in

This Idea Must Die
Amazon.com: This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (Edge Question Series) (9780062374349): John Brockman: Books

Her suggestion was "innateness" (must die) and she says that in light of new discoveries in epigenetics, some questions of innateness don't make sense. P. 192

This may be of interest to @Soupie also as well

This idea must die

 

[Constance]

@Constance. You might like "wonder" by R hepburn

I located this book at amazon uk:


No sample available. I'll check Google Books. Perhaps you say something about the essay if I can't find at least a portion of it to read?

 

[smcder]

Some perceptions of the world related to blackbirds:

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
By Wallace Stevens 1879–1955

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

".... the bawds of euphony ... "

Love this phrase

 

[Constance]

Allison Gopnik has an article in

This Idea Must Die

Her suggestion was "innateness" (must die) and she says that in light of new discoveries in epigenetics, some questions of innateness don't make sense. P. 192

So I don't have to track to the link to 'This Idea Must Die" would you relink it or maybe copy and paste it here if possible?

 

[Constance]

".... the bawds of euphony ... "

Love this phrase

Love not the whole poem? Or at least what it expresses about the multiply perceptible world?

 

[Soupie]

Soupie, I'll try to understand what you mean by "the un-conscious experience of blue."

Constance, I havent finished the following paper yet, but it seems to outline the concept pretty well:

"The Continuum of Experience: Non-Conscious Experience" | Gregory Nixon - Academia.edu

 

[smcder]

So I don't have to track to the link to 'This Idea Must Die" would you relink it or maybe copy and paste it here if possible?

Amazon.com: This Idea Must Die: Scientific Theories That Are Blocking Progress (Edge Question Series) (9780062374349): John Brockman: Books

And I reposted it up above in the original

 

[smcder]

Love not the whole poem? Or at least what it expresses about the multiply perceptible world?

Love it, I do ... I'm re reading for rhythm, to find the rhythm - because I am working on a poem and the rhythm is weak.