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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

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smcder said:
It was in a newsfeed as new ... But i think we've looked at it here on the forum?
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If Bakkar's incisive critiques of Graziano's theory were cited before now I don't remember our recognizing them in our discussions. In any case, your posting the link to Bakkar now provides us with a perfectly clear understanding of the unexplored terrain on which neuroscientific/informational theories of consciousness and mind still precariously 'stand'. The David Morris paper points us toward the necessary direction of further research in understanding consciousness and mind => in their evolutionary and developmental relation to nature itself {which, of course, we do not yet begin to understand 'in itself'}.
 
smcder said:
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Steve, thank you for linking us to this lecture. I stayed with it because the lecturer tethered his lecture to specific screened passages from MP's Phenomenology of Perception. Unfortunately, he has not understood MP's thought in that work or in MP's preceding work concerning Gestalt Theory, The Structure of Behavior, which I assume (but am not sure) he also read. I jotted down some notes and time stamps while I listened to the lecture, which I will compose as a post critiquing the lecturer's misunderstandings of MP, probably tomorrow since I'm still in the process of moving.
 
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Constance said:
Steve, thank you for linking us to this lecture. I stayed with it because the lecturer tethered his lecture to specific screened passages from MP's Phenomenology of Perception. Unfortunately, he has not understood MP's thought in that work or in MP's preceding work concerning Gestalt Theory, The Structure of Behavior, which I assume (but am not sure) he also read. I jotted down some notes and time stamps while I listened to the lecture which I will compose as a post critiquing the lecturer's misunderstandings of MP.
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I was hoping you would.
 
Constance said:
If Bakkar's incisive critiques of Graziano's theory were cited before now I don't remember our recognizing them in our discussions. In any case, your posting the link to Bakkar now provides us with a perfectly clear understanding of the unexplored terrain on which neuroscientific/informational theories of consciousness and mind still precariously 'stand'. The David Morris paper points us toward the necessary direction of further research in understanding consciousness and mind => in their evolutionary and developmental relation to nature itself {which, of course, we do not yet begin to understand 'in itself'}.
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Im enjoying the Morris paper - will have some ???s for you.
 
This helps understand that phenomenology is not just about subjective experience

"slightly more technical terms, we would seem to run into a methodological difficulty deploying phenomenology to address our problem about experience and nature. This is because phenomenology aims to start from what we call ‘ experience ’ . So it would seem that any of its conceptual results about nature would be merely subjective, as they spring from our experience. My claim, though, is that this view gets both phenomenology and experience wrong. In fact, it begs the question of what experience is, it presumes that experience is just ‘ in the head ’ . Indeed, I would argue that Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, understands that we must be radically empirical in letting thinking and experience themselves empirically show us what they are. He thereby discovers that thinking is not really a Cartesian ‘ I think ’ that could be detached from the body and nature, but in fact inherently involves a bodily-kinaesthetic ‘ I can ’ . Bit by bit, living movements beyond us are revealed as integral to experience. Husserl thus suggests a way in which living and natural movements, beyond the anthropocentric, are integral to the experiential field, such that they could give us an educating lens into a new concept of nature itself."

From the David Morris paper, it also helps me with Descartes.
 
smcder said:
Austin L. Hughes

The Folly of Scientism

For reference - to the phenomenological critique of scien/tism.

@Soupie - re: "metaphysical" and "ground"
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I thought this from Evan Thompson was excellent in this regard:

Constance said:
Naturalism," too, is understood in a variety of ways. ...

It will be useful to have in hand a forceful form of naturalism. "Scientific naturalism" can be defined as the view that science provides the best account of reality. The view has an ontological component and a methodological component (Papineau 2009). The ontological component is physicalism, the thesis that everything that exists, including the mind, is completely physical. The methodological component is the thesis that the methods of empirical science give science a general and final authority about the world, and therefore science should be epistemically privileged over all other forms of investigation. Scientific naturalism is a philosophical thesis, not a thesis belonging to any of the empirical sciences themselves. Although some scientists may espouse scientific naturalism, it is not built into the actual practice of empirical science. Moreover, when a scientist gives voice to scientific naturalism, she or he no longer speaks just as a scientist. Dan Zahavi quotes Husserl to make this point:

When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking; and it assuredly is not when they are talking about 'philosophy of Nature' and 'epistemology as a natural science.' (Husserl 1982, p. 39, quoted by Zahavi, p. 31).
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I feel like I'm getting some traction now on phenomenology, more broadly - the Merleau Ponty preface in context of the above posts and the Dreyfus paper and the Morris paper - the Morris and Dreyfus papers set out the phenomenology vs logical analysis debate ... Dreyfus Heideggerean critique of AI in What Computers Can't Do is what got me to take Heidegger as relevant and was key to getting into Being and Time - Dreyfus commentary on Being and Time is available online and is a classic ... @Constance, have you read it?

@Constance what was the name of your mentor who did a commentary on Being and Time?
 
smcder said:
... Dreyfus Heideggerean critique of AI in What Computers Can't Do is what got me to take Heidegger as relevant and was key to getting into Being and Time - Dreyfus commentary on Being and Time is available online and is a classic ... @Constance, have you read it?
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Hi Steve. I read Dreyfus's papers re AI years ago but don't remember his commentary on Being and Time. Would you link it again? Is this the work you mean, evidently available online at Questia ---

Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I by Hubert L. Dreyfus, 1991 | Online Research Library: Questia
?

@Constance what was the name of your mentor who did a commentary on Being and Time?
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E. F. Kaelin. You'll find the preface and introductory chapter of his Being and Time: A Reading for Readers available following the summary of Drefus's work on Being and Time on the same Questia page linked above.

The following extract from Kaelin's introduction exemplifies his comprehensive understanding of the 'Continental' tradition in philosophy in which phenomenology and existentialism developed and evolved into the post-structuralist philosophy underlying contemporary literary, cultural, and social theory in what has become designated as interdisciplinary 'Critical Theory'.

"It was the poststructuralists, under the direction of the Parisian historian of philosophy, Jacques Derrida, [25] who created the most effective answer to my leading question, What is in a literary work of art in addition to a represented fictional world? The answer is cogent and stems from considering a literary work merely as a piece of writing, a text -- indeed, a set of signs, not with an associated set of signified meanings but a set of signs for which the reader of the piece of writing merely substitutes another set of signs, the critical text.

These, too, to be "understood" must be interpreted, and so on ad infinitum. And if there is no ultimate meaning of a given text, there is likewise no initial structural relationship or essence that constitutes the source of the given text.

Heidegger, we recall, described the artist's being-in-the-world as the ultimate source of an artwork's working; and what gets expressed in that source is the human artist's opening to being, indeed to feeling, to interpretive understanding, and to the act of speech. But without a
reader's interpretive response the artist's expression would be a 'meaningless' gesture. . . . ."
 
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Found a simpler link on the Searle / Dreyfus (Heidegger) logical analysis / phenomenology ... I guess one way to see the issue is:

what is first philosophy?

Searle and The Phenomenological Illusion

"This is akin to Wittgenstein’s answer to the question “How do words attain meaning?” or “What is meaning?” His answer sort of leveled centuries of wrestling with this problem: the meaning of a word is how it is used in the language. I think Heidegger’s answer to how ink and paper become a twenty dollar bill is similar: it becomes a twenty dollar bill when it is used as such, experienced as such, acknowledged as such, etc. Once this has occured, it isn’t simply a subjective matter; it is a fact about reality. In his words,the human being and the being of the twenty dollar bill, like other entities encounted in the world, are concomitantly “bound up” in each others destinies. This has to happen first, but to come to realize this fact, ‘the world’ of a human reality with twenty dollar bills must already be.

It is for this reason I believe that Heidegger holds the twenty dollar bill is ontologically prior to the ink and paper of which it is composed."
 
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