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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Whether disjunctivism is true or false, it still follows that perception does not entail direct experience of the thing-in-itself. (As per Strawson even direct/Naive Realism involves representation.)
Perception, so to speak, remains a map of the territory, not the territory itself.
Having said that, both maps and territories are constituted of atoms (let's suppose) and in an analogous way, we can say that the thing-in-itself and perceptions are constituted of noumena.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
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And why, I wonder, do some of us think we need it?
Please do read the paper by David Morris that I linked last night:
http://spectrum.library.concordia.c...Earth for Chiasmi Submission for spectrum.pdf
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
The following might seem like semantic word play or that I'm trying to be clever.
I would say that we don't "directly experience the TII." Rather, experience just is TII.
Does that make sense? This is essentially Conscious Realism. That the most fundamental stuff just is experience/consciousness. The real coin of the realm.
Thus, when a perceptual system constituted of experience perceives other systems equally constituted of experience, it perceives (represents) these systems as material, physical systems.
@Constance We don't need direct experience of the TII.
My whole point in all of this is a reaction to the HP. The question of how and why experience emerges from physical matter.
I believe the above understanding of perception reveals the error/presupposition in the question posed by the HP.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Quantum mechanics trumps nonlocal causality - physicsworld.com
"Quantum mechanics wreaks even more havoc with conventional ideas of causality than some have suspected – according to a team of researchers based in Australia, with collaborators in Scotland and Germany. They have shown that even allowing causality to be nonlocal – so that an event in one place can have an influence on another, distant place – is not enough to explain how quantum objects behave.
Without cause and effect, science would be impossible. You could never use an observation to deduce anything about the underlying mechanism that caused it. But quantum mechanics challenges our commonsense picture of causality – for example by implying that some things happen at random, with no apparent cause, or that an action in one place can seem to have an effect elsewhere, even if the two locations cannot interact."
Comments are interesting too:
"Two Possible Conclusions
1. QM was always right - the microcosm is exceedingly different and weird compared to the macrocosm, which does not appear to suffer from the weirdness.----------------------------- 2. Giving up causality for 19th century instantaneous action-at-a-distance is a bridge too far with a one-way lane going in the wrong direction. Therefore there must something weird about the way we observationally interact with the microcosm that is not understood yet. When that observational bias is subtracted, then a more comprehensible and fully causal microcosm will be revealed.--------------- Any Einsteins out there waiting for their big moment?"
Obviously, there are more than two possible conclusions. But classical causality really is in danger.
And I do think the problem of uniting quantum with classical physics is related to the problem of distinguishing between phenomena and the noumena.
"Quantum mechanics wreaks even more havoc with conventional ideas of causality than some have suspected – according to a team of researchers based in Australia, with collaborators in Scotland and Germany. They have shown that even allowing causality to be nonlocal – so that an event in one place can have an influence on another, distant place – is not enough to explain how quantum objects behave.
Without cause and effect, science would be impossible. You could never use an observation to deduce anything about the underlying mechanism that caused it. But quantum mechanics challenges our commonsense picture of causality – for example by implying that some things happen at random, with no apparent cause, or that an action in one place can seem to have an effect elsewhere, even if the two locations cannot interact."
Comments are interesting too:
"Two Possible Conclusions
1. QM was always right - the microcosm is exceedingly different and weird compared to the macrocosm, which does not appear to suffer from the weirdness.----------------------------- 2. Giving up causality for 19th century instantaneous action-at-a-distance is a bridge too far with a one-way lane going in the wrong direction. Therefore there must something weird about the way we observationally interact with the microcosm that is not understood yet. When that observational bias is subtracted, then a more comprehensible and fully causal microcosm will be revealed.--------------- Any Einsteins out there waiting for their big moment?"
Obviously, there are more than two possible conclusions. But classical causality really is in danger.
And I do think the problem of uniting quantum with classical physics is related to the problem of distinguishing between phenomena and the noumena.
What is the TII? Is it something proposed in Hoffman's interface theory? I don't remember seeing it explained before, but I could have missed that.
I don't think all humans, even today, 'perceive' all encountered beings and things as 'material, physical systems'. Certainly all objectivist/materialist scientists do (or attempt to).
It seems to me that the hard problem is concerned with the existence of multisensory qualitative lived experience in humans and other animals and with various kinds of emotional and mental valence that accompany experience in living beings, rather than being restricted to theorizing the nature of perception in various species of life. In the evolution of species developed on earth, capacities for experiencing the palpable world increase along with protoconscious and eventually conscious awareness and interaction of beings with other beings and with their shared environments. The first felt perceptions seem to be through the sense of touch in primordial organisms and in subsequently appearing lifeforms that have become recognizable to biologists as animals. As I've said before, the interactions recognizable in the quantum substrate seem to me and others to produce habits of interaction leading to more complex and ultimately interacting macrophysical systems, eventually including those generated in life. It does not seem to me to be likely that the nature of the macrophysical 'world' we experience can be fully understood in terms of the microphysical substrate of interacting particles and fields. We can conceptualize that as a possible explanation for the world we inhabit that might be demonstrated to be accurate at some point in the future development of science, but that concept presently remains a supposition and is therefore questionable, too questionable to underwrite further suppositions about a mechanical explanation of consciousness and mind drawn from it, imo.
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Thing in itself.
Notice I didn't have perceive in quotes. When I say perceive, I literally mean perceive. Is that helpful?
If you don't think humans perceive beings and things to be physical, material systems, then what do you suppose they perceive?
If humans don't perceive dogs, cats, and cars to be physical, material systems, then how do they perceive them?
I didn't say the HP was restricted to perception; what I said is that perception, namely a naive realist interpretation of perception, leads to the presupposition underlying the HP.
Namely that reality just is physical material.
Michael Allen
Paranormal Adept
Or more precisely...does the question even make sense? "In-itself" and "for-itself" are labels that only Dasein can decode...or even use (i.e. be "meaningful")
Not really. In how many ways, through how many different kinds of senses, do we perceive and make sense of things and living beings in the world, and how many different ways do other animals sense the selfsame world and make sense of it?
I think we primarily perceive a living world always unfolding temporally, futurally, in which all life forms we encounter engage dynamically with whatever they encounter as they encounter it. We perceive subjectively lived being, and also objects that are apparently not alive. For living beings -- existents -- the world is a plenum of open-ended experience, much of which we share even across species. Experience is open-ended for any embodied consciousness.
I don't see perception in the way that you do. And I don't understand the way in which you understand perception. Or how your notion of perception can be said to lead to the phenomenal experience to which the HP refers.
That is clearly your firm belief. How does 'physical material reality' produce consciousness and mind? How do you understand the nature of consciousness and mind?
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Or in other words, how does 'physical material'-ness produce the history of philosophy?
From the David Morris paper I linked above:
". . . It is precisely in trying to avoid such conceptual problems, and taking phenomena of learning and language seriously that the concept of what I call development becomes central to a Merleau-Pontian philosophy, even though he doesn’t himself use that word as a central term of his vocabulary, or in quite the way I do.
That is, my thought is that Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the question “Where does sense come from?” is that sense develops. According to my conception, this is to say sense has its condition of possibility in an antecedent sense from which alone it develops. Yet, crucially, the antecedent sense does not yet contain or specify in any definite way the new sense that might turn out to have developed from it. Development, as I define it here, can always in principle generate something new, even if it does not in fact always do so. If development could not generate something new, if it was merely the unfolding of already specified programs, then the way in which sense leans upon something broader would be precisely undermined. Development, we could say, plays out the radical contingency of sense as always leaning and waiting upon a broader situation and process.
This concept of development challenges traditional divisions between an a priori that must already be given if there is ever to be meaning, and an a posteriori of senseless data that are already given. This is because development is a process that in effect engenders new a prioris. Phenomena of perceptual learning precisely drive Merleau-Ponty to realize that perceptual processes engender their own a prioris, by reworking a sense that is already endogenous to our perceptual embeddedness in a situation, as in his discussion of the child learning to see new colours (PhP 36-39).
What is key here is that development does not move from: no-sense at all, to sense; but neither does development arrive at determinate sense by unfolding programs that must already have been given, even if they were not yet deployed. Rather, development moves from one sort of sense to a different sort of sense, and it does so only by engaging and moving through a sense that was already there. Development is kin to stumbling around on deck, as the only way to gain your sea legs — and that means there’s no guarantee that you will get your sea legs, or that something else might not happen instead. There is a sort of creative generativity endogenous to development, and it hinges on ways of sensing environments and situations. This sort of creative generativity is of course key to primary expression. My concept of development basically says: for there to be sense and expression, expression has to go all the way down (cf. Landes 2013; Fóti 2013).
This means that being cannot stand as an already given foundation of philosophy, in some sort of abstractly transcendental sense. If being enables philosophy, it is because being has contingently turned out to grant the concrete place from which philosophy finds itself beginning.
Notice how this transforms transcendental conditions: we have a transcendental argument that if philosophy is possible, certain irreducible conditions must obtain. But paradoxically, the argument is that these conditions only work by not guaranteeing philosophy in advance. Such a guarantee would require reference to a standard outside of or in advance of the being that philosophy actually interrogates, and if philosophical interrogation operates via such a standard then it is, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy gone awry, philosophy that is not truly about being, but something else. (Religion may contemplate such a given standard, but it is off limits to radically empirical phenomenology.) There is no transcendental condition of philosophy given in advance, and this is why philosophy requires perceptual faith, and is always of tomorrow. Derrida’s analysis of the transcendental conditions of Husserlian sense similarly shows how these undo transcendental conditionality —but Merleau-Ponty’s analysis proceeds in and through being, in a manner different than Derrida, that brings phenomenology down to earth. . . . ."
". . . It is precisely in trying to avoid such conceptual problems, and taking phenomena of learning and language seriously that the concept of what I call development becomes central to a Merleau-Pontian philosophy, even though he doesn’t himself use that word as a central term of his vocabulary, or in quite the way I do.
That is, my thought is that Merleau-Ponty’s answer to the question “Where does sense come from?” is that sense develops. According to my conception, this is to say sense has its condition of possibility in an antecedent sense from which alone it develops. Yet, crucially, the antecedent sense does not yet contain or specify in any definite way the new sense that might turn out to have developed from it. Development, as I define it here, can always in principle generate something new, even if it does not in fact always do so. If development could not generate something new, if it was merely the unfolding of already specified programs, then the way in which sense leans upon something broader would be precisely undermined. Development, we could say, plays out the radical contingency of sense as always leaning and waiting upon a broader situation and process.
This concept of development challenges traditional divisions between an a priori that must already be given if there is ever to be meaning, and an a posteriori of senseless data that are already given. This is because development is a process that in effect engenders new a prioris. Phenomena of perceptual learning precisely drive Merleau-Ponty to realize that perceptual processes engender their own a prioris, by reworking a sense that is already endogenous to our perceptual embeddedness in a situation, as in his discussion of the child learning to see new colours (PhP 36-39).
What is key here is that development does not move from: no-sense at all, to sense; but neither does development arrive at determinate sense by unfolding programs that must already have been given, even if they were not yet deployed. Rather, development moves from one sort of sense to a different sort of sense, and it does so only by engaging and moving through a sense that was already there. Development is kin to stumbling around on deck, as the only way to gain your sea legs — and that means there’s no guarantee that you will get your sea legs, or that something else might not happen instead. There is a sort of creative generativity endogenous to development, and it hinges on ways of sensing environments and situations. This sort of creative generativity is of course key to primary expression. My concept of development basically says: for there to be sense and expression, expression has to go all the way down (cf. Landes 2013; Fóti 2013).
This means that being cannot stand as an already given foundation of philosophy, in some sort of abstractly transcendental sense. If being enables philosophy, it is because being has contingently turned out to grant the concrete place from which philosophy finds itself beginning.
Notice how this transforms transcendental conditions: we have a transcendental argument that if philosophy is possible, certain irreducible conditions must obtain. But paradoxically, the argument is that these conditions only work by not guaranteeing philosophy in advance. Such a guarantee would require reference to a standard outside of or in advance of the being that philosophy actually interrogates, and if philosophical interrogation operates via such a standard then it is, for Merleau-Ponty, philosophy gone awry, philosophy that is not truly about being, but something else. (Religion may contemplate such a given standard, but it is off limits to radically empirical phenomenology.) There is no transcendental condition of philosophy given in advance, and this is why philosophy requires perceptual faith, and is always of tomorrow. Derrida’s analysis of the transcendental conditions of Husserlian sense similarly shows how these undo transcendental conditionality —but Merleau-Ponty’s analysis proceeds in and through being, in a manner different than Derrida, that brings phenomenology down to earth. . . . ."
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment.[1] (Wiki)
You obviously haven't understood my position argued for over the last several threads, and even my last 2-3 posts. It's not for lack of clarity on my part, I can assure you, it's because you're projecting your own meaning into my posts.
I've made it exceedingly clear that I believe the HP contains an erroneous presupposition and therefore consciousness/experience does not emerge from a physical/material reality.
What I've argued for instead is the position that consciousness itself or some other absolute substrate is primary. And therefore matter/physical is secondary to our perceptual systems, since our perceptual systems generate our perceptions.
While our perceptual systems allow us to perceive the external noumenal/absolute, we should avoid naively conflating our perceptions of the noumenal as veridical in regards to the noumenal.
Therefore, regardless of the fact that we perceive the world to be physical material it does not follow that the world just is physical material.
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Very helpful
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
And yet the notion that reality is constituted entirely of matter holds on this logic?
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"Kant was fascinated by geometrical sense, precisely because it escaped a priori determination. Imagine an isolate human 3d hand popping into existence in empty space. Without any further context, reason can grasp that it would have an incongruent counterpart, that there is a difference between what we would call left and right hand figures, such that the isolate hand has a unique sense. Yet, absent further context, reason cannot specify what determinate sense it has, whether it is what we on Earth would call a left hand, or a right hand. 9 This requires a further context, direction, etc. Determining the sense of left, not right, entails being embedded within and traversing a broader situation."
still from the Morris paper
still from the Morris paper
smcder
Paranormal Adept
This may be the source of some confusion:
"Having said that, both maps and territories are constituted of atoms (let's suppose) and in an analogous way, we can say that the thing-in-itself and perceptions are constituted of noumena."
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Wikipedia
"Naïve realism, also known as direct realism or common sense realism, is a philosophy of mind rooted in a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, some forms of idealism assert that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas and some forms of skepticism say we cannot trust our senses.
The realist view is that we perceive objects as they really are. They are composed of matter, occupy space and have properties, such as size, shape, texture, smell, taste and colour, that are usually perceived correctly. Objects obey the laws of physics and retain all their properties whether or not there is anyone to observe them.[1]
Naïve realism is known as direct as against indirect or representative realism when its arguments are developed to counter the latter position, also known as epistemological dualism;[2] that our conscious experience is not of the real world but of an internal representation of the world."
etc.
Strawson is helpful on that last bit as is this from the IEP:
"The naïve realist claims that, in the good cases, external objects and their properties “partly constitute one’s conscious experience” (Martin 1997: 83) and thereby “shape the contours of the subject’s conscious experience” (Martin 2004: 64)." vs. the world for us being merely an internal perceptual copy of that world generated by neural processes in our brain (although we could maybe know that it is merely an ... etc etc ;-).
In other words, representationalist's brains have to do a lot more work and so they are too tired to do good philosophy.
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