Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9

[Soupie]

Not directly related to the current discussion per we but very very interesting nonetheless:

A Principle of Intentionality. - PubMed - NCBI

A Principle of Intentionality.
Turner CK. Front Psychol. 2017.
Show full citation

Abstract
The mainstream theories and models of the physical sciences, including neuroscience, are all consistent with the principle of causality. Wholly causal explanations make sense of how things go, but are inherently value-neutral, providing no objective basis for true beliefs being better than false beliefs, nor for it being better to intend wisely than foolishly. Dennett (1987) makes a related point in calling the brain a syntactic (procedure-based) engine. He says that you cannot get to a semantic (meaning-based) engine from there. He suggests that folk psychology revolves around an intentional stance that is independent of the causal theories of the brain, and accounts for constructs such as meanings, agency, true belief, and wise desire. Dennett proposes that the intentional stance is so powerful that it can be developed into a valid intentional theory. This article expands Dennett's model into a principle of intentionality that revolves around the construct of objective wisdom. This principle provides a structure that can account for all mental processes, and for the scientific understanding of objective value. It is suggested that science can develop a far more complete worldview with a combination of the principles of causality and intentionality than would be possible with scientific theories that are consistent with the principle of causality alone.

 

[Constance]

Not directly related to the current discussion per we but very very interesting nonetheless:

A Principle of Intentionality. - PubMed - NCBI

A Principle of Intentionality.
Turner CK. Front Psychol. 2017.
Show full citation

Abstract
The mainstream theories and models of the physical sciences, including neuroscience, are all consistent with the principle of causality. Wholly causal explanations make sense of how things go, but are inherently value-neutral, providing no objective basis for true beliefs being better than false beliefs, nor for it being better to intend wisely than foolishly. Dennett (1987) makes a related point in calling the brain a syntactic (procedure-based) engine. He says that you cannot get to a semantic (meaning-based) engine from there. He suggests that folk psychology revolves around an intentional stance that is independent of the causal theories of the brain, and accounts for constructs such as meanings, agency, true belief, and wise desire. Dennett proposes that the intentional stance is so powerful that it can be developed into a valid intentional theory. This article expands Dennett's model into a principle of intentionality that revolves around the construct of objective wisdom. This principle provides a structure that can account for all mental processes, and for the scientific understanding of objective value. It is suggested that science can develop a far more complete worldview with a combination of the principles of causality and intentionality than would be possible with scientific theories that are consistent with the principle of causality alone.

Very interesting. I'm about to read what you've linked here and I hope it gets discussed.

 

[Constance]

Not really. The objective realities of the universe can be entirely "coherent" in the absence of subjectivity. In fact the universe appears to have evolved on its own for the greatest part of its existence without any subjectivity at all. This is old science ...

The Cosmic Calendar

​

Indeed. Which is why scientists such as Kafatos have looked into the q substrate for a physical account of how consciousness/mind (and life itself) might have evolved from q processes and behaviors extrapolated from the Big Bang forward in our local universe. As Sagan indicates, and my introductory biology professor expressed it long ago, "man is a flash in the pan." In referring to a 'coherent' description of 'reality' I was only referring to the difficulties we confront within our conceptions of what-is that arise with our recognition of subjective perspectives on what is 'real' for us in the situated temporality of our existence.

 

[Constance]

Thank you for posting this, Steve. I shall listen and attempt to grok what's said there.

 

[Constance]

In beginning to read the article @Soupie linked today, I noticed a link to the following paper in the right-hand margin of the page:

"Interplay between Narrative and Bodily Self in Access to Consciousness: No Difference between Self- and Non-self Attributes
Jean-Paul Noel1,2,3, Olaf Blanke1,2,4,

Andrea Serino1,2,5 and Roy Salomon1,2,6*

• 1Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Life Science, Brain Mind Institute, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• 2Center for Neuroprosthetics, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland
• 3Vanderbilt Brain Institute, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA
• 4Department of Neurology, University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
• 5Department of Psychology, Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy
• 6Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

The construct of the “self” is conceived as being fundamental in promoting survival. As such, extensive studies have documented preferential processing of self-relevant stimuli. For example, attributes that relate to the self are better encoded and retrieved, and are more readily consciously perceived. The preferential processing of self-relevant information, however, appears to be especially true for physical (e.g., faces), as opposed to psychological (e.g., traits), conceptions of the self. Here, we test whether semantic attributes that participants judge as self-relevant are further processed unconsciously than attributes that were not judged as self-relevant. In Experiment 1, a continuous flash suppression paradigm was employed with “self” and “non-self” attribute words being presented subliminally, and we asked participants to categorize unseen words as either self-related or not. In a second experiment, we attempted to boost putative preferential self-processing by relation to its physical conception, that is, one’s own body. To this aim, we repeated Experiment 1 while administrating acoustic stimuli either close or far from the body, i.e., within or outside peripersonal space. Results of both Experiment 1 and 2 demonstrate no difference in breaking suppression for self and non-self words. Additionally, we found that while participants were able to process the physical location of the unseen words (above or below fixation) they were not able to categorize these as self-relevant or not. Finally, results showed that sounds presented in the extra-personal space elicited a more stringent response criterion for “self” in the process of categorizing unseen visual stimuli. This shift in criterion as a consequence of sound location was restricted to the self, as no such effect was observed in the categorization of attributes occurring above or below fixation. Overall, our findings seem to indicate that subliminally presented stimuli are not semantically processed, at least inasmuch as to be categorized as self-relevant or not. However, we do demonstrate that the distance at which acoustic stimuli are presented may alter the balance between self- and non-self biases."

Interplay between Narrative and Bodily Self in Access to Consciousness: No Difference between Self- and Non-self Attributes

We might also want to read and discuss this paper.

 

[Michael Allen]

Also helpful re Hegel and Merleau-Ponty --

Christopher Pollard, Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of Dialectics in Phenomenology of Perception

Merleau-Ponty’s Conception of Dialectics in Phenomenology of Perception

If Hegel's philosophical system is expressed and developed in the works of his philosophic descendents, why would I need to go back to read all of Hegel? In fact, it seems to me that Hegel's thought has been both extended and critiqued by later philosophers, as in this paper concerning MP's late thinking. Btw, this paper is relevant to the contemporary project of 'naturalizing phenomenology' or 'phenomenologizing nature' which we discussed at some length around the turn of the new year.

David Storey, Spirit and/or Flesh: Merleau-Ponty's Encounter with Hegel

http://phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/phaenex/article/viewFile/604/745

Well, the easy answer is that you don't. Why re-invent the wheel? Of course if you are dense like myself, you might wish to go back to the root when someone you like (i.e. say Sartre, or Heidegger) brilliantly misunderstands Hegel

 

[Constance]

Well, the easy answer is that you don't. Why re-invent the wheel? Of course if you are dense like myself, you might wish to go back to the root when someone you like (i.e. say Sartre, or Heidegger) brilliantly misunderstands Hegel

This misunderstanding of Hegel by later philosophers is interesting. Would you provide a few examples of it relative to Sartre or Heidegger? And do they both misunderstand Hegel in the same way(s)? The philosopher who interests me most is obviously Merleau-Ponty, and as I recall I linked a day or two ago a paper defining the ways in which MP departed from/disagreed with Hegel. If you've read that paper would you say that, in his departures from Hegel, MP misunderstood Hegel? And if so, specifically how?

 

[Constance]

This misunderstanding of Hegel by later philosophers is interesting. Would you provide a few examples of it relative to Sartre or Heidegger? And do they both misunderstand Hegel in the same way(s)? The philosopher who interests me most is obviously Merleau-Ponty, and as I recall I linked a day or two ago a paper defining the ways in which MP departed from/disagreed with Hegel. If you've read that paper would you say that, in his departures from Hegel, MP misunderstood Hegel? And if so, specifically how?

ETA, Merleau-Ponty wrote about Hegel's philosophy in several texts, one an essay entitled "Hegel's Philosophy" in, I think, Signs.

 

[Constance]

Inman Harvey, Misrepresentations

Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics University of Sussex Brighton, UK [email protected]

Abstract: The concept of “representations”, and particularly “internal representations”, can be controversial in Cognitive Science and AI. It is suggested here that much time-wasting confusion could be avoided if participants in such controversies came to recognize the variety of different senses, often incompatible, in which such terms are used. A hypothesis is presented as to why there is so much reluctance to recognize this. Once such fruitless controversies are swept aside through linguistic hygiene, there remain interesting real problems, which are eminently appropriate for being tackled by an Artificial Life methodology.

Extract

“Artificial life overlaps with AI, in that both tackle the problems involved in synthesising lifelike capabilities; there may be different emphases, perhaps on adaptive behaviour versus rational thought. AI overlaps with cognitive science. All of these are permeated by the positions researchers may take on philosophical issues: what is life, what is cognition, what is mind? Traditional GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned AI) approaches to these questions have often framed answers in terms of "representations", or "internal representations". These sort of notions made no sense to me, working in a GOFAI department, and some of our early artificial life experiments at the beginning of the 90s had as one motivation the intent to make such issues explicit (Cliff et al 1993; Harvey et al 1993). Using evolutionary robotics techniques, we evolved simple minimally cognitive agents to perform simple tasks, and then challenged the GOFAI theorists to try and identify just where these so-called "internal representations" were.”

http://users.sussex.ac.uk/~inmanh/Misrepresentations.pdf

 

[Michael Allen]

This misunderstanding of Hegel by later philosophers is interesting. Would you provide a few examples of it relative to Sartre or Heidegger? And do they both misunderstand Hegel in the same way(s)? The philosopher who interests me most is obviously Merleau-Ponty, and as I recall I linked a day or two ago a paper defining the ways in which MP departed from/disagreed with Hegel. If you've read that paper would you say that, in his departures from Hegel, MP misunderstood Hegel? And if so, specifically how?

I think Heidegger's commentary on Hegel is highly recommended.

As far as the comment, it is just a hypothetical (i.e. if you were to find a later to be a "brilliant misunderstanding"...etc) I borrowed the expression from Hubert Dreyfus, who said that Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" was a "brilliant misunderstanding of Hegel." In my usual cargo-cult mode of thinking, I wondered if perhaps the same could be said of any philosopher commenting on another (i.e. Marx perhaps being a "brilliant misunderstanding" of Hegel) and assumed that the probability was high in any case.

The only example I can provide at the moment is Dreyfus and his comment regarding the Cartesian recasting of Heidegger into "Being and Nothingness"--that's what he considered to be Sartre's "brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger."

 

[Michael Allen]

"Hegel holds that we do in fact have the noumena in thought."

By contrast, Merleau-Ponty holds that we have the noumena in experienced being-in-the-world, first pre-reflectively and subsequently reflectively.

It is more accurate to say that noumena for Hegel is a notion which lives in the actualized immediacy of human beings who are brought forth by nature in their progressive movement through the "Absolute."

All of the definitions of 'noumena' are self-contradictory -- because their existence is asserted as true regarding something for which phenomenal knowledge has--presumably--no access. Hegel's razor says that our recognition of "noumena" as a notion IS knowledge of 'noumena'. To continue down the path we end up recognizing it as a necessary condition for the existence of anything that can possess knowledge or cognition. To say that our faculty of perception has apprehended all but that which causes the apprehension (i.e. noumena) is a contradiction.

 

[Constance]

I think Heidegger's commentary on Hegel is highly recommended.

As far as the comment, it is just a hypothetical (i.e. if you were to find a later to be a "brilliant misunderstanding"...etc) I borrowed the expression from Hubert Dreyfus, who said that Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" was a "brilliant misunderstanding of Hegel." In my usual cargo-cult mode of thinking, I wondered if perhaps the same could be said of any philosopher commenting on another (i.e. Marx perhaps being a "brilliant misunderstanding" of Hegel) and assumed that the probability was high in any case.

The only example I can provide at the moment is Dreyfus and his comment regarding the Cartesian recasting of Heidegger into "Being and Nothingness"--that's what he considered to be Sartre's "brilliant misunderstanding of Heidegger."

Thanks. I'll look for Dreyfus's comments re Cartesianism in Sartre's applications of Heidegger in Being and Nothingness.

 

[Michael Allen]

Thanks. I'll look for Dreyfus's comments re Cartesianism in Sartre's applications of Heidegger in Being and Nothingness.

Conversation with Hubert L. Dreyfus, p. 5 of 8

Sent from my SM-G900V using Tapatalk

 

[Constance]

It is more accurate to say that noumena for Hegel is a notion which lives in the actualized immediacy of human beings who are brought forth by nature in their progressive movement through the "Absolute."

Thank you; this is helpful. What did you think of Pollard's paper identifying MP's agreements with Hegel and his departure from Hegel?

All of the definitions of 'noumena' are self-contradictory -- because their existence is asserted as true regarding something for which phenomenal knowledge has--presumably--no access. Hegel's razor says that our recognition of "noumena" as a notion IS knowledge of 'noumena'. To continue down the path we end up recognizing it as a necessary condition for the existence of anything that can possess knowledge or cognition. To say that our faculty of perception has apprehended all but that which causes the apprehension (i.e. noumena) is a contradiction.

If I understand you in these sentences you are saying that what Kant recognized as the 'noumenal' is, for Hegel, rationally implicit in the experiential phenomenality of the lived world we exist in. I think MP disagrees to the extent that what Hegel offers is a conclusion arising in abstract thought rather than through cumulative experience and reflection on experience within embodied life and consciousness. For MP, the path to comprehension of the nature of being and the possible nature of Being is long, deep, and freighted with the ambiguity we experience as being-in and being intimately interconnected with the world and yet standing always to a degree apart from it, never completely coinciding with it. [Heidegger's 'ek-stase'] In MP, we navigate a path through the visible and the invisible with increasingly implicit recognition of and questioning of the invisible as standing behind the visible in which knowledge about the invisible remains out of reach. We are not capable, in be-ing, of touching the Absolute as Hegel conceives it, but capable only of registering adumbrations of it, which become palpably expressed, going as far as they can, in MP's late writings on Nature and the Chiasm (and as well, I've found, in poetry such as that produced by Wallace Stevens.

So I have to question your last sentence above:

To say that our faculty of perception has apprehended all but that which causes the apprehension (i.e. noumena) is a contradiction.

 

[Constance]

Conversation with Hubert L. Dreyfus, p. 5 of 8

Thank you for the link. I've long thought that Dreyfus does not thoroughly understand MP's philosophy and this interview does not change my mind. I think that Steve has linked some taped lectures by Dreyfus but I don't recall that they were tapes from the course he teaches on MP every few years. So I'm tagging Steve @smcder to find out.

 

[Constance]

Emilios Bouratinos, A New Conceptual Framework for Physics: Some Thoughts on How and Where to Begin

Dropbox - Bouratinos Bielefeld 2005.pdf

 

[Soupie]

Re Hegel and MP and noumena

According to the piece I posted from Quora, Hegel did approach the noumena from an experiential perspective. The following was the most intriguing quote from the piece I thought:

"What Hegel argues is that what seems to us as given in immediate sensation is anything but; to focus on a "bit" of sensation, say a patch of color or a flavor, is not to grasp an object-like thing, but to actually experience an underlying process. Colors and tastes change in intensity; so do all of our sensory perceptions and concepts in thought. What seems to us as a fixed and orderly Being is unmasked as a deeper process of historically-unfolding becoming."

This to me is also where the Eastern meditative practices intersect with phenomenology.

Once we recognize that the perceptual phenomena we experience are not things (though they may correlate with real, external, mind-independent things) we can become cognizant of the humancentric "window" of consciousness through which we become aware of an external world.

However, I take Hegel as saying we shouldn't reify and objectify these phenomena but recognize them as arising within a deeper process wherein a subset of the absolute (a being) becomes aware of the absolute (Being).

 

[smcder]

Enrahonar. Quaderns de Filosofia 55, 2015 41-49

How Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion can contribute to today’s ethical debate* Ursula Wolf Universität Mannheim

[email protected]-mannheim.de

Abstract Reception date: 3-1-2014 Acceptance date: 28-3-2014

The article has three parts. The first part exposes Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant who tries to derive morality from pure reason. The second part exhibits Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion which is based on the insight that the will can only be moved by the “weal and woe” of a being and that moral action thus can only be possible where the other’s well-being or misery is the immediate motive. Schopenhauer claims that we encounter this phenomenon in our experience, namely in the everyday phenomenon of compassion. The advantages of this ethics of compassion over utilitarianism are demonstrated. The third part discusses some difficulties, e.g. whether this approach can cope with the area of justice.

 

[smcder]

Thank you for the link. I've long thought that Dreyfus does not thoroughly understand MP's philosophy and this interview does not change my mind. I think that Steve has linked some taped lectures by Dreyfus but I don't recall that they were tapes from the course he teaches on MP every few years. So I'm tagging Steve @smcder to find out.

Yes, recordings of his various lecture series -

 

[smcder]

Enrahonar. Quaderns de Filosofia 55, 2015 41-49

How Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion can contribute to today’s ethical debate* Ursula Wolf Universität Mannheim

[email protected]-mannheim.de

Abstract Reception date: 3-1-2014 Acceptance date: 28-3-2014

The article has three parts. The first part exposes Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant who tries to derive morality from pure reason. The second part exhibits Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion which is based on the insight that the will can only be moved by the “weal and woe” of a being and that moral action thus can only be possible where the other’s well-being or misery is the immediate motive. Schopenhauer claims that we encounter this phenomenon in our experience, namely in the everyday phenomenon of compassion. The advantages of this ethics of compassion over utilitarianism are demonstrated. The third part discusses some difficulties, e.g. whether this approach can cope with the area of justice.

"... in as much as purely abstract concepts cannot move human beings and like Kant’s content-free morality has no carrying capacity."

?