Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

[Constance]

So why is the phenomenal cat outside the brain?

Because the cat exists outside the brain, and we know of the cat's existence -- and our own existence -- through the phenomenal appearances of the cat, just as we share the recognition of the world in which we exist through its phenomenal appearances.

Other animals also experience the palpable world phenomenally.

 

[Constance]

No one is arguing that humans do not share a commonly experienced local world grounded in the commonality of our perceptions.

Really? This does seem to be the implication of most of the 'models' you've brought into this discussion.

 

[Constance]

Here's an interesting blog about the interpretation problem in QM with a long series of informative comments:

The Most Embarrassing Graph in Modern Physics

 

[Constance]

Uriah Kriegel is an important contemporary philosopher who fine-tunes our understanding of intentionality and phenomenality in both papers and books. One such book is a volume he has edited entitled Phenomenal Intentionality, the introductory chapter of which is available in full at the Google Books page for this volume. I think that reading this chapter would be beneficial for establishing greater clarity in our current discussion.

Phenomenal Intentionality

 

[Constance]

"Gurwitsch’s Phenomenal Holism"
Elijah Chudnoff

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
September 2013, Volume 12, Issue 3, pp 559-578

Abstract

Aron Gurwitsch made two main contributions to phenomenology. He showed how to import Gestalt theoretical ideas into Husserl’s framework of constitutive phenomenology. And he explored the light this move sheds on both the overall structure of experience and on particular kinds of experience, especially perceptual experiences and conscious shifts in attention. The primary focus of this paper is the overall structure of experience. I show how Gurwitsch’s
Gestalt theoretically informed phenomenological investigations provide a basis for defending what I will call Phenomenal Holism, the view that all the parts of a total phenomenal state metaphysically depend on it. To illustrate how the ideas developed along the way can be used in advancing work on the phenomenology of particular kinds of experience, I draw on them in defending Husserl’s view that we can be aware of abstract objects against a phenomenological objection.



“In the introduction to his dissertation, Phenomenology of Thematics and of the Pure Ego: Studies of the Relation between Gestalt Theory and Phenomenology, Gurwitsch writes: "The goal of our study is to further certain phenomenological problems with the help of Gestalt-theoretical theses, to supplement Husserl's analyses by insights arrived at in Gestalt theory, as well as to correct some of his tenets, and in general to advance phenomenology along these lines beyond the stage reached by Husserl'sIdeen. All this is accomplished, however, essentially in the spirit of the Ideen.1 This statement proved prescient: It does not just describe the goals Gurwitsch pursued in his dissertation but those that dominated his work throughout his career.2 Gurwitsch never abandoned the “spirit of the Ideen”: He continued to accept the basic framework of constitutive phenomenology Husserl set out in that book. But Gurwitsch’s importation of Gestalt theoretical ideas into that basic framework resulted in a number of far-reaching, and in my view theoretically fruitful, revisions to Husserlian doctrine — e.g., to Husserl's views on self-awareness, attention, and non-intentional qualia.3

The main idea of Gestalt theory is that in the realm of experience wholes explain their parts. Gurwitsch applied this idea to total phenomenal states. He argued that partial phenomenal states depend for their existence on the totality of phenomenal states to which they belong. There are two ways of understanding this claim. On one understanding, it is a form of what I will call Phenomenal Holism. On another understanding, it is a form of what I will call Phenomenal Monism. I explain the difference in the first section. A useful way to present the Gestalt theoretical insights that Gurwitsch took to have the most important bearing on phenomenology is to set them out as steps in an argument for Phenomenal Holism. This is what I do in the second and third sections. In the fourth section, I also consider how the Argument for Phenomenal Holism might be extended into an argument for Phenomenal Monism. As we’ll see, the extension requires assumptions that are difficult to support. Phenomenal Holism is a thesis about the structure of total phenomenal states. In arguing for it, however, we will develop a number of ideas that can be drawn on in thinking about the constituents of total phenomenal states, i.e., the specific experiences that occur within them. In the fifth section, I take up some issues about the scope of awareness. According to Husserl, we can be aware of abstract objects. There are both metaphysical and phenomenological objections to this claim. Here, I set out a phenomenological objection. Then I show how Gurwitsch ’s ideas about the structure of total phenomenal states can be drawn on in meeting it. . ."

Gurwitsch's Phenomenal Holism

 

[Constance]

Merleau-Ponty was a student of Gurwitsch and later critiqued Gurwitsch's interpretation of Gestalt theory. The following paper clarifies M-P's development of Gestalt theory and recognition of its ontological insight. It is also perhaps the clearest paper I've ever brought to this discussion concerning M-P and his major development of phenomenological philosophy. Reading it would permit substantial progress beyond the failure of communication we've reached in this discussion.


"SENSE-MAKING AND SYMMETRY-BREAKING:
MERLEAU-PONTY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND
DYNAMIC SYSTEMS THEORY"
Noah Moss Brender (McGill University)

From his earliest work forward, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop
a new ontology of nature that would avoid the antinomies of
realism and idealism by showing that nature has its own endogenous
sense which is prior to reflection. The key to this new ontology
was the concept of form, which he appropriated from Gestalt
psychology. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to give a positive
characterization of the phenomenon of form which would clarify
its ontological status. Evan Thompson has recently taken up Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach
to cognitive science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic
systems theory and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However,
Thompson does not quite succeed in resolving the ambiguities
in Merleau-Ponty’s account of form. This article builds on an indication
from Thompson in order to propose a new account of form
as asymmetry, and of the genesis of form in nature as symmetrybreaking.
These concepts help us to escape the antinomies of Modern
thought by showing how nature is the autoproduction of a
sense which can only be known by an embodied perceiver.


First several pages of this paper:

"Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to epistemology, which
takes up and extends one of Heidegger’s fundamental insights 1, is
the discovery of a pre-reflective, corporeal relation to the world
which is prior to theoretical knowledge, language, and self-
consciousness, and takes place through the perception and move-
ment of the living body. This is a naturalized epistemology 2, in that
it places knowing back into nature; in order to accomplish this,
however, we must not only revise our concept of knowledge, but
also our concept of nature.3 In particular, Merleau-Ponty argues
that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature
unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine
composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.

If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity.
Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness
that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected
parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying
that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can
only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could
comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find
ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed
gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend.
“Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely
an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that
which faces us, but that which carries us.” (N 4/20; trans. mod.)4
It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemolo-

2 We could equally call it a naturalized phenomenology. The question of
whether or not phenomenology can be naturalized has been much discussed
of late. See, e.g., Jean Petitot et al., eds., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in
Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Univeristy Press, 1999); Sean Gallagher, “On the Possibility of Naturalizing
Phenomenology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology,
(ed.) D. Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dan Zahavi, “Naturalized
Phenomenology: A Desideratum or a Category Mistake?,” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72 (2013), 23–42.
3 See David Morris, “From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological
Refiguring of Nature,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72
(2013), 317–41. See also Renaud Barbaras, “The Movement of the Living as
the Originary Foundation of Perceptual Intentionality,” in Petitot et al., eds.,
Naturalizing Phenomenology.

gy—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if
the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves
put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that
transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within
consciousness—a representation or mental construct.5

The problem is for consciousness to reflect on its own emergence
within nature, without projecting the results of this reflection
back into its conditions.6 There must be something for us to
know, some nascent intelligibility in nature that is not placed there
by us—otherwise, knowing would be impossible. But this natural
meaning must not yet be an idea for a consciousness—otherwise,
knowing would already have taken place. For knowledge to be
possible at all, then, nature must have its own endogenous meaning
which is prior to thought.7 As Merleau-Ponty says in the lecture
courses on The Concept of Nature that he gave near the end of his
life, “Nature is what has a sense [sens], without this sense having
been posited by thought. It is the autoproduction of a sense.” (N,
3/19; trans. mod.) Thus Merleau-Ponty transforms epistemological
questions into ontological ones: what is this natural meaning that
is prior to thought, and how do such meanings arise in nature
without being posited by consciousness? How are we to think a
sense that is the source of all thought, but is not itself an idea?
In order to answer these questions, Merleau-Ponty turns to the
natural sciences—not only to criticize them, as his phenomenological
predecessors had 8, but also to learn from them:

'Thus, on the one hand it is necessary to follow the spontaneous
development of the positive sciences by asking whether
man is really reduced to the status of an object here, and on the other
hand we must reconsider the reflexive and philosophical attitude
by investigating whether it really gives us the right to define
ourselves as unconditioned and timeless subjects. It is possible
that these converging investigations will finally lead us to
see a milieu which is common to philosophy and the positive
sciences, and that something like a third dimension opens up,
this side of the pure subject and the pure object, where our activity
and our passivity, our autonomy and our dependence no
longer contradict one another.' (TT, 13)9

The key to this new “dimension,” for Merleau-Ponty, is the concept
of Gestalt 10: a non-synthetic whole that cannot be analyzed into
mutually external parts. Merleau-Ponty appropriates this concept—
which he translates as “form” (forme) or “structure” (structure)—
from the German school of Gestalt psychology. However, he argues
that the Gestalt psychologists have failed to recognize the true
ontological significance of their discovery. In the phenomenon of
form, Merleau-Ponty finds “intelligibility in its nascent state” (SB,
207/223; trans. mod.): a self-organizing whole that is not a machine,
and does not need an intellectual synthesis to constitute it.
Because it is neither a thing nor an idea (SB, 127/138), form
seems to point beyond the old antinomies toward a new ontology.
Everything depends, however, on whether and how it is possible to
think a whole that resists analysis. Form is not reducible to its
parts, but neither is it anything other than those parts. “How then
are we to understand this relation of the totality to its parts? What
status must we give totality?” This question, Merleau-Ponty says,
“is at the center of this course on the idea of Nature and maybe the
whole of philosophy.” (N, 145/194; my emphasis)

Merleau-Ponty’s first—and in some ways most complete—
attempt to articulate a Gestalt ontology can be found in his first
book, The Structure of Behavior.11 Merleau-Ponty never abandoned

9 Translation taken from Bernhard Waldenfels, “Perception and Structure in
Merleau-Ponty,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 10, no. 1 (1980), 21.
10 “Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that from the beginning to the end,
Merleau-Ponty was attempting to think the form discovered by Gestalt psychology;
and that in this sense, form takes the place of the ‘thing itself’ to
which the Husserlian precept enjoins us to return: all of Merleau-Ponty’s
descriptions, of behaviour as of the perceived world, are guided and constrained
by the Gestalt.” Renaud Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty et la psychologie de
la forme,” Les Études philosophiques, vol. 57, no. 2 (2001), 151–63, here 151;
my translation.
11 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 21. I am here siding with
Toadvine against commentators who argue that Merleau-Ponty only turned to
ontology toward the end of his life, when he was writing The Visible and the
Invisible, and that this turn constituted a break with his earlier, phenomenological
project. Probably the most influential advocate of the latter reading is
Renaud Barbaras, e.g., in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s
Ontology, (tr.) T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2004).

this ontology, referring back to this book repeatedly in later works.
However, he was never satisfied with the account of form he had
inherited from Gestalt psychology, which defines it as a whole that
cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. In a working note from
1959, near the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty criticizes this as “a
negative, exterior definition”—it says what form is not, but does
not succeed in explaining what it is. (VI, 204/255) Unfortunately,
Merleau-Ponty died without having discovered the positive account
of form that he was searching for.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in The Structure
of Behavior and Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt ontology. Of particular
note are Ted Toadvine’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
(2009), and Evan Thompson’s Mind and Life: Biology, Phenomenology,
and the Sciences of Mind (2007).12 Toadvine turns to Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology in search of a new philosophical approach to our
present environmental crisis. Thompson takes Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach to cognitive
science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic systems theory
and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However, both Toadvine
and Thompson identify a troubling ambiguity in The Structure
of Behavior’s account of form and its relation to consciousness—an
ambiguity which stems from Merleau-Ponty’s failure to clarify the
ontological status of form.

In this article, I attempt to resolve this ambiguity by offering a
new account of form which builds on Thompson’s use of concepts
from dynamic systems theory. I begin by summarizing the argument
of the Structure and explaining the ambiguity that Toadvine
and Thompson identify in it. Next, I discuss Thompson’s appropriation
of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. I argue that Thompson fails to
clarify the ontological status of the Gestalt, and that as a result, his
enactive account of cognition or “sense-making” exhibits the same
ambiguity that troubles Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In Part Three, I
work out the implications of Thompson’s suggestion that natural
forms arise through symmetry-breaking, in order to offer a new
account of form as asymmetry. Finally, I argue that this account
can help us to resolve the ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology,
as well as in Thompson’s account of sense-making.

1. Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt Ontology . . . . .

http://philpapers.org/archive/MOSSAS-2.pdf

 

[Pharoah]

Merleau-Ponty was a student of Gurwitsch and later critiqued Gurwitsch's interpretation of Gestalt theory. The following paper clarifies M-P's development of Gestalt theory and recognition of its ontological insight. It is also perhaps the clearest paper I've ever brought to this discussion concerning M-P and his major development of phenomenological philosophy. Reading it would permit substantial progress beyond the failure of communication we've reached in this discussion.


"SENSE-MAKING AND SYMMETRY-BREAKING:
MERLEAU-PONTY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND
DYNAMIC SYSTEMS THEORY"
Noah Moss Brender (McGill University)

From his earliest work forward, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop
a new ontology of nature that would avoid the antinomies of
realism and idealism by showing that nature has its own endogenous
sense which is prior to reflection. The key to this new ontology
was the concept of form, which he appropriated from Gestalt
psychology. However, Merleau-Ponty struggled to give a positive
characterization of the phenomenon of form which would clarify
its ontological status. Evan Thompson has recently taken up Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach
to cognitive science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic
systems theory and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However,
Thompson does not quite succeed in resolving the ambiguities
in Merleau-Ponty’s account of form. This article builds on an indication
from Thompson in order to propose a new account of form
as asymmetry, and of the genesis of form in nature as symmetrybreaking.
These concepts help us to escape the antinomies of Modern
thought by showing how nature is the autoproduction of a
sense which can only be known by an embodied perceiver.


First several pages of this paper:

"Merleau-Ponty’s signature contribution to epistemology, which
takes up and extends one of Heidegger’s fundamental insights 1, is
the discovery of a pre-reflective, corporeal relation to the world
which is prior to theoretical knowledge, language, and self-
consciousness, and takes place through the perception and move-
ment of the living body. This is a naturalized epistemology 2, in that
it places knowing back into nature; in order to accomplish this,
however, we must not only revise our concept of knowledge, but
also our concept of nature.3 In particular, Merleau-Ponty argues
that we cannot understand how knowledge arises within nature
unless we abandon the Cartesian view of nature as a machine
composed of mutually external and indifferent parts.

If nature is a mechanism then it has no intrinsic meaning or unity.
Thus nature could only be meaningful for a constituting consciousness
that imposes a meaning on it by synthesizing its disconnected
parts into an ideal whole. However, this amounts to denying
that we can know nature at all. First, it means that nature can
only be known from the outside, from a God’s-eye-view that could
comprehend it as an object. But this is not our situation; we find
ourselves born into a nature that is older than thought, and indeed
gives rise to it—a nature that we can never encompass or transcend.
“Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not entirely
an object; it does not exactly stand before us. It is our soil, not that
which faces us, but that which carries us.” (N 4/20; trans. mod.)4
It is precisely for this reason that we wish to naturalize epistemolo-

2 We could equally call it a naturalized phenomenology. The question of
whether or not phenomenology can be naturalized has been much discussed
of late. See, e.g., Jean Petitot et al., eds., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in
Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Univeristy Press, 1999); Sean Gallagher, “On the Possibility of Naturalizing
Phenomenology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology,
(ed.) D. Zahavi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Dan Zahavi, “Naturalized
Phenomenology: A Desideratum or a Category Mistake?,” Royal
Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72 (2013), 23–42.
3 See David Morris, “From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological
Refiguring of Nature,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, vol. 72
(2013), 317–41. See also Renaud Barbaras, “The Movement of the Living as
the Originary Foundation of Perceptual Intentionality,” in Petitot et al., eds.,
Naturalizing Phenomenology.

gy—to understand how knowledge arises within nature. Second, if
the only meaning we can find in nature is one that we ourselves
put into it, then nature ceases to be an object of knowledge that
transcends consciousness and becomes instead an idea within
consciousness—a representation or mental construct.5

The problem is for consciousness to reflect on its own emergence
within nature, without projecting the results of this reflection
back into its conditions.6 There must be something for us to
know, some nascent intelligibility in nature that is not placed there
by us—otherwise, knowing would be impossible. But this natural
meaning must not yet be an idea for a consciousness—otherwise,
knowing would already have taken place. For knowledge to be
possible at all, then, nature must have its own endogenous meaning
which is prior to thought.7 As Merleau-Ponty says in the lecture
courses on The Concept of Nature that he gave near the end of his
life, “Nature is what has a sense [sens], without this sense having
been posited by thought. It is the autoproduction of a sense.” (N,
3/19; trans. mod.) Thus Merleau-Ponty transforms epistemological
questions into ontological ones: what is this natural meaning that
is prior to thought, and how do such meanings arise in nature
without being posited by consciousness? How are we to think a
sense that is the source of all thought, but is not itself an idea?
In order to answer these questions, Merleau-Ponty turns to the
natural sciences—not only to criticize them, as his phenomenological
predecessors had 8, but also to learn from them:

'Thus, on the one hand it is necessary to follow the spontaneous
development of the positive sciences by asking whether
man is really reduced to the status of an object here, and on the other
hand we must reconsider the reflexive and philosophical attitude
by investigating whether it really gives us the right to define
ourselves as unconditioned and timeless subjects. It is possible
that these converging investigations will finally lead us to
see a milieu which is common to philosophy and the positive
sciences, and that something like a third dimension opens up,
this side of the pure subject and the pure object, where our activity
and our passivity, our autonomy and our dependence no
longer contradict one another.' (TT, 13)9

The key to this new “dimension,” for Merleau-Ponty, is the concept
of Gestalt10: a non-synthetic whole that cannot be analyzed into
mutually external parts. Merleau-Ponty appropriates this concept—
which he translates as “form” (forme) or “structure” (structure)—
from the German school of Gestalt psychology. However, he argues
that the Gestalt psychologists have failed to recognize the true
ontological significance of their discovery. In the phenomenon of
form, Merleau-Ponty finds “intelligibility in its nascent state” (SB,
207/223; trans. mod.): a self-organizing whole that is not a machine,
and does not need an intellectual synthesis to constitute it.
Because it is neither a thing nor an idea (SB, 127/138), form
seems to point beyond the old antinomies toward a new ontology.
Everything depends, however, on whether and how it is possible to
think a whole that resists analysis. Form is not reducible to its
parts, but neither is it anything other than those parts. “How then
are we to understand this relation of the totality to its parts? What
status must we give totality?” This question, Merleau-Ponty says,
“is at the center of this course on the idea of Nature and maybe the
whole of philosophy.” (N, 145/194; my emphasis)

Merleau-Ponty’s first—and in some ways most complete—
attempt to articulate a Gestalt ontology can be found in his first
book, The Structure of Behavior.11 Merleau-Ponty never abandoned

9 Translation taken from Bernhard Waldenfels, “Perception and Structure in
Merleau-Ponty,” Research in Phenomenology, vol. 10, no. 1 (1980), 21.
10 “Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that from the beginning to the end,
Merleau-Ponty was attempting to think the form discovered by Gestalt psychology;
and that in this sense, form takes the place of the ‘thing itself’ to
which the Husserlian precept enjoins us to return: all of Merleau-Ponty’s
descriptions, of behaviour as of the perceived world, are guided and constrained
by the Gestalt.” Renaud Barbaras, “Merleau-Ponty et la psychologie de
la forme,” Les Études philosophiques, vol. 57, no. 2 (2001), 151–63, here 151;
my translation.
11 Toadvine, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature, 21. I am here siding with
Toadvine against commentators who argue that Merleau-Ponty only turned to
ontology toward the end of his life, when he was writing The Visible and the
Invisible, and that this turn constituted a break with his earlier, phenomenological
project. Probably the most influential advocate of the latter reading is
Renaud Barbaras, e.g., in The Being of the Phenomenon: Merleau-Ponty’s
Ontology, (tr.) T. Toadvine and L. Lawlor (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2004).

this ontology, referring back to this book repeatedly in later works.
However, he was never satisfied with the account of form he had
inherited from Gestalt psychology, which defines it as a whole that
cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. In a working note from
1959, near the end of his life, Merleau-Ponty criticizes this as “a
negative, exterior definition”—it says what form is not, but does
not succeed in explaining what it is. (VI, 204/255) Unfortunately,
Merleau-Ponty died without having discovered the positive account
of form that he was searching for.

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in The Structure
of Behavior and Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt ontology. Of particular
note are Ted Toadvine’s Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature
(2009), and Evan Thompson’s Mind and Life: Biology, Phenomenology,
and the Sciences of Mind (2007).12 Toadvine turns to Merleau-
Ponty’s ontology in search of a new philosophical approach to our
present environmental crisis. Thompson takes Merleau-Ponty’s
ontology as the basis for a new, “enactive” approach to cognitive
science, synthesizing it with concepts from dynamic systems theory
and Francisco Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. However, both Toadvine
and Thompson identify a troubling ambiguity in The Structure
of Behavior’s account of form and its relation to consciousness—an
ambiguity which stems from Merleau-Ponty’s failure to clarify the
ontological status of form.

In this article, I attempt to resolve this ambiguity by offering a
new account of form which builds on Thompson’s use of concepts
from dynamic systems theory. I begin by summarizing the argument
of the Structure and explaining the ambiguity that Toadvine
and Thompson identify in it. Next, I discuss Thompson’s appropriation
of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. I argue that Thompson fails to
clarify the ontological status of the Gestalt, and that as a result, his
enactive account of cognition or “sense-making” exhibits the same
ambiguity that troubles Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. In Part Three, I
work out the implications of Thompson’s suggestion that natural
forms arise through symmetry-breaking, in order to offer a new
account of form as asymmetry. Finally, I argue that this account
can help us to resolve the ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s ontology,
as well as in Thompson’s account of sense-making.

1. Merleau-Ponty’s Gestalt Ontology . . . . .

http://philpapers.org/archive/MOSSAS-2.pdf

Cool!

 

[Constance]

Uriah Kriegel is an important contemporary philosopher who fine-tunes our understanding of intentionality and phenomenality in both papers and books. One such book is a volume he has edited entitled Phenomenal Intentionality, the introductory chapter of which is available in full at the Google Books page for this volume. I think that reading this chapter would be beneficial for establishing greater clarity in our current discussion.

Phenomenal Intentionality

I went back to review Kriegel's introductory chapter in this volume and found that it is no longer available in the sample text. It was there a few days ago when I posted the link. Perhaps I can find it elsewhere.

 

[Constance]

I was interested in reading the paper by David Morris entitled "From the Nature of Meaning to the Phenomenology of Nature, cited in footnote 3 in "SENSE-MAKING AND SYMMETRY-BREAKING: MERLEAU-PONTY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE, AND
DYNAMIC SYSTEMS THEORY" by Noah Moss Brender (linked above). I found that it is available at academia.edu but on request. I've requested that Morris upload that paper and will link it here when he does. Here's the link to its abstract:

From the Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenology of Nature

Morris has a group of related papers listed at academia edu, at the following link:

David Morris | Concordia University (Canada) - Academia.edu

 

[Constance]

I've just found that the paper I referred to is available at this link from Concordia University:

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf


ETA: I'm halfway through this paper now and recommend it enthusiastically as a supplement to the Moss Brender paper on sense-making and symmetry-breaking.

 

[Constance]

This page is also clarifying on the limits of representation concerning lived (experienced) reality:

"BEING-IN-THE-WORLD

As I suggest in the concluding nodes of this webtext, acknowledging the limits of representation does not mean that we should—or even can—forgo acts of representation altogether. Representing events, memories, and experiences are, after all, exactly what writing does, and what we routinely call upon students to do in their writing. But in granting this, it does not follow that we must also grant an ability on writing’s part to successfully perform these duties. Regardless of our hopes or intentions, I want to suggest that writing fails us—and indeed always fails us—when we presume for it the possibility of returning us to the originary space of the embodied event itself. As phenomenology, Bio Mapping, and recent work on memory and trauma suggest, such failure can nevertheless be a good thing to the extent that it invites us to confront (without the possibility of representing or recuperating) the irreducibility of our embodied being-in-the-world.

Although it shares a great deal with Lefebvre and Soja's notions of space as re/produced at the level of everyday practice, the phenomenological idea of being-in-the-world ultimately takes the notion of lived space further by foregrounding the ways tacit or pre-reflective bodily sensations implicate the body-in-action with the vibrancy of the world itself. Soja (1989), it should be noted, turned at one point to Heidegger’s ontology of being in Postmodern Geographies, proposing that being-in-the-world constitutes a form of spatial production and relation. Where my reading of Heidegger and phenomenology parts ways with Soja, however, is in some of the conclusions he reached, particularly with respect to phenomenology’s understanding of consciousness and the degree to which ontology and phenomenology open the way to new critical spatial praxes (see Soja, 1989, pp. 118-137).

First developed by Heidegger (1927/1962) in his monumental work Being and Time and later extended by Merleau-Ponty (1945/2007) in his bookPhenomenology of Perception, being-in-the-world attempts to capture the way human existence (Dasein, in Heidegger’s terms) is always already rooted in the concrete relations (i.e., not merely abstract or theoretical relations) it has with spaces, objects, and others in the world. Like their predecessor and founder of modern phenomenology Edmund Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty were interested in exploring the material textures of human experience at their most quotidian levels. Unlike Husserl, however, they proposed doing so without resorting to the phenomenological method of reductionism, which attempts to bracket from analysis all things in the environment except those that appear to usin consciousness. In their mutual (although differing) departures from Husserlian reductionism, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty argued that experience can only be understood and reflected upon within the contexts within which understanding and reflecting occur in the first place. The world, they argued,

'is more than simply the spatial container of our existence. It is the sphere of our lives as active, purposive beings: beings who have thoughts about it, who respond to it emotionally, imaginatively, and who act on it (sometimes deliberately, sometimes unthinkingly).' (Matthews, 2002, p. 49)

Being-in-the-world thus "implies that we perceive the world, not from a God’s-eye view located somehow outside it, but from somewhere within it," and that
real human experience of the world necessarily involves learning, exploring the world from where one is and only gradually (if successful) coming to some kind of clearer understanding of things and how they are related to each other and to ourselves—and understanding that, since we can never see the world as a whole, will never, even in principle, be complete. (as cited in Matthews, 2002, pp. 61-62)

Although Heidegger assumed in Being and Time that existential analysis can eventually yield insight into our being-in-the-world, he suggested as well that previous attempts at interpreting this ontological condition had been met with mixed results—stemming mainly from their "point of departure" which he characterized as "epistemology or the ‘metaphysics of knowledge’" (p 86). Approaching existence epistemologically presumes that being’s essence can be reduced to our a priori theorizations of it and therefore "represented exclusively by a single exemplar—knowing the world" (p. 86). In contrast, Heidegger proposed that "Being-in-the-world … amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorptionin references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment" (p. 107, emphasis added), with readiness-to-hand indicating that our involvements with/in the world are more often than not tacit or habitual rather than conscious or conspicuous. Heidegger famously illustrated this condition of readiness-to-hand by considering the ways Dasein relates to everyday objects such as hammers and writing tables. When Dasein encounters a hammer in its readiness-to-hand, for example, it does not grasp it theoretically as a concept or idea. Rather, when encountering the hammer in its readiness-to-hand, Daseindeals with the object by using and manipulating it (p. 98). In such instances, the ontic nature of the thing itself withdraws from Dasein's immediate concern, leaving Dasein engaged in a more primordial relation that at once precedes and exceeds its "seeing" or "discovery" of it.

For Merleau-Ponty, it’s precisely this pre-reflective, pre-theoretical aspect of our being-in-the-world that defines being as both an everyday spatial practice and a site for phenomenological investigation. In his own version of the tool-analysis, Merleau-Ponty took Heidegger’s discussion of the object’s withdrawal through its readiness-to-hand and expanded it by introducing the ways the body itself tacitly participates in the production of everyday object relations. In his Phenomenology of Perception, which attempted to marry Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenologies with then recent research on human sensation and perception, Merleau-Ponty described what he calls the "phenomenal body." A person, he argued,
is conscious of his bodily space as the matrix of his habitual action, but not as an objective setting; his body is at his disposal as a means of ingress into a familiar surrounding, but not as the means of expression of a gratuitous and free spatial thought. (p. 119)

While a body clearly has its physical boundaries, Merleau-Ponty noted that our experiences of those boundaries often exceed that reality. A woman wearing a hat with a long feather on top, for instance, may, "without any calculation, keep a safe distance between the feather in her hat and things which might break it off. She feels where the feather is just as we feel where our hand is" (p. 165). The same holds true for a blind man, whose cane has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight. In the exploration of things, the length of the stick does not enter expressly as a middle term: the blind man is rather aware of it through the position of objects than of the position of objects through it. (pp. 165-166)

In each of these cases, the phenomenal body engages in relations with the world and objects in the world that are more habitual than conscious or reflective. The phenomenal body is, in other words, a porous body, microperceptually responding to specific information about the world even as its own capacities quietly spill out and intertwine with those of other beings in the world. Consciousness, in this view, therefore means a great deal more than "awareness" or cognitive "recognition," as Soja, for instance, seems to suggest. For Merleau-Ponty it means

'being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its "world," and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it; it is to allow oneself to respond to their call, which is made upon it independently of any representation.' (pp. 159-161)

Although she only briefly touches on phenomenology in Geographies of Writing (in this case, by way of Heidegger and his notion of dwelling), Reynolds nevertheless arrived at many of the same conclusions Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty reached in their respective phenomenologies. Like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Reynolds has asked us to see bodies and space as intimately connected, with each shaping or marking the other in ways that enable and/or constrain one’s rhetorical being-in-the-world. Where Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty part ways with Reynolds, however, is in the specific attunement they brought to the epistemological and metaphysical limits that accompany our abilities to represent the phenomenal body-in-action. While they agreed that the body’s involvement with/in the world is real and calls for our understanding, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty also maintained that, in responding to such calls, we should be careful not to presume that with understanding comes the possibility of bringing to knowledge that which lies on the hither side of consciousness, in the here-and-now of our pre-theoretical and pre-reflective being-in-the-world.

As Merleau-Ponty has argued, we need to understand and accept that the reality of our being-in-the-world can never be fully exhausted by our discussions or descriptions of it. We need to understand, in other words, that behind our perceptions (or conceptions) of the world and ourselves in the world lie a number of qualities—audibility or tangibility, for example—that are never fully contained in any single act of perception or representation. As Merleau-Ponty put it, there is always "a depth of the object that no progressive sensory deduction will ever exhaust" (p. 251). And this inexhaustible depth holds true for the body and its "prepersonal" being-in-the-world as well:

There is another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world, but the system of anonymous “functions” which draw every particular focus into a general project. (p. 296)

This possibility of "another subject beneath me"—of a prepersonal phenomenal body tacitly involved in its being-in-the-world—offers a very different way of thinking about writing, memory, and representation than what we find in Lefebvre and Soja’s critical spatial theory (and perhaps even in many contemporary conceptions of writing as well). If, as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty suggested, bodily sensation can indeed occur below the threshold of conscious awareness and yet still have an effect on that body’s being-in-the-world, then what we experience as memory, and what we attempt to narrativize as memory through writing, can never stand in for an experience of the event itself for the simple reason that the event itself was never experienced as such in the first place. Memory, in these cases, is not the representation of an experience through writing, but rather the indication, the attunement perhaps, that what we’re attempting to recover—what we’re hoping to recollect—remains forever "unclaimed" and beyond our abilities to recuperate it as a form of knowledge (Caruth, 1996). In a recent book on memory and the Holocaust, Michael Bernard-Donals (2009) referred to these unclaimed experiences or immemorial excesses as "forgetful memory." Between memory and forgetting, he proposed, lies "a memory that is not a representation but a moment of seeing without knowing … that annihilates both past and present and creates, instead, a presence that can only be made available [to us] … through a speaking or writing that is precocious, out of control, and utterly troubling" (p. 8). A writing attuned to forgetful memory, therefore, would not seek to foreclose upon the void of memory by representing it in the terms of knowledge or experience, but would rather "allow the immemorial to impress itself upon the written" (p. 33).

The question of what such a writing might look like (let alone how we might begin to teach it) is a vexed one to be sure (Bernard-Donals, for his part, offered a number of case studies, from memoir to fiction, that illustrated how such excesses can emerge in various writings about trauma). In any event, it seems clear that writing about our pre-reflective being-in-the-world "may require a language other than that of history or the narrative of memory" (p. 33), or at the very least a language that continuously interrupts the will to craft a narrative out of memory. As I argue in the following section, for all of its stated commitments to representing participants’ being-in-the-world, Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project actually works to question memory’s reliability in the forming of such representations. As I hope to show, when thought of in terms of place-based theories and pedagogies, Nold’s attunement to the limits of memory and representation serve to remind composition scholars of the significant roles pre-reflective sensations play in our everyday lives and the responsibilities we hold at the same time to guard against their theorization or memorialization as such in writing."

Kairos 16.3: Barnett, Psychogeographies of Writing - Being-in-the-World

 

[Constance]

This extract from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" should also be clarifying:

"What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods of the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible, for my other hand, for example, if it takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part."

 

[Constance]

I've just found that the paper I referred to is available at this link from Concordia University:

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf


ETA: I'm halfway through this paper now and recommend it enthusiastically as a supplement to the Moss Brender paper on sense-making and symmetry-breaking.

ETA:
Extract from the paper's conclusion:

"In my view, the immune system thus yields an insight into what is ontologically at stake in the negative-in-being. The insight is that if sense is ever to sneak into being, being has to ‘leave room’ for ruptures, boundaries, spacings and distances between things, for nonconnection or incongruence, such that the places where things happen matters, as do the boundaries and distributions of material that allow places to stand out as distinct. At bottom, there could not be sense in an isotropic universe that would not let things spread out differentially (a principle that echoes Darwin’s realization that geographical isolation and regions facilitate species differentiation).

Here we start getting into ontological concepts that are hard to articulate because they challenge our deepest anthropocentric prejudices and the deepest commitments of the sceptical complex, namely, the need to find some ‘smallest possible’ unit of analysis (in some sense of ‘small’) that is already given and all at once with absolute certainty (such a unit would be self-contained as to its determinacy; classically it is the ‘atom’), in some sort of system where the relations of all parts can be simultaneously given as determinate (classically, this would be, for example, by way of laws that govern relations of the atomic units). What’s really at stake underneath these commitments is the view that something needs to already be fully and determinately given, in and of itself, if we are to grasp and explain things, otherwise there is no starting point or foundation from which our explanations can proceed. And what’s at stake behind this is the view that if anything is to be certain, then something must at some point already be given as certain. On the contrary, we are seeing that the condition of sense is a being that is not given as already all connected but rather operates as it does through a sort of operation of figuring itself out, connecting itself up, refiguring itself, through a distribution across places that is always already underway. This point that I am making, which emphasizes a distribution that ruptures a would-be all-given simultaneity, mirrors a point about time made by philosophers like Henri Bergson and scientists like Ilya Prigogine. They argue that time is real and makes a difference to being as ‘successive’. Time is not a dimension given in advance, but ‘figures itself out’ through duration. I am saying that a sort of distribution that ruptures being is real and makes a difference to being as ‘simultaneous’. Put otherwise, for Bergson, being is not really ‘successive’ because the notion of succession puts succeedents spatially alongside one another, as if succeedents are already lined up, ready to go. But I am saying being is not ‘simultaneous’ either: parts are not really simultaneously alongside one another, you have to get from one to the other through a distribution that is always already underway, that ruptures being, and that takes place across places. This is what’s at stake in speaking of being as ‘figuring itself out’ (in the sense of giving itself a figure—not of deliberate problem solving). Being and space do not have an already given figure, space is not a given figure, being is a ‘figuring out’, and only in virtue of that does being have a determinate endurance and distribution. Indeed, at this point we find a conceptual analogy between a developing organism and being itself: just as an organism develops in situ, via inherited dynamics already underway, we would have to think of being/the cosmos as distributing itself not through abstract laws, but through differences endogenous and unique to it as a historical phenomenon. The difference is that the organism’s development takes place in a larger environment and dynamic, whereas the coming-to-be of the cosmos takes place as a making place in the first place, and it is its own dynamic.

All this leads me to the difficult thought that if there is a sense in being, this is because being is a sort of non-coincidence, such that being is never purely identical or equal with itself, it is marked by a kind of difference that is nonetheless yet to be shown. Being thus always surpasses itself, but from within, not because of some already given ideal independent of being. This would almost say: being is sense;
it is oriented by its own being as differing, or dislocated from itself. Earlier I said that the sceptical complex worries that its point of view, which is the locus of cognitive activity, might be dislocated from itself, from the safe-harbour of the cogito; the worry is that cognition might be embedded in a body or nature that would thereby taint, disrupt or subject thinking to doubt. Here I am led to the thought that perhaps the fundamental dynamic of being just is a sort of non-unitary dislocation that challenges any effort to find anything, let alone a point of view, that is what it is in some purely localized or unitary fashion. Being is itself embedded in something further, but that something further is its own dislocation. Put in terms closer to contemporary science, I could say: being is uncertainty itself. It is not positively given (not even as an already established probability pattern), but neither is it a purely negative ideal that could be grasped as pure information. Rather, as uncertainty, it does not coincide with itself in its givenness. And, as uncertainty, being itself would be the standard in virtue of which information, understood as determinate distributions of probability actualizations, becomes information. Information would thus not be abstract, but immanent in being. Being as uncertainty would thus be sense. I know these thoughts are hard to follow, but they might help us grasp how meaning is an institution older than human experience, such that experience and nature are not at odds."


Morris's paper helps us to understand why Heidegger reached the point of declaring "the end of metaphysics." And why the notion of a 'block universe' is appealing to physicists still blocked within materialist/physicalist/objectivist presuppositions. It also contributes significantly to the overcoming of the 'hard problem' in consciousness studies.

@Pharoah, I think Panksepp would be interested in the Moss Brenden and Morris papers. Would you email him the links?

 

[Pharoah]

I've just found that the paper I referred to is available at this link from Concordia University:

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf


ETA: I'm halfway through this paper now and recommend it enthusiastically as a supplement to the Moss Brender paper on sense-making and symmetry-breaking.

Morris's is an engaging paper. I could discuss some key points. Basically conforms with my way of thinking, but from a phenomenological perspective which is nice. Might drop him a line. Makes me want to read MP's PP.

 

[Constance]

Morris's is an engaging paper. I could discuss some key points. Basically conforms with my way of thinking, but from a phenomenological perspective which is nice. Might drop him a line. Makes me want to read MP's PP.

Very glad to hear these responses, Pharoah. I look forward to your discussing some of Morris's key points in relation to your hierarchical construct theory. I think we can all learn from such a comparison. And as I've suggested before, I think your theory will be enriched by opening out to phenomenological insights into the evolution of species of life and thereby the evolution of consciousness out of activity, prereflective awareness, and protoconscious developments.

 

[Pharoah]

Very glad to hear these responses, Pharoah. I look forward to your discussing some of Morris's key points in relation to your hierarchical construct theory. I think we can all learn from such a comparison. And as I've suggested before, I think your theory will be enriched by opening out to phenomenological insights into the evolution of species of life and thereby the evolution of consciousness out of activity, prereflective awareness, and protoconscious developments.

Morris: 'Nature of Meaning to a Phenomenological Refiguring of Nature'

In the following section, Morris is saying that naturalization requires redefining nature, by realising an inherent meaningfulness in and of itself.
"The topic of phenomenology and naturalism raises the question whether human experience can be naturalized, that is, conceptualized as integral with nature as we understand it. A central context for this question is ongoing debates about the relation between mind and nature. My studies lead me to think that debates and problems in this area are deeply informed – and led astray – by an uncritically ac- cepted philosophical and scientific commitment that we can trace back to Descartes at least, namely the concept of nature as a moving material system devoid of inherent meaningfulness. Mindful human experience, as meaningful, is thus at odds with nature and cannot be naturalized" p. 317 (cf. Also, "it is not we who determine that life is meaningful, life itself in its very living determines itself that way..." p.324)
But, of course, I am at odds with his sentiment that "...meaning is an irreducible element of living phenomena,..." p. 325: refer to my paper on information.

"Some, such as the philosopher Renaud Barbaras (‘The Movement of the Living as the Originary Foundation of Perceptual Intentionality’) go further, insisting that resolving the mind-body problem... entails a new concept and ontology of nature. The moves afoot in effect expand the field of meaning, by noticing how the dynamics of living and natural systems in fact already exhibit a kind of meaningfulness that could harbour mind. But this expansion of meaning entails new and challenging ways of conceptualizing the body and nature." p. 318-9
This is the expansionist program Nagel advocates, and which I argue that I provide in my first paper... and extends further in my paper on information.

The following section (re. MP: bubbles) reminded me of D'Arcy Thompson's 'On Growth and Form' which, 30 years back, is easily the book that has most inspired HCT:
"Here I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s early concept of structure, e.g., his description of the soap bubble as shaping itself through its overall dynamic in its environment, such that we cannot separate a formula or idea of the bubble’s shape from the bubble’s existence or vice versa." p. 333

Morris may be interested in Panksepp, but not sure about the other wat round coz JP is in retirement mode

 

[Constance]

Thank you, Pharoah. At this point I think we are ready to discuss the differences between the standard objectivist ontology and the phenomenological ontology of nature and meaning. What stands in the way of your accepting the grounds Morris explicates for the latter?

Also, would you expand your response by characterizing Nagel's expansionist program as you understand it and its parallels with your 'first paper' (first HCT paper?) and your paper on information, referred to in this statement from your response:

"This is the expansionist program Nagel advocates, and which I argue that I provide in my first paper... and extends further in my paper on information."

And also please provide current links to those two papers?

 

[Constance]

Morris may be interested in Panksepp, but not sure about the other way round coz JP is in retirement mode.

Panksepp has, as you told me recently, retired from his primary activity in affective neuroscience research, but I think he would be gratified by reading Morris's paper and some others I've linked by phenomenological thinkers, now having the time to devote to reading contributions from philosophy (and in Morris's case also biological science). I'll be happy to send him links to these papers if you don't feel comfortable doing so. Just message or email me his email address.

 

[Pharoah]

Thank you, Pharoah. At this point I think we are ready to discuss the differences between the standard objectivist ontology and the phenomenological ontology of nature and meaning. What stands in the way of your accepting the grounds Morris explicates for the latter?
Also, would you expand your response by characterizing Nagel's expansionist program as you understand it and its parallels with your 'first paper' (first HCT paper?) and your paper on information, referred to in this statement from your response:
And also please provide current links to those two papers?

What stands in the way?.. of me accepting the phenomenological approach?
I am not sure that anything is standing in the way for me, other than my ignorance.
I have a problem with some writing styles... its like I'm looking at an impressionist painting: I want to see the image in focus and the painter is purposefully blurring it, not because they know what they are painting, but because they like pretending to know what they are painting. I can't get my teeth into that way of doing things. I am very analytically minded.

Nagel's expansionism (as I interpret it) is characterised in my first paper:
http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/Erkenntnis-18-11-15.pdf
The information essay (http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/Info-essay-05-03-16.pdf) critiques the current understanding of information. As an alternative, I explain that information is the construct (i.e. the dynamics of the construction that constitutes the form being considered) and that the construct is an interactive product of its environment and embedded within it (like MP's bubble).
This is an expansionist approach: in the first paper, I talk of different classes of informational constructs as "classes of knowledge". The expansion is to take 'conceptual knowledge' as only one such class, and from there evoke a sense that there is a 'class of knowledge' in phenomenal consciousness, in living physiologies and even in inorganic material forms. These different classes are embedded with their environment in such a way as makes them what they are... they are ontologically distinct, causally differentiated.
The Newtonian reference (in the info paper) is supposedly my way of saying that these classes are explained by reduction (from the Newtonian axiom)... these characteristics have to emerge from our universe because the universe obeys Newtonian law. But they are causally differentiated and I have not quite figured out what this means in terms of Reductionism, Emergentism, and Causation. That is my next paper... and I have some maths to help me on this which Steve is going to try to help me with.

Will respond on Panksepp in due course... bit busy next few days.

 

[Soupie]

The expansion is to take 'conceptual knowledge' as only one such class, and from there evoke a sense that there is a 'class of knowledge' in phenomenal consciousness, in living physiologies and even in inorganic material forms. These different classes are embedded with their environment in such a way as makes them what they are... they are ontologically distinct, causally differentiated.

So on this view, knowledge is distinct from (phenomenal) consciousness?

Thus, there is an ingredient other than knowledge/meaning that separates phenomenal consciousness from the other hierarchical constructs.

Any guesses as to what that ingredient is?