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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9

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Soupie said:
@smcder

throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater.jpg
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BUT ... don't you think if there were something to the CTMU ... someone would have done something with it by now? I remember looking into this on more than one occasion and I haven't found any evidence of this ... nor that Langan has advanced the theory in any way.

hmmm.jpg
 
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smcder said:
BUT ... don't you think if there were something to the CTMU ... someone would have done something with it by now? I remember looking into this on more than one occasion and I haven't found any evidence of this ... nor that Langan has advanced the theory in any way.

hmmm.jpg
Click to expand...
When it comes to the CTMU, I'm mainly interested in the concept of UBT.
 
Constance said:
That sounds like a relatively straightforward program. What I would like to hear from you is an explication of your thesis. What illusions do you think you can banish, and what illusion(s) might be found to persist after you banish some illusions? In other words, what firm reality remains for us to contemplate after you have banished the illusions you claim to identify? And what are the grounds you can establish for that firm reality?
Click to expand...

Or for no reality, if that is your preferred outcome?
 
Constance said:
Or for no reality, if that is your preferred outcome?
Click to expand...
A tall order. I felt that I was summarizing my purposes and motivations for points I had already made in other posts---or more or less creating a quick caricature of my own motivations in my involvement in discussion--for others to digest. In fact I don't get a lot of time during the week to adequately present my thoughts in as structured/formalized thesis as I would like.

Sometimes it seems as though this thread is "going at lightspeed" (or plaid) and I catch "mental dead air" every now and then while trying to process everything posted here. I digest this stuff very slowly or not at all, so much of what you'll find me posting here is a distillation of many years reading and re-reading the same half-dozen or so philosophy books in my library.

To make matters worse, I tend to ramble and throw things out in "stream of consciousness" style without going back and checking for consistency, foolishness, etc.



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Michael Allen said:
A tall order. I felt that I was summarizing my purposes and motivations for points I had already made in other posts---or more or less creating a quick caricature of my own motivations in my involvement in discussion--for others to digest. In fact I don't get a lot of time during the week to adequately present my thoughts in as structured/formalized thesis as I would like.

Sometimes it seems as though this thread is "going at lightspeed" (or plaid) and I catch "mental dead air" every now and then while trying to process everything posted here. I digest this stuff very slowly or not at all, so much of what you'll find me posting here is a distillation of many years reading and re-reading the same half-dozen or so philosophy books in my library.

To make matters worse, I tend to ramble and throw things out in "stream of consciousness" style without going back and checking for consistency, foolishness, etc.
Click to expand...

I can identify. :) I'm lost especially in these current attempts to theorize the origin of 'what-is' as we encounter it in our time and place from substrates or sub-substrates we can't get close to. Your posts are always thought-provoking so just do what you do.

ETA: I don't know how or why these strike-throughs have appeared in my post, or how to delete them. Is the universe trying to delete the question itself? Or me?
 
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smcder said:
@Constance - from the PDF above:

upload_2017-3-24_2-50-39.png
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Steve, I'm so glad you were able to find a chapter from Stewart's book online. For my own purposes, re WS's poetry, I need to read all of the book and am ordering it. If/when I'm ever able to complete a useful manuscript on the poetry, I know I'll want to use this extract from the chapter you linked as an epigraph:


“…sound production and reception in poetry always carry an image of the particularity of human voices. It is not just sound that we hear; it is the sound of an individual person speaking sounds. The diffuseness of sound, the problem of invocation and the specific consequences invocation bears regarding the impossibility of closure, our need to attribute source of causality to sounds when we hear them -- in the production of lyric all of these amorphous qualities of sound production are traced to the situation of the speaking person.”
 
smcder said:
Can you quote a specific part of section 2?
Click to expand...
http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/intentionality-experience.pdf

From page 6:

"Since the phenomenological theories of intentionality are unfailingly non-representationalist, they also reject the view according to which phenomenal experiences are to be conceived of as some kind of internal movie screen that confronts us with mental representations. We are ‘zunächst und zumeist’ directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intra-mental objects. The so-called qualitative character of experience, the taste of a lemon, the smell of coffee, the coldness of an ice cube are not at all qualities belonging to some spurious mental objects, but qualities of the presented objects. Rather than saying that we experience representations, it would be better to say that our experiences are presentational, and that they present the world as having certain features. 8"

I understand that Zahavi wasn't really addressing perception as understood in phenomenology, so this may not be the best source. But this notion of presentation versus representation has never been clear to me.

First of all, shall I consider the above to be a monist approach? That is, do phenomenologists consider "objects" "us/we" and "presentations" to all exist within the same substrate? For example, above it says: "We are ‘zunächst und zumeist’ directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intra-mental objects." What shall I take the "we" to be in this case? The physical organism or the conscious subject? Who/what is getting this so-called presentation?

When Zahavi says phenomenologists reject representationalism, does he mean it in the strong sense that we don't contain within our physical brain 1:1 representational replicas of objects in the external world, or is he rejecting it in the sense outlined by Strawson: External stimulus X evokes physiological change x in the organism.

For the record, my conception of perception is as follows: External stimulus X evokes change x in the organism, and this change just is the perception.

On a separate note, this footnote 7 is very interesting:

7 This might sound like externalism. But actually, it is questionable whether the very choice between internalism and externalism, an alternative based on the division between inner and outer—is reference determined by factors internal to the mind, or by factors external to the mind?—is at all acceptable to the phenomenologists. Already in Logical Investigations Husserl argued that the notions of inner and outer, notions which he claimed expressed a naive commonsensical metaphysics, were inappropriate when it came to understanding the nature of intentionality (cf. Husserl, 1984, 673, 708). This rejection of a commonsensical split between mind and world is even more pronounced after Husserl’s transcendental turn. In Cartesian Meditations, for instance, Husserl writes that it is absurd to conceive of consciousness and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially interdependent and united (Husserl, 1976, 117. Cf. Husserl, 1959, 432). If we pass on to Heidegger, he is also famous for having argued that the relation between Dasein and world could not be grasped with the help of the concepts ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ As he writes in Being and Time:AIn directing itself toward...and in grasping something, Da-sein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Da-sein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its object, Da-sein is ‘inside’ correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows.”(Heidegger, 1996, 58). In my view, the phenomenological analyses of intentionality (be it Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, or Merleau-Ponty’s) all entail such a fundamental rethinking of the very relation between subjectivity and environment that it no longer makes sense to designate them as being either internalist or externalist. This claim might be relatively uncontroversial when it comes to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but it is controversial when it comes to Husserl, since he (at least by Anglo-American philosophers) is frequently interpreted as a prototypical internalist and methodological solipsist. However, I believe that this interpretation is based on something that approaches a complete misunderstanding of what Husserl is up to (including a misinterpretation of his concept of noema, and of his notion of phenomenological reduction), but it would lead too far to argue for this claim here. See however Zahavi, 2003a.
 
Soupie said:
http://cfs.ku.dk/staff/zahavi-publications/intentionality-experience.pdf

From page 6:

"Since the phenomenological theories of intentionality are unfailingly non-representationalist, they also reject the view according to which phenomenal experiences are to be conceived of as some kind of internal movie screen that confronts us with mental representations. We are ‘zunächst und zumeist’ directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intra-mental objects. The so-called qualitative character of experience, the taste of a lemon, the smell of coffee, the coldness of an ice cube are not at all qualities belonging to some spurious mental objects, but qualities of the presented objects. Rather than saying that we experience representations, it would be better to say that our experiences are presentational, and that they present the world as having certain features. 8"

I understand that Zahavi wasn't really addressing perception as understood in phenomenology, so this may not be the best source. But this notion of presentation versus representation has never been clear to me.

First of all, shall I consider the above to be a monist approach? That is, do phenomenologists consider "objects" "us/we" and "presentations" to all exist within the same substrate? For example, above it says: "We are ‘zunächst und zumeist’ directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intra-mental objects." What shall I take the "we" to be in this case? The physical organism or the conscious subject? Who/what is getting this so-called presentation?

When Zahavi says phenomenologists reject representationalism, does he mean it in the strong sense that we don't contain within our physical brain 1:1 representational replicas of objects in the external world, or is he rejecting it in the sense outlined by Strawson: External stimulus X evokes physiological change x in the organism.

For the record, my conception of perception is as follows: External stimulus X evokes change x in the organism, and this change just is the perception.

On a separate note, this footnote 7 is very interesting:

7 This might sound like externalism. But actually, it is questionable whether the very choice between internalism and externalism, an alternative based on the division between inner and outer—is reference determined by factors internal to the mind, or by factors external to the mind?—is at all acceptable to the phenomenologists. Already in Logical Investigations Husserl argued that the notions of inner and outer, notions which he claimed expressed a naive commonsensical metaphysics, were inappropriate when it came to understanding the nature of intentionality (cf. Husserl, 1984, 673, 708). This rejection of a commonsensical split between mind and world is even more pronounced after Husserl’s transcendental turn. In Cartesian Meditations, for instance, Husserl writes that it is absurd to conceive of consciousness and true being as if they were merely externally related, when the truth is that they are essentially interdependent and united (Husserl, 1976, 117. Cf. Husserl, 1959, 432). If we pass on to Heidegger, he is also famous for having argued that the relation between Dasein and world could not be grasped with the help of the concepts ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ As he writes in Being and Time:AIn directing itself toward...and in grasping something, Da-sein does not first go outside of the inner sphere in which it is initially encapsulated, but, rather, in its primary kind of being, it is always already ‘outside’ together with some being encountered in the world already discovered. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Da-sein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its object, Da-sein is ‘inside’ correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows.”(Heidegger, 1996, 58). In my view, the phenomenological analyses of intentionality (be it Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, or Merleau-Ponty’s) all entail such a fundamental rethinking of the very relation between subjectivity and environment that it no longer makes sense to designate them as being either internalist or externalist. This claim might be relatively uncontroversial when it comes to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, but it is controversial when it comes to Husserl, since he (at least by Anglo-American philosophers) is frequently interpreted as a prototypical internalist and methodological solipsist. However, I believe that this interpretation is based on something that approaches a complete misunderstanding of what Husserl is up to (including a misinterpretation of his concept of noema, and of his notion of phenomenological reduction), but it would lead too far to argue for this claim here. See however Zahavi, 2003a.
Click to expand...
1. Why is a representationalist model key to the argument that Zahavi is opposing?

2. contrast the two phrases, the one about: on its own the mind not reaching all the way to the world and the one about "being in the world".

As to whether you agree with the phenomenological view of perception ... ask yourself if your view of perception supports epiphenomenalism?if perception is a physiological change in X ... Then what does consciousness have to "do"?




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"First of all, shall I consider the above to be a monist approach? That is, do phenomenologists consider "objects" "us/we" and "presentations" to all exist within the same substrate? For example, above it says: "We are ‘zunächst und zumeist’ directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intra-mental objects." What shall I take the "we" to be in this case? The physical organism or the conscious subject? Who/what is getting this so-called presentation?"

"Who/what is getting this so-called presentation?"

We are!
 
@Soupie
"First of all, shall I consider the above to be a monist approach? That is, do phenomenologists consider "objects" "us/we" and "presentations" to all exist within the same substrate?"

Two clues we have:

1. "Being in the World"
2. Zahavi's work on naturalizing phenomenology
 
@Soupie

I think of Representation as an extra step ... Uswes having to form a picture of the world first and respond to that ... this was what GOFAI/early AI tried to do and it failed - you can see why or you can see Dreyfus.

AI is now incorporating some ideas from phenomenology, if I understand correctly. Very funny to think you might learn Phenomenology if you study AI! Ha! Ha ha! .... ha

But phenomenology, as I understand it, which is to say poorly ... so you should ask @Constance ... wants to get YOU ... Who? ... YOU! back in your body and your body back in the world. Where? ... THE WORLD.

And if you ask me about Phenomenology and Monism again ... I'll bracket you! ;-)
 
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