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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

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@Constance - shall we move ahead with Wiesing?

Yes, I think for the time being I want to read as much as is available of this work at google books. We can post key extracts, some of which I think would be of special interest to @Soupie. I see from your post last night that you are finding Wiesing to be very interesting, perhaps incisive. That's my impression so far.
 
Yes, I think for the time being I want to read as much as is available of this work at google books. We can post key extracts, some of which I think would be of special interest to @Soupie. I see from your post last night that you are finding Wiesing to be very interesting, perhaps incisive. That's my impression so far.

very interesting
 
Under the Aspect of Time: Heidegger, Wittgenstein and the Place of the Nothing | James Luchte: Philosophy

Good article on Wittgenstein and Heidegger

It is often said that there has been relatively little work devoted to the relationship between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. It has also been argued that this is due, to a great extent, to the barriers of the ‘Analytic-Continental’ divide. Yet, over the last two decades interest in the relationship (or non-relationship) between the two philosophers has intensified and has been articulated in what can be provisionally laid out as four distinct streams of interpretation: Analytic, Pragmatic (both Analytic and Continental), Mystical and Phenomenological.[1] What is surprising (or, perhaps, not surprising) about the discussion of the relationship, however, is the relative lack of awareness of each of the streams to the others, as they trickle blindly, impervious to the others. Indeed, it is not that there has not been any work on this relationship, but that the work has remained segregated by a network of blindnesses, barriers or dams. This network has served to impede any synoptic or perspicuous interpretation of the relationship.
 
I was trying to find more on Wiesing, there is a Wikipedia page - auf Deutsche - and not much else, was hoping to find online essays, lectures etc
 
Here is a picture of him in his car:

Wiesing_Lambert_397.jpg

Note the resemblance to David Hasselhoff who is enormous in Germany ... here, not so much:


Also note that Hasselhoff is a paradigm example of an "Artificial Presence".

Still, catchy tune.
 
Came across something like this research in a book called "I can make you sleep." In the original research they found that talking out loud, just describing everything that was happening to you - increased IQ but that talking to yourself - doing the same thing, put you to sleep!

Why Talking to Yourself Might be The Highest Form of Intelligence | Just Seven Things

Two things. First, in giving words to (or writing onto paper) an issue and adding the clarity and clarifications required to make something understandable to someone else has the same impact on your other-than-conscious. You may think that you’re being clear about an issue in your head, but you rarely are. You’re more likely to be half articulating the issue and then immediately looping into the same consciously derived result you keep on getting which is failing to remove the problem or blocker.
And this is the second point. By talking to yourself (again, words or paper is good – words may be better because of how unusual you may experience the sensation), your conscious brain gives a clear set of instructions to your other-than-conscious brain. You ask yourself the question and often answer it very quickly yourself because the totality of your resources (conscious and unconscious) are now engaged to a common endeavour


(and in most cases, you knew the answer to the problem: it just needed unlocking by you being clear with yourself)
 
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An interesting book relevant for our discussions, now translated into English:


Too expensive to buy, but that's what libraries are for. :)

Its not at the college library, I'll try an ILL through the (very) public library.
 
Fear that drives the analytic? No.
I think fear prevents someone from seeing contrasting concepts... if one is content with one's conceptual view of the world why risk upsetting that view with new ideas that might undermine it? To do so is scary.
Analytic approach is driven by the notion that underlying principles of explanation are possible; that unity underlies complexity.
furthermore, if you don't appreciate this principle of unity in art and literature, then you can't understand its greatness. Complxity without unity is chaos

You can cut it either way, fear can drive the analytic (seeking predictive control) and the notion of underlying explanations can prevent someone from seeing contrasting concepts, for example the concept that there might not be underlying explanations available.
 
Its not at the college library, I'll try an ILL through the (very) public library.

I'm going to have to read this book in its entirety and will probably also be using interlibrary loan. It might, however, be on the shelf in the university library here.

Wiesing refers several times to Richard Shusterman's paper "Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism," which I read last night. Here's a link and some notes and extracts from it:

"Beneath Interpretation, Against Hermeneutic Holism" | Richard Shusterman - Academia.edu
_
See esp. pp. 190-192*=>193 “…apart from the non-linguistic understandings and experiences of which we are aware, there are more basic experiences or understandings of which we are not even conscious, but whose successful translation provides the necessary background selection and organization of our field which enables consciousness to have a focus and emerge as a foreground. We typically experience our verticality and direction of gaze without being aware of them, but without our experiencing them we could not be conscious of or focused on what we are in fact aware of; our perceptual field would be very different. As Dewey insisted, there is a difference between not knowing an experience and not having it. 'Consciousness … is only a very small and shifting part of experience,' and relies on 'a context which is non-cognitive,' a 'universe of non-reflectional experience'.” n22

“We can never talk (or explicitly think) about things existing without their being somehow linguistically mediated,” but this “does not mean that we can never experience them non-linguistically or that they cannot exist for us meaningfully but not in language. …Neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of pre-reflective, nonlinguistic experience and understanding. n23 Hermeneutic holism thus fails in its argument that interpretation is the only game in town because language is the only game in town. For there is both uninterpreted linguistic understanding and meaningful experience that is nonlinguistic."

Shusterman goes on in Section IV of his paper to detail "three reasons for maintaining some distinction between understanding and interpretation" in the ways in which we make sense of the world in which we are embedded.
 
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From Shusterman above:

“…apart from the non-linguistic understandings and experiences of which we are aware, there are more basic experiences or understandings of which we are not even conscious, but whose successful translation provides the necessary background selection and organization of our field which enables consciousness to have a focus and emerge as a foreground."

This is a clear expression of the core insight of MP's phenomenology, a recognition so clear and simple that it is amazing how difficult it is for many people to appreciate the ground it signifies. "Our field" of vision is constituted simultaneously through the other prereflective senses that open us to the environing world before we begin to reflect on it and our relation to/with it. One's 'field' and one's perception from the center of it is given{edit: are given together}. Not surprisingly at this point, the phenomenological poet Wallace Stevens has had the same recognition. In "Yellow Afternoon" he writes: "It comes to him from the center of his field." That poem is not available online but I will type it out here later today.
 
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ps: it's a long time since I've read and cited that poem so I hope the sense I took from it years back is borne out by the text.
 
Here is "Yellow Afternoon" by Wallace Stevens:

Yellow Afternoon

It was in the earth only
That he was at the bottom of things
And of himself. There he could say
Of this I am, this is the patriarch,
This it is that answers when I ask,
This is the mute, the final sculpture
Around which silence lies on silence.
This repose alike in springtime
And, arbored and bronzed, in autumn.

He said I had this that I could love,
As one loves visible and responsive peace,
As one loves one’s own being,
As one loves that which is the end
And must be loved, as one loves that
Of which one is a part as in a unity,
A unity that is the life one loves,
So that one lives all the lives that comprise it
As the life of the fatal unity of war.

Everything comes to him
From the middle of his field. The odor
Of earth penetrates more deeply than any word.
There he touches his being. There as he is
He is. The thought that he had found all this
Among men, in a woman- she caught his breath-
But he came back as one comes back from the sun
To lie on one's bed in the dark, close to a face
Without eyes or mouth, that looks at one and speaks.
 
Shusterman:

"…neither we nor the language which admittedly helps shape us could survive without the unarticulated background of pre-reflective, non-linguistic experience and understanding,"

and that pre-reflective understanding apparently includes the sense of time, of temporality, the underground stream of prereflective being-in-the-world (the mute knowledge of it) somehow carried in the subconscious mind {which remains to be explored}.

Temporality and perception are the keystones of the phenomenological turn in philosophy. Thinking temporality and perception together, it becomes clear that we step outside our prereflective sense of being (playing out temporally in our subconsciousness ) in acts of perception, by virtue of which we recognize our situation 'in the middle of our field', as being 'ek-stase' in Heidegger's term. That term expresses our unique sense of awakened presence to and in and of the world as a form of standing-out from what we perceive while continuing to stand-in the world's being, of which we are a part and an expression. It is by virtue of the presencing to 'things' in our environment through perception that consciousness {which always includes subconsciousness} becomes capable of reflection on the temporality of our experienced existence in the world and of consequent thinking, conceptualizing, about 'reality' as what-is as it evolves in the always open-ended passage of time. The contributions of both Wiesing and Shusterman help us to focus on the passage from pre-reflective to reflective consciousness which funds our understanding of 'being-in-the-world'.

The recognition of the resulting deeply entangled and indivisible 'duality' of subconscious and conscious orientation and ideation helps to account, I think, for our species' drive to discover and understand the ground of our being, recognizable in the forms of ontological thinking traceable far back into our species' history and prehistory. Something similar but less apprehensible for us seems to occur in other animal species in the form of what Panksepp calls 'affectivity' and 'seeking behavior', recognizable even in primordial organisms.


I've edited, rewritten, the last two paragraphs of this post from this morning, the changes highlighted in blue.
 
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From Wallace Stevens's "The Pure Good of Theory":


It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth … If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.
 
The movie Ex Machina, which is about strong AI and is in theaters now, is getting good reviews. I posted the trailer awhile back in the substrate independent minds thread.

Apparently the author slipped an Easter egg into the movie which seems to reveal a book which influenced his approach to consciousness.

Seems like a good book. In the same vein as Mind in Life. If so bodes well for how the movie handles consciousness and AI.

Secret code in Ex Machina : movies
 
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