smcder
Paranormal Adept
I like that, reminds me of learning math and thinking ... this is just highly organized common sense! Kind of silly but I remember thinking that.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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I like that, reminds me of learning math and thinking ... this is just highly organized common sense! Kind of silly but I remember thinking that.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Lecture 11 in this series ... a good discussion of the Libet experiment, including a critique I'd not heard before, starts about 7 minutes in. I'll see if I can find a transcript
@Constance the supplementary materials we are looking at should have extensive resources on this
@Constance the supplementary materials we are looking at should have extensive resources on this
At the turn of the new year Steve linked the following statement by Michel Bitbol, "On the Primary Nature of Consciousness," in our review of key papers in the project of 'naturalizing phenomenology' or 'phenomenologizing nature'. We briefly discussed Bitbol's statement and wondered about the definition of word 'efficience' Bitbol uses, and I said I'd ask a French friend of mine to help us understand what that term means in the French language. She has now returned and responded:
"What I could find is the word "aptitude" as synonyme of 'efficience'.
So it would mean that neurosciences are incapable of "understanding
phenomenal consciousness because they don't have the right aptitude."
I think we should confront Bitbol's challenge to reductive neuroscience again if we want to continue to reflect here on the naturalization project. It seems to me that within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies it is now clear to the majority of participants that phenomenology and neuroscience must be integrated if progress is to be made. Here is the Bitbol statement for review; the bibliography he provided with that statement is included and presents papers we might be able to locate online.
"On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
Michel Bitbol
CNRS / Ecole Normale Superieure (Archives Husserl), Paris
Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi,
The Systems View of Life,
Cambridge UniversityPress, 2014, p. 266-268
Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one's own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere 'feel' of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.
We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein's expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one's own experience and the others' experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, o elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific statement: it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.
But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of 'having a feel'). In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to appear as irrelevant or incidental.
As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent predictors of subject's behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of [to] provide
reports in clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the functions of consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like to be an organism performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the organism, integrated action planning, or self-monitoring), but not the mere fact that there is something it is like to implement these functions. Indeed, only the functions have adaptative value, not their being experienced.
Even the ability of neurophysiological inquiry to identify correlates of phenomenal consciousness can be challenged on that basis. After all, identifying such correlates rely [relies] heavily on the subject's ability to discriminate, to memorize, and to report , which is used as the ultimate experimental criterion of consciousness. Can we preclude the possibility that the large-scale synchronization of complex neural activity of the brain cortex often deemed indispensible for consciousness, is in fact only required for interconnecting a number of cognitive functions including those needed for memorizing, self-reflecting and reporting? Conversely, extrapolating Semir Zeki's suggestion, can we preclude that any (large or small) area of the brain or even of the body is associated to some sort of fleeting pure experience, although no report can be obtained from it?
Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory; but they still have 'implicit memories' of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial acknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue.
Should we content ourselves with these negative remarks ?As Francisco Varela has shown, one can overcome them by proposing a broadened definition of science. Instead of remaining stuck within the third-person attitude, the new science should include a 'dance' of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts, mediated by the second person level of social exchange. As soon as this momentous turn is taken, elementary consciousness is no longer a mystery for a truncated science, but an aknowledged datum from which a fuller kind of science can unfold.
Bibliography
Bitbol M., 'Science as if situation mattered',
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 1, 181-224, 2002
Bitbol, M., 'Is Consciousness Primary?',
NeuroQuantology, 6, 53-71, 2008
Bitbol, M. & Luisi, P.-L., 'Science and the self-referentiality of consciousness',
Journal of Cosmology, 14, 4728-4743, 2011
Varela, F.V., 'Neurophenomenology : a methodological remedy for the hard problem', in: Shear J (ed.) Explaining consciousness, the hard problem, MIT Press, 1998
Wittgenstein, L., 'Notes for lectures on private experience and sense data', Philosophical Review, 77, 275-320,1968
Zeki, S., 'The disunity of consciousness', in R. Banerjee & B.K. Chakrabarti (Eds.),
Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168, Elsevier, 2008"
"What I could find is the word "aptitude" as synonyme of 'efficience'.
So it would mean that neurosciences are incapable of "understanding
phenomenal consciousness because they don't have the right aptitude."
I think we should confront Bitbol's challenge to reductive neuroscience again if we want to continue to reflect here on the naturalization project. It seems to me that within the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies it is now clear to the majority of participants that phenomenology and neuroscience must be integrated if progress is to be made. Here is the Bitbol statement for review; the bibliography he provided with that statement is included and presents papers we might be able to locate online.
"On the primary nature of consciousness (a short statement)
Michel Bitbol
CNRS / Ecole Normale Superieure (Archives Husserl), Paris
Published as an insert in F. Capra & P.-L. Luisi,
The Systems View of Life,
Cambridge UniversityPress, 2014, p. 266-268
Nobody can deny that complex features of consciousness, such as reflexivity (the awareness that there is awareness of something), or self-consciousness (the awareness of one's own identity) are late outcomes of a process of biological adaptation. But what about pure non-reflexive experience ? What about the mere 'feel' of sensing and being, irrespective of any second-order awareness of this feel ? There are good reasons to think that pure experience, or elementary consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, is no secondary feature of an objective item but plainly here, primary in the strongest sense of the word.
We start with this plain fact : the world as we found it (to borrow Wittgenstein's expression) is no collection of objects ; it is indissolubly a perceptive-experience-of-objects, or an imaginative experience of these objects qua being out of reach of perceptive experience. In other terms, conscious experience is self-evidently pervasive and existentially primary. Moreover, any scientific undertaking presupposes one's own experience and the others' experiences as well. In history and on a day-to-day basis, the objective descriptions which are characteristic of science arise as an invariant structural focus for subjects endowed with conscious experience. In this sense, scientific findings, including results of neurophysiology and evolution theory, are methodologically secondary to experience. Experience, o elementary consciousness, can then be said to be methodologically primary for science. Consequently, the claim of primariness of elementary consciousness is no scientific statement: it just expresses a most basic prerequisite of science.
But conversely, this means that the objective science of nature has no real bearing on the pure experience that tacitly underpins it. The latter allegation sounds hard to swallow in view of so many momentous successes of neurosciences. Yet, if one thinks a little harder, any sense of paradox vanishes. Actually, it is in virtue of the very efficience of neurosciences that they can have no grip on phenomenal consciousness. Indeed, as soon as this efficience is fully put to use, nothing prevents one from offering a purely neurophysiological account of the chain of causes operating from a sensory input received by an organism to the elaborate behaviour of this organism. At no point does one need to invoke the circumstance that this organism is perceiving and acting consciously (in the most elementary sense of 'having a feel'). In a mature cognitive neuroscience, the fact of phenomenal consciousness is bound to appear as irrelevant or incidental.
As a result, any attempt at providing a scientific account of phenomenal consciousness, by way of neurological or evolutionary theories, is doomed to failure (not because of any deficiency of these sciences, but precisely as a side effect of their most fruitful methodological option). Modern neurological theories, such as global workspace theory or integrated information theory, have been remarkably successful in accounting for major features of higher levels of consciousness, such as the capacity of unifying the field of awareness and of elaborating self-mapping. They have also turned out to be excellent predictors of subject's behavioral wakefulness and ability/inability of [to] provide
reports in clinical situations such as coma and epileptic seizure. But they have provided absolutely no clue about the origin of phenomenal consciousness. They have explained the functions of consciousness, but not the circumstance that there is something it is like to be an organism performing these functions. The same is true of evolutionist arguments. Evolution can select some useful functions ascribed to consciousness (such as behavioral emotivity of the organism, integrated action planning, or self-monitoring), but not the mere fact that there is something it is like to implement these functions. Indeed, only the functions have adaptative value, not their being experienced.
Even the ability of neurophysiological inquiry to identify correlates of phenomenal consciousness can be challenged on that basis. After all, identifying such correlates rely [relies] heavily on the subject's ability to discriminate, to memorize, and to report , which is used as the ultimate experimental criterion of consciousness. Can we preclude the possibility that the large-scale synchronization of complex neural activity of the brain cortex often deemed indispensible for consciousness, is in fact only required for interconnecting a number of cognitive functions including those needed for memorizing, self-reflecting and reporting? Conversely, extrapolating Semir Zeki's suggestion, can we preclude that any (large or small) area of the brain or even of the body is associated to some sort of fleeting pure experience, although no report can be obtained from it?
Data from general anaesthesia feed this doubt. When the doses of certain classes of anaesthetic drugs are increased and coherent EEG frequency is decreased, mental abilities are lost step by step, one after another. At first, subjects lose some of their appreciation of pain, but can still have dialogue with doctors and remember every event. Then, they lose their ability of recalling long-term explicit memories of what is going on, but they are still able to react and answer demands on a momentary basis. With higher doses of drugs, patients lose ability to respond to requests, in addition to losing their explicit memory; but they still have 'implicit memories' of the situation. To recapitulate, faculties that are usually taken together as necessary to consciousness are in fact dissociable from one another. And pure, instantaneous, unmemorized, non-reflective experience might well be the last item left. This looks like a scientific hint as to the ubiquity and primariness of phenomenal consciousness. Of course, a scientific hint does not mean a scientific proof (at any rate, claiming that there exists a scientific proof of the primariness of elementary consciousness would badly contradict our initial acknowledgment that objective science can have no real grip on pure experience). The former scientific hint is only an indirect indication coming from the very blindspot of science: the pure passing experience it presupposes, and of which it retains only a stabilized and intersubjectively shared structural residue.
Should we content ourselves with these negative remarks ?As Francisco Varela has shown, one can overcome them by proposing a broadened definition of science. Instead of remaining stuck within the third-person attitude, the new science should include a 'dance' of mutual definition taking place between first-person and third-person accounts, mediated by the second person level of social exchange. As soon as this momentous turn is taken, elementary consciousness is no longer a mystery for a truncated science, but an aknowledged datum from which a fuller kind of science can unfold.
Bibliography
Bitbol M., 'Science as if situation mattered',
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science, 1, 181-224, 2002
Bitbol, M., 'Is Consciousness Primary?',
NeuroQuantology, 6, 53-71, 2008
Bitbol, M. & Luisi, P.-L., 'Science and the self-referentiality of consciousness',
Journal of Cosmology, 14, 4728-4743, 2011
Varela, F.V., 'Neurophenomenology : a methodological remedy for the hard problem', in: Shear J (ed.) Explaining consciousness, the hard problem, MIT Press, 1998
Wittgenstein, L., 'Notes for lectures on private experience and sense data', Philosophical Review, 77, 275-320,1968
Zeki, S., 'The disunity of consciousness', in R. Banerjee & B.K. Chakrabarti (Eds.),
Progress in Brain Research, Vol. 168, Elsevier, 2008"
The following exchange between Steve and @Soupie a few weeks ago --which I'd love to see developed further -- bears out the difficulties inherent in our efforts to think nature and mind either as unified or as distinct from one another. It also exemplifies the statement from James, cited in Steve's signature line, that "Metaphysics means nothing but an unusually obstinate effort to think clearly."
Whence that obstinate effort, perpetuated in philosophy and poetry, meanwhile largely abandoned by 'modern' science? As one Wallace Stevens scholar observes in reading Stevens's philosophical and meditative poetry, "the mental activity resulting from the attempt to deal with what cannot be grasped easily is the same activity which enables man not only to place himself in a 'world not his own,' but also to shape himself."* And that shaping (of what is available to minds to think) is a temporally and historically open-ended process.
*Lisa Steinman, "Figure and Figuration in Stevens’ Long Poems," second paper at this link:
http://wallacestevens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Vol.-1-No.-1-Spring-1977-1.pdf
From Stevens's poem "Connoisseur of Chaos":
". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see."
Whence that obstinate effort, perpetuated in philosophy and poetry, meanwhile largely abandoned by 'modern' science? As one Wallace Stevens scholar observes in reading Stevens's philosophical and meditative poetry, "the mental activity resulting from the attempt to deal with what cannot be grasped easily is the same activity which enables man not only to place himself in a 'world not his own,' but also to shape himself."* And that shaping (of what is available to minds to think) is a temporally and historically open-ended process.
*Lisa Steinman, "Figure and Figuration in Stevens’ Long Poems," second paper at this link:
http://wallacestevens.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Vol.-1-No.-1-Spring-1977-1.pdf
From Stevens's poem "Connoisseur of Chaos":
". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see."
1) Is it better to say that Mindedness and intentionality are basic/fundamental than to say minds and intention is basic/fundamental? Is that better?
2) The boundary problem and minds being arbitrary ... what I am saying is that if we admit evidence that mind is non-local then the question is no longer "why do I only have my thoughts and sensations?"
Is the question: "how does the undifferentiated differentiate?" If it is, could you apply the tetralemma:
- If what-is does not differentiate via atomization, how else might it do so?
not sure I've worded this completely right, so here's the reference:
Tetralemma - Wikipedia
(affirmation)
¬X(negation)
X¬X(both) equiv.
¬X¬X(neither)
What's left is the "ineffable" and an argument for putting the ineffable on logical grounds is laid out here:
- What-is is not undifferentiated
- What-is is not differentiated
- BOTH What-is is not (undifferentiated AND differentiated)
- NEITHER What-is is neither (undifferentiated OR differentiated)
The Fifth Corner of Four | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures
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ps Steve, I loved the conference presentation titled "The Fifth Corner" which you linked in the above quoted post. Here is the location for links to other papers presented at this conference:
The New Madhyamaka | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures
The New Madhyamaka | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures
Here is a link to Michel Bitbol's presentation to the New Madhyamaka conference, entitled "Quantum Mechanics and Deep Interconnectedness."
Quantum Mechanics and Deep Interconnectness | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures
Quantum Mechanics and Deep Interconnectness | University of Oxford Podcasts - Audio and Video Lectures
Connoisseur of Chaos
I
A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
II
If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.
III
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
IV
A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.
V
The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Wallace Stevens
I
A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
II
If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.
III
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
IV
A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.
V
The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Wallace Stevens
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Last edited:
smcder
Paranormal Adept
This is the latest post from a blog I've been following for some time, The Archdruid Report. This one seems to me to be relevant to recent discussions here:
The Archdruid Report: The World as Representation
The Archdruid Report: The World as Representation
Very interesting and I plan to follow future installments. How often do I need to check Greer's site for new essays, weekly?
Also, can you summarize/characterize 'the Druid Perspective' or link me to a summary? Thanks.
One of the numerous comments following JMG's linked essay:
Mario Incandenza 2/9/17, 12:47 PM
It's worth noting that this disappearance of philosophy from the public sphere is especially a phenomenon of the anglophone world. In France, for instance, philosophy still gets a fair degree of the pop culture treatment, and is incorporated into the standard secondary school education. I think a major reason for this is the devolution of most english-language philosophy into "analytic" philosophy, an institutionalized discourse that models itself on the sciences and limits itself to questions that can be "rigorously" expressed (where rigor is construed as expressible in the terms of formal logic). This has accomplished two things, primarily: 1) it has produced a false, overly narrow conception of truth as that which is logically demonstrable; and 2) it has ceased to be able to speak to almost everything that is actually meaningful in experience. In other places (and, to be fair, still at the margins of anglophone philosophy), the existentialist and phenomenological traditions continue to drive a philosophy that remains engaged with actual living experience - though god knows the continentals are not immune to the trappings of academese themselves..."
Mario Incandenza 2/9/17, 12:47 PM
It's worth noting that this disappearance of philosophy from the public sphere is especially a phenomenon of the anglophone world. In France, for instance, philosophy still gets a fair degree of the pop culture treatment, and is incorporated into the standard secondary school education. I think a major reason for this is the devolution of most english-language philosophy into "analytic" philosophy, an institutionalized discourse that models itself on the sciences and limits itself to questions that can be "rigorously" expressed (where rigor is construed as expressible in the terms of formal logic). This has accomplished two things, primarily: 1) it has produced a false, overly narrow conception of truth as that which is logically demonstrable; and 2) it has ceased to be able to speak to almost everything that is actually meaningful in experience. In other places (and, to be fair, still at the margins of anglophone philosophy), the existentialist and phenomenological traditions continue to drive a philosophy that remains engaged with actual living experience - though god knows the continentals are not immune to the trappings of academese themselves..."
Another of the comments re Greer's essay that might help us focus discussion:
"
Ray Wharton said...
Epistemology is a representation of the process of representation. Science done well is very closely related to Epistemology, generating and refining topics, enhancing resolution. But there is a trade off between resolution and perspective in representation.
Epistemology, if successful, gives a representation which can help us estimate and value other classes of representation. But it must all connect to the other side. For years I was mystified by what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche meant, why it was tied to power or to life. Heidegger, for his great failings as a prose writer left me with 'care' as an alternative allusion to that which isn't represented. Similarly a Druid teacher (Reformed I believe) in the Colorado area taught the World as Care and Allusion... punning off the illusion of the Veil of Maya. Suffering is also beyond the representation, the odor of oblivion and chaos.
'You say enough to be shhhhed with your comment about the life of Starfish JMG.'
What is to representation as suffering is to wisdom?
"
Ray Wharton said...
Epistemology is a representation of the process of representation. Science done well is very closely related to Epistemology, generating and refining topics, enhancing resolution. But there is a trade off between resolution and perspective in representation.
Epistemology, if successful, gives a representation which can help us estimate and value other classes of representation. But it must all connect to the other side. For years I was mystified by what Schopenhauer and Nietzsche meant, why it was tied to power or to life. Heidegger, for his great failings as a prose writer left me with 'care' as an alternative allusion to that which isn't represented. Similarly a Druid teacher (Reformed I believe) in the Colorado area taught the World as Care and Allusion... punning off the illusion of the Veil of Maya. Suffering is also beyond the representation, the odor of oblivion and chaos.
'You say enough to be shhhhed with your comment about the life of Starfish JMG.'
What is to representation as suffering is to wisdom?
Extracts from Greer's essay that will no doubt be developed in his future installments, which we can nevertheless begin to discuss at this point:
"Arthur Schopenhauer, about whom we’ll be talking a great deal as we proceed, gave the process we’re discussing the useful label of “representation;” when you look at the coffee cup, you’re not passively seeing the cup as it exists, you’re actively representing—literally re-presenting—an image of the cup in your mind."
"What makes the realization just described so challenging is that it’s fairly easy to prove that the cup as we represent it has very little in common with the cup as it exists “out there.” You can prove this by means of science: the cup “out there,” according to the evidence collected
painstakingly by physicists, consists of an intricate matrix of quantum probability fields and ripples in space-time, which our senses systematically misperceive as a solid object with a certain color, surface texture, and so on. You can also prove this, as it happens, by sheer sustained introspection—that’s how Indian philosophers got there in the age of the Upanishads—and you can prove it just as well by a sufficiently rigorous logical analysis of the basis of human knowledge, which is what Kant did."
"For the moment, I want to focus a little more closely on the epistemological crisis itself, because there are certain very common ways to misunderstand it. One of them I remember with a certain amount of discomfort, because I made it myself in my first published book, Paths of Wisdom. This is the sort of argument that sees the sensory organs and the nervous system as the reason for the gap between the reality out there—the “thing in itself” (Ding an Sich), as Kant called it—and the representation as we experience it. It’s superficially very convincing: the eye receives light in certain patterns and turns those into a cascade of electrochemical bursts running up the optic nerve, and the visual centers in the brain then fold, spindle, and mutilate the results into the image we see.
The difficulty? When we look at light, an eye, an optic nerve, a brain, we’re not seeing things in themselves, we’re seeing another set of representations, constructed just as arbitrarily in our minds as any other representation. Nietzsche had fun with this one: “What? and others even go so far as to say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs!” That is to say, the body is also a representation—or, more precisely, the body as we perceive it is a representation. It has another aspect, but we’ll get to that in a future post."
"Arthur Schopenhauer, about whom we’ll be talking a great deal as we proceed, gave the process we’re discussing the useful label of “representation;” when you look at the coffee cup, you’re not passively seeing the cup as it exists, you’re actively representing—literally re-presenting—an image of the cup in your mind."
"What makes the realization just described so challenging is that it’s fairly easy to prove that the cup as we represent it has very little in common with the cup as it exists “out there.” You can prove this by means of science: the cup “out there,” according to the evidence collected
painstakingly by physicists, consists of an intricate matrix of quantum probability fields and ripples in space-time, which our senses systematically misperceive as a solid object with a certain color, surface texture, and so on. You can also prove this, as it happens, by sheer sustained introspection—that’s how Indian philosophers got there in the age of the Upanishads—and you can prove it just as well by a sufficiently rigorous logical analysis of the basis of human knowledge, which is what Kant did."
"For the moment, I want to focus a little more closely on the epistemological crisis itself, because there are certain very common ways to misunderstand it. One of them I remember with a certain amount of discomfort, because I made it myself in my first published book, Paths of Wisdom. This is the sort of argument that sees the sensory organs and the nervous system as the reason for the gap between the reality out there—the “thing in itself” (Ding an Sich), as Kant called it—and the representation as we experience it. It’s superficially very convincing: the eye receives light in certain patterns and turns those into a cascade of electrochemical bursts running up the optic nerve, and the visual centers in the brain then fold, spindle, and mutilate the results into the image we see.
The difficulty? When we look at light, an eye, an optic nerve, a brain, we’re not seeing things in themselves, we’re seeing another set of representations, constructed just as arbitrarily in our minds as any other representation. Nietzsche had fun with this one: “What? and others even go so far as to say that the external world is the work of our organs? But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would be the work of our organs! But then our organs themselves would be—the work of our organs!” That is to say, the body is also a representation—or, more precisely, the body as we perceive it is a representation. It has another aspect, but we’ll get to that in a future post."
Another comment re Greer's project, which will no doubt become the core of some disagreements here:
"Ruben2/8/17, 4:34 PM
I just wrote about the "thin stream of visual information...flowing into your mind" in The harsh reality of cognitive limits.
"Our senses take in an enormous amount of data that our brain must manage and select responses for. As Tor Norretranders says:
“The fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits…”
Estimates of how many million bits per second vary, but the average estimate is about 60 million.
60 million bits of data per second flood our senses, but we are conscious of only 40. Not 40 million, just 40. That means we are conscious of just 0.00007% of what we perceive."
I doubt Norretranders' claim. Has anyone read the referenced paper by Norretranders? I doubt his claim for several reasons, among which is the multiplicity of details of earlier experiences and observations recalled {called to mind} as a result of direct neural/brain stimulation, hypnotic regression, and reflection/introspection {and also, of course, memories long forgotten that are sometimes triggered when we reflect on well-recalled events of our own personal past}.
It's obviously true that as a general rule we are focused on specific events or objects or others in our continually unfolding temporal experiences, but that does not mean that what we have simultaneously experienced more broadly at the margins of our focused attention is "discarded" and lost to the complex structure of personal consciousness, which includes subconscious memory and even mentation. The unmistakable evidence of the persistence of memory is tragically obvious in the psychical afflictions of young adults and even older adults who have been abused or neglected in their earliest years and have had no help in processing their experiences as helpless small children.
"Ruben2/8/17, 4:34 PM
I just wrote about the "thin stream of visual information...flowing into your mind" in The harsh reality of cognitive limits.
"Our senses take in an enormous amount of data that our brain must manage and select responses for. As Tor Norretranders says:
“The fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits…”
Estimates of how many million bits per second vary, but the average estimate is about 60 million.
60 million bits of data per second flood our senses, but we are conscious of only 40. Not 40 million, just 40. That means we are conscious of just 0.00007% of what we perceive."
I doubt Norretranders' claim. Has anyone read the referenced paper by Norretranders? I doubt his claim for several reasons, among which is the multiplicity of details of earlier experiences and observations recalled {called to mind} as a result of direct neural/brain stimulation, hypnotic regression, and reflection/introspection {and also, of course, memories long forgotten that are sometimes triggered when we reflect on well-recalled events of our own personal past}.
It's obviously true that as a general rule we are focused on specific events or objects or others in our continually unfolding temporal experiences, but that does not mean that what we have simultaneously experienced more broadly at the margins of our focused attention is "discarded" and lost to the complex structure of personal consciousness, which includes subconscious memory and even mentation. The unmistakable evidence of the persistence of memory is tragically obvious in the psychical afflictions of young adults and even older adults who have been abused or neglected in their earliest years and have had no help in processing their experiences as helpless small children.
One more comment on that last post in which Norretranders is quoted as writing:
“The fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits…”
Norretranders is apparently uninformed about phenomenological analyses of consciousness concerning the way in which lived experience does not consist of isolated one-second flashes of consciousness or attention but rather integrates what happens to us, what we see and react to, in the stream of interconnected moments and episodes of our lives. He should read Husserl on the phenomenology of "inner-time consciousness," involving prehension and protention, the latter phenomena also recognized by Whitehead.
“The fact is that every single second, millions of bits of information flood in through our senses. But our consciousness processes only perhaps forty bits a second – at most. Millions and millions of bits are condensed to a conscious experience that contains practically no information at all. Every single second, every one of us discards millions of bits…”
Norretranders is apparently uninformed about phenomenological analyses of consciousness concerning the way in which lived experience does not consist of isolated one-second flashes of consciousness or attention but rather integrates what happens to us, what we see and react to, in the stream of interconnected moments and episodes of our lives. He should read Husserl on the phenomenology of "inner-time consciousness," involving prehension and protention, the latter phenomena also recognized by Whitehead.
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Project Gutenberg provides online the first volume [perhaps also subsequent volumes] of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea at this link:
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 1 of 3) by Arthur Schopenhauer
At the outset of The World as Will and Idea Schopenhauer identifies his question with this quote from Pliney:
"Quam multa fieri non posse, priusquam sint facta, judicantur?"
Google translates this as:
"How many things can not be made, before the vessels have been employed, are judged?"
I'll look for another translation.
"Quam multa fieri non posse, priusquam sint facta, judicantur?"
Google translates this as:
"How many things can not be made, before the vessels have been employed, are judged?"
I'll look for another translation.
A later and improved translation of The World as Will and Representation is available at wordpress and linked below. This translator provides a translation of "Quam multa fieri non posse, priusquam sint facta, judicantur?" as "How many things are considered impossible until they are actually done!" The translator's introduction to this two-volume work* is worth reading for clarification of terms, and the text itself is said to clarify many mistranslations in the first translation, which is the one copied at Gutenberg.
https://digitalseance.files.wordpre...r-the-world-as-will-and-representation-v1.pdf
*Another reason why this translation at wordpress is preferable is that it includes the first four parts/volumes as originally presented by Schopenhauer in its first volume with S's later extension of the work constituting volume 2.
https://digitalseance.files.wordpre...r-the-world-as-will-and-representation-v1.pdf
*Another reason why this translation at wordpress is preferable is that it includes the first four parts/volumes as originally presented by Schopenhauer in its first volume with S's later extension of the work constituting volume 2.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
While reflecting on some past comments about some of my posts, particularly the notion that I'm a reductionist with respect to consciousness, I'd like to point out that emergence is non-reductive, and it is the phenomena I've been partial to all along as responsible for the manifestation of consciousness. Simply because it can be argued that consciousness supervenes on the material, doesn't mean that consciousness is a material phenomenon. Nor does using a reductive approach to identify the materials consciousness has emerged from mean that emergence is reductive. I would add that reductionism isn't a dirty word and that both a reductionist and non-reductionist approach can together with an experiential approach, yield truths that can ( and have ) advanced our understanding of things ( consciousness included ).
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This is well worth reading for an understanding of the developing contexts of modern European philosophy:
Eric Gerlach, "Modern European Philosophy 9 – Schopenhauer"
Modern European Philosophy 9 – Schopenhauer
Eric Gerlach, "Modern European Philosophy 9 – Schopenhauer"
Modern European Philosophy 9 – Schopenhauer
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