But where in Hoffman's brand of 'Conscious Realism" do "mind-independent objects" exist?
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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But where in Hoffman's brand of 'Conscious Realism" do "mind-independent objects" exist?
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
"Conscious realism is a proposed answer to the question of what the universe is made of. Conscious realism asserts that the objective world, i.e., the world whose existence does not depend on the perceptions of a particular observer, consists entirely of conscious agents. Conscious realism is a non-physicalist monism."
Ah, I thought you were saying you considered Hoffman's 'conscious realism' to be a form of idealism. Maybe Steve suggested that somewhere above. In any case, 'conscious realism' does not seem to be well-named in our time of vigorous attempts to understand what 'consciousness' is.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
I was asking @Soupie what the relationship of CR was to Idealism, if it was a kind of Idealism.
I've been trying to go back a bit and get things straight in my head and the papers by Strawson have been very helpful - I think because he makes a real effort to be clear himself and to try and clear things up.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Indeed, as concerns the MBP, I do think Strawson's and Hoffman's views parallel one another:
(1) Both agree that consciousness is fundamental—that it doesn't emerge from physical processes
(2) Both agree that there is an objective, mind-independent reality—albeit a reality suffused with consciousness. (Strawson, matter; Hoffman, Conscious Agents)
(3) Both reject Naive Realism, and
(4) Both agree that our perceptions are computed by physiological/neural processes in brains
The big difference between the two is the degree to which they believe our perceptions of reality are veridical; Strawson I'm guessing would be a Critical Realist, while Hoffman has his radical Interface Theory.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Thank you Constance.
@Soupie said
I know, smcder. You are a dualist, even though profess not to be. Youve expressed an affinity for the idea that minds/POV's are fundamental.
@Soupie I'm unclear (and would like to become clear) if you mean that I don't realize I'm a dualist? or that I intentionally profess not to be for some other reason?
As I've said - I don't take any position and that leaves me free to explore and occasionally defend positions in the interest of balance and completeness. Going forward then, absent any declaration ... this can be assumed to be my position: one of
- "hard"ish (firm?) agnosticism re: theories of consciousness.
Though I do like Schwitzgebel's "Crazyism" and I'm sympathetic to the Mysterianism(s) of Nagel and McGinn.
@Constance At the same time I have long sensed that your (@Soupie) own favored approaches in consciousness studies have remained tethered to dualism.
This idea, that Dualism could create a kind of "reaction formation" that drives other views, has come up twice since you made this comment:
1. Strawson argues at the beginning of "Real Physicalism" that it is the "thrall" of dualism and a fundamental error in thinking that we know something about matter that makes it incompatible with consciousness that drives Dennet's (et al) eliminativism and later Strawson uses something like this in his critique of some versions of "neutral monism" which I think may have an uneasy relationship to dualism.
2. Contemporary Dualism: A Defense // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
"One of the most intriguing papers is "Neuroscience: Dualism in Disguise" by Riccardo Manzotti and Paolo Moderato.They argue that neuroscientists implicitly accept a view that they explicitly reject: dualism. They mention two assumptions of neuroscience (85):"
Thanks. That is clarifying, and I think a good position to occupy.
I want to read that critique. Does it occur later in "Real Physicalism" or in another paper by Strawson?
Also a must-read to add to the reading list we've accumulated in the last week. Glad you found it.
“The big difference between the two is the degree to which they believe our perceptions of reality are veridical; Strawson I'm guessing would be a Critical Realist, while Hoffman has his radical Interface Theory.”
What you call "the big difference" is very big indeed. I wonder how Strawson would respond to your comparison of his thinking with Hoffman's. Especially concerning your fourth point:
“(4) Both agree that our perceptions are computed by physiological/neural processes in brains.”
Why don't you email your post to Strawson and ask him for a response? He seems to be a pretty available guy and is likely to respond.
Re your claim in (4), it's, imo, an improvement over what I understood to be your earlier position -- that processes in the brain generate, produce, our perceptions, including the experienced meaning of our perceptions. But the verb "computed" still seems to me to be misleading, implying that it is the neurons and neural nets that experience being and reflect on its possible meaning.
No doubt the evolution of neurological processes in the brain has supported our integrations of our experiences and perceptions in the present within the cumulative context of our past experiences and perceptions. But can interacting neurons and neural nets in the brain sense the lived experience of being-in-the-world – of being present in an always temporally open-ended situation among things and others-- which begins in prereflective consciousness before reflection on experience begins? In what way are neurons and neural networks present in the experience of being and capable of ‘making sense’ of that experience?
Coming back to your point 4, I want to note that it seems to me that your use of the verb 'computed' indicates a commitment to Hoffman's idea/belief that what we can perceive is already computed before we can experience it, and that this computation is itself already restricted in affording us only a narrow range of possible perceptions of our being in the world. Against this kind of thinking we need to consult Heidegger's and other phenomenologists thought concerning "originary experiences" of being.
This article in the IEP, "Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness,"
should be helpful at this point in the development of our own critical thinking regarding the nature of time as fundamentally experienced in the temporality of consciousness.
Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyPhenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
should be helpful at this point in the development of our own critical thinking regarding the nature of time as fundamentally experienced in the temporality of consciousness.
Phenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of PhilosophyPhenomenology and Time-Consciousness | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance
I can't remember if I have posted this ... Mary Jane Rubinstein seems to be thriving as a female in philosophy, she has tremendous and infectious energy and humor.
The paper presented in the video is entitled:
One Way Up Through the Way Back into the Out of Ontotheology. It's at works.bepress.com but I can't seem to copy the link. She has a number of fascinating talks including many on the multiverse.
In this talk she touches on some fascinating aspects of Heidegger's thought. Has anyone carried these concerns forward? Metaphysics and its concerns for the world only instrumentally? Going to ground?
I can't remember if I have posted this ... Mary Jane Rubinstein seems to be thriving as a female in philosophy, she has tremendous and infectious energy and humor.
The paper presented in the video is entitled:
One Way Up Through the Way Back into the Out of Ontotheology. It's at works.bepress.com but I can't seem to copy the link. She has a number of fascinating talks including many on the multiverse.
In this talk she touches on some fascinating aspects of Heidegger's thought. Has anyone carried these concerns forward? Metaphysics and its concerns for the world only instrumentally? Going to ground?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"Something like this level of ridiculousness lies behind that strange moment in the WB essay
when Heidegger suddenly asks (and one wonders whom he is asking), will Christian theology ever decide to listen to the Apostle Paul and declare that philosophy is foolishness? (W, 218). In other words, will anyone ever realize that theology has no business wedding itself to Greek ontology? That God is not being? Anyone other than me? Because, have I made it clear, I’m not writing a theology?"
when Heidegger suddenly asks (and one wonders whom he is asking), will Christian theology ever decide to listen to the Apostle Paul and declare that philosophy is foolishness? (W, 218). In other words, will anyone ever realize that theology has no business wedding itself to Greek ontology? That God is not being? Anyone other than me? Because, have I made it clear, I’m not writing a theology?"
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"But this isn’t what Heidegger means by the term. When Heidegger says “metaphysics,” he means the whole history of western philosophy—all the way from Plato, or in his more dismal moods, the presocratics—through Hegel. He means that calculative kind of thinking in which a thinking subject represents beings as objects, a thinking which furthermore maps this subjective/objective split onto a host of other dualisms: substance versus accident, eternal versus temporal, form versus matter, etc. Now Heidegger says that this tradition was overturned by Friedrich Nietzsche, who revealed the socalled intelligible realm as an unstable product of the sensible realm. This, Heidegger says, is what Nietzsche’s madman means when he cries through the marketplace that “God is Dead.” (slide) “The pronouncement ‘God is dead’ means: the suprasensory world is without effective power. It bestows no life. Metaphysics, i.e. for Nietzsche, Western philosophy understood as Platonism, is at an end.” (WN, 61). So Nietzsche proclaimed the end of Platonism, and he overturned it, but he didn’t overcome it, says Heidegger. Nietzsche still remains within the confines of metaphysics because (in Heidegger’s often strained interpretation of him), in order to free himself from God and the Forms as the site of ultimate value, he consolidated the human subject as the site of ultimate value. “God is dead,” the madman says, “and we have killed him.” This theocidal human subject becomes, for Heidegger’s Nietzsche, “ the executor of unconditional will to power ” (N, 95): the one who ultimately determines the value of being in the absence of transcendence, and for that reason, the human subject becomes the master of being itself. (slide) “Man enters into insurrection,” Heidegger writes in this same essay on Nietzsche, The world changes into object. In this revolutionary objectifying of everything that is, the earth…moves into the midst of human positing and analyzing. The earth can show itself only as the object of assault, an assault that, in human willing, establishes itself as unconditional objectification. Nature appears everywhere…as the object of technology (N, 100)."
smcder
Paranormal Adept
@Constance -does anyone talk abouth this now? Are there any voices this big? Charles Taylor? Heidegger seemed already overwhelmed with the hydroelectric projects with our refusal to let being be.
Extending my response to @Soupie's post today, I had written
and later wrote:
Here is an informative paper I've just read that critiques various ideas about perception and experience held within the precincts of contemporary analytical philosophy that might be more approachable for you:
From T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Is there a perceptual relation?
Tim Crane, University College London
https://philpapers.org/archive/CRAITA-4.pdf
Extract:
“…Some philosophers, however, will deny that intentionality or representation is non-relational: externalists about intentionality or mental content will say that some intentionality is genuinely relational. They will say that some representations are relational and others are not. Hence they will say that some intentionality is relational and some is not. Of course, I cannot object to someone who decides to use the term ‘intentionality’ in this way; the important thing here is not which words one uses but which ideas and distinctions among ideas one is trying to express. Nonetheless, I doubt whether this is the most helpful way to use the terminology of intentionality in this context. For it seems to me extremely obscure how one of the fundamental characteristics of the mind (or, indeed, anything) could, in itself, be sometimes a relation, and sometimes not. But I will not address this issue directly here. Instead, I will briefly address the question of whether such a ‘mixed’ view of intentionality can properly accommodate the distinction I am drawing (to use Campbell’s words) between relational and representational views of experience. . . . ."
and later wrote:
Here is an informative paper I've just read that critiques various ideas about perception and experience held within the precincts of contemporary analytical philosophy that might be more approachable for you:
From T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (eds.) Perceptual Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
Is there a perceptual relation?
Tim Crane, University College London
https://philpapers.org/archive/CRAITA-4.pdf
Extract:
“…Some philosophers, however, will deny that intentionality or representation is non-relational: externalists about intentionality or mental content will say that some intentionality is genuinely relational. They will say that some representations are relational and others are not. Hence they will say that some intentionality is relational and some is not. Of course, I cannot object to someone who decides to use the term ‘intentionality’ in this way; the important thing here is not which words one uses but which ideas and distinctions among ideas one is trying to express. Nonetheless, I doubt whether this is the most helpful way to use the terminology of intentionality in this context. For it seems to me extremely obscure how one of the fundamental characteristics of the mind (or, indeed, anything) could, in itself, be sometimes a relation, and sometimes not. But I will not address this issue directly here. Instead, I will briefly address the question of whether such a ‘mixed’ view of intentionality can properly accommodate the distinction I am drawing (to use Campbell’s words) between relational and representational views of experience. . . . ."
Google Search enabled me to find this paper among other papers by Rubenstein that are downloadable at this link.
SelectedWorks - Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Here is the link to the download of "On the Way up through the Way back into Out ...":
file:///C:/Users/constance/Downloads/fulltext_stamped%20(2).pdf
ETA: Ooops, that link only goes to, and can't go through to my download of the paper. Instead,
go to the fourth item up on the right side of the wh0le downloads site at the first link above.
{Funny thing, I remember being attracted, even in the 5th grade, to the 49 or so prepositions in the grammar of our language, which now that I think about it suggests an early orientation to thinking about the relationships between and among things and perceivers, including myself. I think that's why I responded so thoroughly to the Stevens phrase I quoted here recently: "the intricacies of perception, when perceived".}
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