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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

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Pharoah said:
@Constance Where does MP talk about the bubble? which book?
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In the Phenomenology of Perception. Dreyfus, in the paper linked below, lays out his interpretation of MP's metaphor of the 'bubble'. Steve [@smcder ] has read far more of Dreyfus than I have and will be the best guide to his theories concerning the relationship of phenomenology to cognitive science.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/MerleauPontySkillCogSci.pdf


{Given that I haven't read Dreyfus in depth, I still want to note that from what I have read so far my impression is that he fails to recognize the evolution of feeling/emotion in living species [recognized by Panksepp and others] and as a consequence cannot account for the aesthetic dimensions of experienced being-in-the-world that influence the motivations toward meaningful coexistence in our species and others.}
 
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Pharoah said:
A. Chemero, “An Outline of a Theory of Affordances”, Ecological Psychology, 15, 2, 181-195, 2003.
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I wish I had time to read this paper now but will have to wait until my household move is completed. The first paragraph:

"The primary difference between direct and inferential theories of perception concerns the location of perceptual content, the meaning of our perceptions. In inferential theories of perception, these meanings arise inside animals, based on their interactions with the physical environment. Light, for example, bumps into receptors, causing a sensation. The animal (or its brain) performs inferences on the sensation, yielding a meaningful perception. In direct theories of perception, on the other hand, meaning is in the environment, and perception does not depend on meaning-conferring inferences; instead, the animal simply gathers information from a meaning-laden environment. However, if the environment contains meanings, then it cannot be merely physical. This places a heavy theoretical burden on direct theories of perception, a burden so severe that it may outweigh all the advantages to conceiving perception as direct. This is because direct theories of perception require a new ontology, one that is at odds with today’s physicalist, reductionist consensus that says the world just is
the physical world, full stop. Without a coherent understanding of what the world is like, such that it can contain meanings and is not merely physical, direct perception is simply indefensible. Thus, like earlier theories that take perception to be direct (e.g., Heidegger, 1962; James,1912/1976), James Gibson’s ecological psychology (1966,1979) includes
an ontology, his theory of affordances (1979)."
 
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Here's a book by Mary-Jane Rubenstein available online -- Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe -- which I am eager to read:

Strange Wonder

ps: she's a brilliant interpreter of Heidegger and Levinas (see at pp. 55-66, the only pages I've read so far), and a greatly gifted writer. I'm so glad you found her, Steve!!!
 
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I recommend the introductory chapter of Strange Wonder, much of which is available at this Google Books page:
Strange Wonder

Google Books' description:

"Strange Wonder confronts Western philosophy's ambivalent relationship to the Platonic "wonder" that reveals the strangeness of the everyday. On the one hand, this wonder is said to be the origin of all philosophy. On the other hand, it is associated with a kind of ignorance that ought to be extinguished as swiftly as possible. By endeavoring to resolve wonder's indeterminacy into certainty and calculability, philosophy paradoxically secures itself at the expense of its own condition of possibility.

Strange Wonder locates a reopening of wonder's primordial uncertainty in the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom wonder is first experienced as the shock at the groundlessness of things and then as an astonishment that things nevertheless are. Mary-Jane Rubenstein traces this double movement through the thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida, ultimately thematizing wonder as the awesome, awful opening that exposes thinking to devastation as well as transformation. Rubenstein's study shows that wonder reveals the extraordinary in and through the ordinary, and is therefore crucial to the task of reimagining political, religious, and ethical terrain."
 
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Constance said:
The titles of Rubenstein's papers are intriguing. I wish she would provide at least their abstracts at academia.edu. We could request that she post some or all of her papers there. I'd be particularly interested in first reading the paper entitled "The Unbearable Withness of Being." How did you first come across her work?
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I think it was youtube, when I was looking for something else:


Cosmic Singularities: On the Nothing & the Sovereign

Published on Nov 12, 2014

Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein gives a talk on the concepts of Nothingness and Sovereignty through theological and astrophysical sources. Until very recently, the creation myth of secular modernity has been the big bang hypothesis: the expansion of our universe out of a single point. Physicists concede that in its traditional form, this story performs an uncanny recapitulation of Christian creation theology: the universe bursts forth suddenly, in a flood of light, out of nothing. As many contemporary thinkers have argued, however, the “nothing” of Christian orthodoxy is neither scripturally nor doctrinally self-evident; rather, it is the product of ontopolitical efforts to secure the sovereignty of God. This lecture traces the twinned concepts of sovereignty and nothingness through theological and astrophysical sources, arguing that even rabidly atheistic appeals to the ex nihilo end up enshrining a figure of absolute power. Ultimately, it suggests that far from supporting an absolute beginning, quantum and multiverse cosmologies undermine the logic of nothingness and sovereignty by means of chaos and entanglement.

 
@Constance. found it in The structure of behavior

re Chemero: would it be right to think of Heidegger as a being in the direct affordance camp and MP not? For MP it is the form, embodied, that is the qualifying importance. being is not so much 'in the world' but an intrinsic embodied form (if that makes sense).
 
The Philosopher of Feelings
Constance said:
Downloads of Rubenstein's papers are available at this link:

SelectedWorks - Mary-Jane Rubenstein
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I'm developing an interest in philosophy as a search for the good life, for the human life ... if we're on the cusp of becoming something else, something more than human or being replaced ... I will have wanted to examine what it meant to be human in the first place ...

"the logic of ordinary human intelligence" is a phrase I came across in a discussion of John Wattling - a little published philosopher who was more influential in conversation, teaching and presence - in fact in a discussion with many philosophers of who was the most impressive philosopher they'd ever known (posted above) - one thing that came out fairly often was that an impressive philosophical mind was found in conjunction with personality and character traits and that often a philosopher's true measure was found more in their company and their conversation than their writings.

So the links I've posted lately and this one:

Philosophical Feelings | Issue 101 | Philosophy Now

... and also wanting to read more of the feminine voice in philosophy, or other voices that bring in a conscious femininity - male or female ... or I'm really not sure what, because many things in my life right now make me realize how woefully inadequate my grasp of the feminine in the human is ... again, be that in the male or the female or in the spirit of philosophia herself.
 
Pharoah said:
@Constance
re Chemero: would it be right to think of Heidegger as a being in the direct affordance camp and MP not? For MP it is the form, embodied, that is the qualifying importance. being is not so much 'in the world' but an intrinsic embodied form (if that makes sense).
Click to expand...

Sorry, I can't respond to that question until I've had time to read the Chemero paper. Meanwhile, would you write a bit more about the distinction you're drawing between H and MP? Thanks.
 
@smcder . . . Hi Steve. I've received an encrypted document from you in my gmail that comes with warnings attached (perhaps from Norton). I haven't opened it yet since I'm not sure it's from you and safe to open. Pharoah has also received this email and has the same concerns. Let us know whether we should open the email or not. :)
 
I've come across a new book on prereflective consciousness published by Routledge that looks as if it meets us at this point in our sustained thread. Here's a link to the preface and table of contents:

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Hardback) - Routledge

I'm especially interested in the third paper (ch. 3), "Degrees of Self-Presence: Rehabilitating Sartre's accounts of pre-reflective self-consciousness and reflection" by Kenneth Williford, which is available almost in toto in the book sample at amazon. I'm trying to find it elsewhere on the internet. I think it clarifies a number of issues that have remained obscure in our mutual understanding of the phenomenology of consciousness.
 
From SEP, further to prereflective consciousness and its implicit self-reference:

Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness
First published Sat Feb 19, 2005; substantive revision Wed Dec 24, 2014

On the phenomenological view, a minimal form of self-consciousness is a constant structural feature of conscious experience. Experience happens for the experiencing subject in an immediate way and as part of this immediacy, it is implicitly marked as my experience. For phenomenologists, this immediate and first-personal givenness of experiential phenomena is accounted for in terms of a pre-reflective self-consciousness. In the most basic sense of the term, self-consciousness is not something that comes about the moment one attentively inspects or reflectively introspects one's experiences, or recognizes one's specular image in the mirror, or refers to oneself with the use of the first-person pronoun, or constructs a self-narrative. Rather, these different kinds of self-consciousness are to be distinguished from the pre-reflective self-consciousness which is present whenever I am living through or undergoing an experience, i.e., whenever I am consciously perceiving the world, whenever I am thinking an occurrent thought, whenever I am feeling sad or happy, thirsty or in pain, and so forth.

Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
 
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