Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

[smcder]

Dostoyevsky on free will, two translations:

And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one's own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One's own free unfettered choice, one's own caprice, however wild it may be, one's own fancy worked up at times to frenzy--is that very "most advantageous advantage" which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.

 

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The idea of perversity in Dostoyevsky's quote and for example in Poe's short story - have always made me think about evolutionary explanations of free will as illusion ... and also that the most monstrous characters are often portrayed as those who do act only according to the dictates of reason and self-interest.

 

[smcder]

I'm also interested in Zizek's return to the cogito of Descartes. Philosophy is cyclic and epi-cyclic.

I think it's a fear of complexity that drives the analytic side .... this is also a quality of the left hemisphere as it's specialized and only takes tasks (well, it's supposed to, anyway) handed to it, pre-approved, from the right hemisphere (according to McGilchrist) but this seems to explain a lot of things you can observe in people. I've always been fascinated with mathematics and only recenly shed some of the idealization of it as I've read more of the history of mathematics ... it's the austere beauty, the aesthetic of simplification that is appealing ... if only the world were like this:

e^iπ=-1

 

[smcder]

@Constance ... what do you make of this ... I've not seen it put this directly before?

Consciousness (Intentionality) as Transcendent | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

"... we can't take intentionality seriously and be materialists"

 

[Pharoah]

I'm also interested in Zizek's return to the cogito of Descartes. Philosophy is cyclic and epi-cyclic.

I think it's a fear of complexity that drives the analytic side .... this is also a quality of the left hemisphere as it's specialized and only takes tasks (well, it's supposed to, anyway) handed to it, pre-approved, from the right hemisphere (according to McGilchrist) but this seems to explain a lot of things you can observe in people. I've always been fascinated with mathematics and only recenly shed some of the idealization of it as I've read more of the history of mathematics ... it's the austere beauty, the aesthetic of simplification that is appealing ... if only the world were like this:

e^iπ=-1

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

 

[smcder]

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

Comparing Zizek and Chomsky exchange in light of McGilchrists book:

A brief description of The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Is the specific context for my statements.

Looking at their language, content etc ... in light of McGilChrist's theory. We've discussed McGilChrist before so I didn't go into detail.

If I remember, Zizek actually refers to the British empirical tradition not analytical but I should have just said Chomsky in this case - because obviously I don't mean fear drives every act of analytic thought or even that it drives Chomsky in general - very specific to this context

 

[smcder]

Comparing Zizek and Chomsky exchange in light of McGilchrists book:

A brief description of The Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist

Is the specific context for my statements.

That and this lecture:

304 Marcuse and One-Dimensional Man (1993) - Rick Roderick

 

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Here's another article on the exchange:

The Slavoj Žižek v Noam Chomsky spat is worth a ringside seat | Peter Thompson | Comment is free | The Guardian

 

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There is an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently."

 

[smcder]

And here:

Chomsky vs. Zizek | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog

where "analytic" in the sense of the philosophical tradition is used

 

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http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/The_Master_and_his_Emissary_by_McGilchrist.pdf
(my comments in bold)

I've posted all this before but I don't think we've discussed it much - I know for me it's uncomfortable to think of a struggle within my own brain ... but McGilChrist argues and supports the argument that the trend is for the link between the hemispheres to have become physically thinner over time, he tells us an evolutionary story about how we are conflicted by our very nature, at the deepest levels of our self. I think it also explains something about our individual choices of philosophy - eg how we split into roughly two camps: analytic/empirical tradition and Continental.

The particular relevance to us at this point in history is this. Both hemispheres clearly play crucial roles in the experience of each human individual, and I believe both have contributed importantly to our culture. Each needs the other. Nonetheless the relationship between the hemispheres does not appear to bisymmetrical, in that the left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on, one might almost say parasitic on, the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. Indeed it is filled with an alarming self-confidence.

The ensuing struggle is as uneven as the asymmetrical brain from which it takes its origin. My hope is that awareness of the situation may enable us to change course before it is too late. The Conclusion, therefore, is devoted to the world we now inhabit. Here I suggest that it is as if the left hemisphere, which creates a sort of self-reflexive virtual world, has blocked off the available exits, the ways out of the hall of mirrors, into a reality which the right hemisphere could enable us to understand.

In the past, this tendency was counterbalanced by forces from outside the enclosed system of the self-conscious mind;

1) apart from the history incarnated in our culture,
2) and the natural world itself, from both of which we are increasingly alienated,

these were principally the embodied nature of our existence, the arts and religion. In our time each of these has been subverted and the routes of escape from the virtual world have been closed off.

An increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualized world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.

I will have some concluding thoughts about what, if anything, we can do – or need not to do – about it. Because I am involved in redressing a balance, I may at times seem to be skeptical of the tools of analytical discourse. I hope, however, it will be obvious from what I say that I hold absolutely no brief for those who wish to abandon reason or traduce language.

The exact opposite is the case. Both are seriously under threat in our age, though I believe from diametrically opposed factions. The attempt by some post-modern theoreticians to annex the careful anti-Cartesian scepticism of Heidegger to an anarchic disregard for language and meaning is an inversion of everything that he held important. To say that language holds truth concealed is not to say that language simply serves to conceal truth (though it certainly can do), or, much worse, that there is no such thing as truth (though it may be far from simple). But equally we should not be blind to the fact that language is also traduced and disregarded by many of those who never question language at all, and truth too easily claimed by those who see the subject as unproblematic. It behoves us to be sceptical. Equally this book has nothing to offer those who would undermine reason, which, along with imagination, is the most precious thing we owe to the working together of the two hemispheres. My quarrel is only with an excessive and misplaced rationalism which has never been subjected to the judgment of reason, and is in conflict with it. I hope it will not be necessary for me to emphasise, too, that I am in no sense opposed to science, which, like its sister arts, is the offspring of both hemispheres – only to a narrow materialism, which is not intrinsic to science at all. Science is neither more nor less than patient and detailed attention to the world, and is integral to our understanding of it and of ourselves.

I also recommend reading the exchange between Steven Pinker and McGilChrist

 

[Pharoah]

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

But what do I know about fear? Let's consult B&T for some deeper insight:
"That which fear fears about is that very entity which is afraid - Dasein. Only an entity for which in it's Being this very Being is an issue, can be afraid. Fearing discloses this entity as endangered and abandoned to itself. Fear always reveals Dasein in the Being of its "there", even if it does so in varying degrees of explicitness." Etc P.180/141

 

[Pharoah]

One of the problems I hav with B&T is the structuring of meaning for complex terms. Good illustrations of this are on p. 184/5 145
"Dasein is such that in every case it has understood that it is to be thus or thus."
And
"As projecting, understanding is the kind of Being of Dasein in which it is it's possibilities as possibilities."
And
""But Dasein is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity it's potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially."

It has a mystical language feel... You will see the light when you feel the light... But it means whatever suits your mode of thinking about it. Ie it means whatever you want it to mean.

Just thought I would share my thoughts on this.

 

[smcder]

But what do I know about fear? Let's consult B&T for some deeper insight:
"That which fear fears about is that very entity which is afraid - Dasein. Only an entity for which in it's Being this very Being is an issue, can be afraid. Fearing discloses this entity as endangered and abandoned to itself. Fear always reveals Dasein in the Being of its "there", even if it does so in varying degrees of explicitness." Etc P.180/141

Is this in response to my comment or is this another direction?

 

[smcder]

One of the problems I hav with B&T is the structuring of meaning for complex terms. Good illustrations of this are on p. 184/5 145
"Dasein is such that in every case it has understood that it is to be thus or thus."
And
"As projecting, understanding is the kind of Being of Dasein in which it is it's possibilities as possibilities."
And
""But Dasein is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity it's potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially."

It has a mystical language feel... You will see the light when you feel the light... But it means whatever suits your mode of thinking about it. Ie it means whatever you want it to mean.

Just thought I would share my thoughts on this.

Have you looked at Dreyfus' commentary to see if it's of anyone help to you?

 

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I've been casting my nets wide for new ideas and new ways to think about the topics on this thread and one of the things I've been listening to is some hypnosis/NLP talks ... and I think there are some interesting insights about the brain, attention, etc. and it's also relevant to why we take the positions we do, why we believe what we do ... why it's hard to be rational about those beliefs, something that's always fascinated me.

( I've personally used hypnosis for medical purposes and self hypnosis for pain control and found it to be very effective.)

In one talk, the idea of pace and lead is used ... so a pace is something cognitively or empirically verifiable:

"As you sit here, on your chair, listening to my voice, feeling the weight of your body in the chair, you might notice sensations in your left ear"

and a lead is something you want the subject to do ... so noticing the sensations in your left ear is a lead, but it can also be verified - so as you continue to rack up the paces and the inner monitor says "yes, that's true ... and that's true" the idea is that this inner monitor eventually accepts that you are telling the truth and so let's everything in ... and that's when you gradually introduce the leads:

"you may find as you sit here, on your chair, listening to my voice that you are relazing and as you relax, you may want to think about a time when you were free from pain"

as the subject gets into trance or goes deeper, the association and verifiability etc of the ideas can get looser ... you can take someone from north to south if you slice it up thin enough.

An interesting thing is that once you gain credibility and the inner monitor lets the leads go through, then everything you said before may be accepted as well, because it takes effort and attention to maintain the last X number of things someone said ... you can see how this works in every day life, in relationships and in sales, of course ... we believe someone we like or have accepted as credible, even things they've said in the past.

Another interesting thing is the law of compounding ... so if I make a suggestion and then a second one, the first one is strengthened and so on down the line, whether I make 15 of the same or 15 different suggestions, suggestion 1 is reinforced 15 fold (so to speak) and so on ...

I don't know much about it all right now and if I come across better ways to connect it with the ideas in this thread I will, but I just wanted to get it out there as I think it says some very interesting things about the mind.

 

[Constance]

as the subject gets into trance or goes deeper, the association and verifiability etc of the ideas can get looser ... you can take someone from north to south if you slice it up thin enough.

An interesting thing is that once you gain credibility and the inner monitor lets the leads go through, then everything you said before may be accepted as well, because it takes effort and attention to maintain the last X number of things someone said ... you can see how this works in every day life, in relationships and in sales, of course ... we believe someone we like or have accepted as credible, even things they've said in the past.

Another interesting thing is the law of compounding ... so if I make a suggestion and then a second one, the first one is strengthened and so on down the line, whether I make 15 of the same or 15 different suggestions, suggestion 1 is reinforced 15 fold (so to speak) and so on ...

I don't know much about it all right now and if I come across better ways to connect it with the ideas in this thread I will, but I just wanted to get it out there as I think it says some very interesting things about the mind.

This is interesting, Steve. I'm somewhat confused, though, by what you mean in the second-last paragraph by the 'reinforcement' of a whole line, a series, of 'suggestions' in hypnosis. You are talking here, I think, about your own experiments in self-hypnosis, so the continuing line of 'suggestions' are apparently made by your still-conscious mind to your own subconscious. Is that correct? If so, do you reach a point at which your conscious mind relinquishes control of the train of thought, and if so what do you experience at that point?

I think at this point that there is a subconscious mind much vaster than the mind we engage in waking consciousness and that it likewise traffics in 'meaning', significations, carried from the collective 'unconscious' partially integrated with our own stores of personal subconscious memory of 'lived reality'. I think the subconscious mind knows far more than our waking consciousnesses know about our own and our evolutionary forebears' experiences in the local reality of this planet and, as well, of nonlocal connections with protoconscious and conscious states (prereflective and reflective) that we have experienced in part beneath the waterline of waking consciousness. I think of the image of the iceberg used by depth psychologists to represent the relative size and signifying influence of consciousness and subconsciousness, used also by Morton on the cover of his book Hyperobjects.


What do you experience as you move deeper in the structure of your own conscious-subconscious complex (for it seems to me it is a complex structure, a system, concerning which we are only beginning to understand the being of 'consciousness' as a whole).

 

[Constance]

Here is still another text we probably all should apply ourselves to if we are to understand Heidegger:

The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy): Martin Heidegger, Albert Hofstadter: 9780253204783: Amazon.com: Books


Here is a helpful post in a discussion of this book at amazon, also linked below:

"Instead of Being and Time, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology should be the starting point into Heidegger for anyone more comfortable with clear, analytical prose and arguments. As great as it is, Being and Time seems to contain a bit more showing off, as might be expected from a work whose purpose was to establish the philosophical gravitas of the author, and its climax in the account of authenticity makes it perhaps a more existentialist work.

In Basic Problems Heidegger makes a clearer case for phenomenology as a scientific method for the problems of 'first philosophy' (the a priori, ontology, or metaphysics), and the strongest case from any of the continental philosophers, I believe. I read Being and Time and many later works first, so was surprised on reading Basic Problems at the more rigorously analytical style and clarity. This may be due either to Heidegger's own experimentation with different styles of discourse and seeking in this course to improve in clarity on what he started in Being and Time, or perhaps it may be due to Albert Hofstadter's magnificently rendered translation for English speakers. In either case, there is no better place to start with Heidegger especially for those either trained or just more comfortable with analytical thought. For such readers, this book can help unlock Heidegger's more difficult writings.

The key argument is that basic problems of ontology, or at least how problems of ontology have been differently rendered in various phases of western philosophy, can be shown through Heidegger's phenomenological method to reveal a systematic unity that was not explicitly grasped by those who formulated the problems before. To this end Heidegger addresses four key historical theses about being: (1) Kant's critical thesis that being is not a real predicate; (2) the medieval thesis, following Aristotle, that any entity is characterized by, on the one hand (a) essence, what it is, being of a kind, and on the other hand (b) existence, that it is at all, a "this" being, actually or substantially; (3) the modern thesis, following Descartes, that the basic ways or modes of being are either (a) being of nature, as an extended, material sort of thing, or (b) being of mind, as a mental, psychic, or spiritual sort of thing; (4) the thesis of logic "in the broadest sense" (apparently shared by each of the prior theses) that "every being, regardless of its particular way of being, can be addressed and talked about by means of the 'is'. The being of the copula.

Now, how does Heidegger show their unity in an implicit fundamental ontology that was not explicit to the prior thinkers? Well, that is what the course sets out to do, but in a nutshell: (1) from a Kantian experience, the being of entities is not a predicate because of the ontological difference between being and entities, which is intelligible only to Dasein, or that being for whom entities are revealed within a horizon of time, temporal Dasein is the condition of possibility for the "being" of entities to appear as an issue at all, but temporality is not an entity among the entities which are revealed; (2) from the medieval and Aristotelian experience, that whch is revealed (a) as a what-being or in essence does so in terms of Zuhandensein, or functional meaning required in any practical activity, while that which is revealed (b) as a sheer 'this' or 'substance' does so in terms of Vorhandensein, or sheer presence (broken tool), in the aspect of a nonfunctional strangeness that beings are at all, which sparks Dasein to theorizing and science; (3) thus in the modern, Cartesian sort of experience, the division of being into (a) natural, extended stuff and (b) mental, nonextended stuff can each be seen as deriving from the experience of Vorhandensein, but confusedly overlooking the hermeneutic condition of practical involvement and context (Zuhanden) for the distancing power of the theoretical stance (Vorhanden), which tends to overlook how things have always already shown up (a priori) in terms of some tacit or implicit practical context, then also confusedly reifying the temporal horizon of all revealing in Dasein in into a category or box of 'mental stuff', mistaking the temporal horizon for something categorial; (4) lastly, we can see that the principle of logic that any being can be spoken of in terms of the copula or 'is' derives more basically from the fact of discourse, talk, or logos, which is ontological condition of possibility for philosophical Dasein to make explicit the fact or nature of revealing or disclosing anything whatsoever, in whatever manner it is disclosed."

Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy)

 

[Constance]

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.

Yes, Pharoah, it's true that we take shelter in our ideas about the world; we become accustomed to thinking about the world and our relationship to it in our accustomed ways. But some conceptualizations of the self/mind -- nature/world relationship provide more shelter than others, and I think it is fair to say that the presuppositions of analytical philosophy provide more rather than less shelter.

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

"Underlying principles of explanation are possible" -- perhaps, but not yet discovered in physical science.

furthermore, if you don't appreciate this principle of unity in art and literature, then you can't understand its greatness. Complexity without unity is chaos.

Derrida has demonstrated that our languages, and our linguistically expressed texts, deconstruct themselves, enabling various readings and interpretations. We never stop interpreting and reinterpreting our experience in and of the world. Wallace Stevens has a poem (one of many) on this theme:


Wallace Stevens, “Connoisseur of Chaos”

I

A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

II

If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

III

After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

IV

A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.

V

The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

 

[Constance]

One of the problems I hav with B&T is the structuring of meaning for complex terms. Good illustrations of this are on p. 184/5 145
"Dasein is such that in every case it has understood that it is to be thus or thus."
And
"As projecting, understanding is the kind of Being of Dasein in which it is it's possibilities as possibilities."
And
""But Dasein is never more than it factically is, for to its facticity it's potentiality-for-Being belongs essentially."

It has a mystical language feel... You will see the light when you feel the light... But it means whatever suits your mode of thinking about it. Ie it means whatever you want it to mean.

No, it doesn't mean 'whatever you want it to mean'. Just keep reading him, and not just B&T but some of the other works Steve and I have cited. (there's a useful one added today) The time will come when you will read passages such as those you quoted with understanding.

ps: just to say that I did question your desire to begin with B&T in the first place (and a recommendation to use an informed guide to that work if you chose to begin with it).