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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9

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Here are a few clarifying quotations from the translation of "The Origin of the Work of Art" that I linked at academia.edu that might be helpful.

"In the work, if there happens an opening up of beings (des Seienden) into what and how they are, a happening of truth is at work."

"Our way of posing the question of the work is shaken, because we asked not after the work, but half after a thing and half after a tool. Only this was no posing of the question that first we developed. It is the way the question is posed in aesthetics. The way aesthetics considers the artwork in advance stands under the dominance of the traditional explication of all being (alles Seienden). Still, the shaking of the usual posing of the question is not the essential point. What matters is a first opening of the sight by which the workly in the work, the tool-like in the tool, the thingly in the thing, first come nearer to us, if we think the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden). To this end it is needed that beforehand the constraints of self-evidence fall off and that current pseudo-concepts be set aside. Hence we had to go by a way around. But it brings us at the same time on the way that can lead to a determination of the thingly part of the work. The thingly part of the work should not be denied away; but this thingly part, if indeed it belongs to the being-work of the work, must be thought from out of the workly. If so, the way leads to a determination of the thingly actuality of the work by going not over the thing to the work, but over the work to the thing. The artwork opens up in its own way the being of beings (das Sein des Seienden). In the work happens this opening, i.e. the unconcealing, i.e. the truth of beings (des Seienden). In the artwork, the truth of beings (des Seienden) has set itself to work. Art is the setting-itself-to-work of truth. What is truth itself, that it ereignet itself at times as art? What is this setting-itself-to-work?[29]"


I'm not sure why these translators felt they needed to provide a translation of this essay beyond that of Albert Hofstadter, who translated and published a group of H's later essays in Poetry Language Thought [which I've cited before]. There Hofstadter provided an extremely helpful introduction to these essays, including "The Origin of the Work of Art." As I said much earlier in our thread, I found these essays and Hofstadter's introduction to them to be radically illuminating re Heidegger's later philosophy. And I've found today that the entirety of that book is available online at this link:

http://ssbothwell.com/documents/ebooksclub.org__Poetry__Language__Thought__Perennial_Classics_.pdf
 
Jack Panksepp has apparently passed away. I was unable to find an article with details however.

@smcder I don't necessarily have a response to objectifying/using consciousness. I think humans already manipulate human consciousness and if we learn to manipulate consciousness with greater precision we will. For better and worse, as with all technology.

Edit: This is Soupie. My mind has apparently become embodied by a new account. It's still green.
 
eme said:
Jack Panksepp has apparently passed away. I was unable to find an article with details however.

@smcder I don't necessarily have a response to objectifying/using consciousness. I think humans already manipulate human consciousness and if we learn to manipulate consciousness with greater precision we will. For better and worse, as with all technology.

Edit: This is Soupie. My mind has apparently become embodied by a new account. It's still green.
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There's an obit that looks to be under development. In the meantime this article might be relevant to the discussion here: The periconscious substrates of consciousness: Affective states and the evolutionary origins of the SELF (PDF Download Available)
 
smcder said:
"Let me take up this question while acknowledging the apparent irony of doing so in this technological medium. In fact, this need not be ironic at all, given my view that we have to find ways to use technologies against technologization—learning to use technologies without being used by them, as it were—by employing particular technologies in ways that help us uncover and transcend (rather than thoughtlessly reinforce) the nihilistic technologization at work within our late-modern age. What Heidegger helps us learn to undermine and transcend, in other words, is not technology but rather nihilistic technologization."

This idea of using technology against ("technicity") surprises me ... specifically this technology i.e. electronic communication ... as it seems to be exactly the kind of technology H. was concerned about?
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Did George Williams use this word 'technicity' in the essay quoted? I don't remember coming across the term there or anywhere. What does it refer to?

I remember your referring to the concept of 'techne' in Heidegger's thought much earlier in this thread. It comes up on the last of the five pages of class notes I link below. Perhaps you were reading H's "The Question concerning Technology" at that time.

In the meantime, I've found a very clear online explication of Heidegger's "The Question concerning Technology" written as class notes by a professor of Heideggerean philosophy in Hawaii, linked below. I'll quote a brief extract from the fourth page of these notes but recommend reading all five pages because they integrate H's thinking re technology with his later philosophy as a whole.

Extract

"But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.

Heidegger once again quotes the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, finding in these lines from the poem "Patmos" a formulation of the paradox he wants to describe: within the "supreme danger" of humanity's enframing orientation to the world lies the potential of a rescue from that very danger.

To help us to understand this paradox, Heidegger turns our attention to the meaning of "essence." He takes us through the traditional philosophical sense of "essence": it means "what" [in Latin, quid] something is. It names a genus, a class of things that are all the same kind of thing. All trees, for example, have "treeness" in common; "treeness" is their essence. From their inquiries into essence, the ancient Greek philosophers developed the concept of eidos, which we have already encountered in the example of the chalice.

This traditional understanding of essence, however, does not apply to modern technology. For Plato and Aristotle, the essence is what "remains permanently," what outlasts any particular manifestation of a thing (312). Heidegger turns to the German language to connect the verb wesen "to develop" (not often used in modern German) to the verb währen "to endure." Here again, Heidegger trying to "get behind" the assumptions and established formulations that shape traditional philosophical thinking. The model of essence as a "genus" does not adequately represent the relationship between the essence of a thing and the thing as it appears before us.

If enframing, as the essence of technology, cannot be thought of as a category to which all technological things belong, how are we supposed to think of it? At this point Heidegger turns to move head-on into the paradox. He draws upon the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe--another thinker who loved to play with words--who in one of his novels joins the words fortwähren "to endure permanently" and gewähren "to grant." Heidegger wants to connect the concept of "enduring"--a quality of essence in the traditional model of essence--and "granting," which is Heidegger's new contribution to the model.

Earlier in this Guide, I mentioned that the idea of "giving" is crucial in Heidegger's work, and that the phrase "to be" is, in German, es gibt--literally, "it gives." If we return for a moment to the example of chalice, we can begin understand Heidegger's reasons for selecting this particular object for his illustration. In the Christian tradition in which Heidegger is situated, the communion chalice is used to make an offering: the priest or minister offers the communion wine to the congregation in the chalice, and the wine itself symbolizes Christ's offering of his life for humanity. Heidegger takes this image and applies it to all existence. The world "gives" itself to us insofar as it reveals and opens itself to us. Our response to this "gift," which Heidegger has described as "enframing," is at once a grave danger (our instrumental, exploitative, blind orientation to the world sets us on a self-destructive course) and an opportunity to see ourselves as a part of the coming-into-being, the revealing, and the "granting" of the world.

Furthermore, since humanity is, as we have said, "in the driver's seat" of technology, we must realize that our capacity to manipulate nature entails a solemn responsibility to "watch over" nature. Again, we can easily see Heidegger's argument in terms of today's environmental movement, but we need to remember that Heidegger is not simply speaking of nature in the sense usually assumed by environmentalists.
Everything that exists must be cared for--humanity's responsibility is to care for Being itself. It would also be a simplification of Heidegger's argument to associate it too directly with the anti-nuclear movement, but the specter of the total devastation of the planet does bring home the gravity of Heidegger's concerns. In the question concerning technology, everything is at stake. . . . ."

The link will probably go the fourth page of these notes but it's best to read the three preceding pages up to this point and then to finish reading these notes. [Note: the Hawaaian professor goes on the present another set of notes on this essay at what feels like the conclusion of the first set.]

Heidegger: The Question Concerning Technology
 
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(continuing) Here are three paragraphs from the last page of the class notes cited above:

"In our own time, Heidegger suggests, the paradox of how "enframing" can hold within it a saving power [that] can be resolved by viewing the artistic or poetic orientation to the world as the alternative dimension of "enframing." The poet looks at the world in order to understand it, certainly, but this reflection does not seek to make the world into a "standing-reserve." For Heidegger, the poet takes the world "as it is," as it reveals itself--which, for Heidegger, is the world's "true" form (remember that the Greek word for truth, aletheia, literally means "revealing" or "unveiling").

"Truth" for Heidegger is a "revealing," the process of something "giving" or "showing" itself. Art is the realm in which this "granting" of the world is upheld. Art's relationship with the world is, in Heidegger's view, different from technology's in that art is less concerned with measuring, classifying, and exploiting the resources of the world than it is with "taking part" in the process of coming-to-being and revealing that characterize the existence.

We should not interpret Heidegger to be suggesting that we all go out and become artists, but rather that we incorporate more of the artist's and poet's vision into our own view of the world. By doing so, we can guard against the dangers of enframing, and enter into a "free"--constantly critical, constantly questioning--relationship with the technology that is constantly making new incursions into our lives."

Btw, Thoreau expressed the same concern about technology that we see in Heidegger when he wrote "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and moved out of Concord to live at Walden Pond in order to get closer to the natural world.
 
Re the second set of notes from Hawaii, which I'm reading now, the following is also clarifying:

“. . . It's appropriate that Heidegger's language takes on such a poetic quality at this point, for the next term he will introduce is poeisis, the Greek word from which our word "poetry" is derived. For the Greeks, Heidegger tells us, poeisis, is intimately related to "being responsible" in the sense he has just discussed.

Poeisis means "bringing forth." Heidegger distinguishes between two forms of bringing forth. The first is directly associated with poeisis, as it is the bringing forth into existence that the craftsperson and the poet (and anyone who produces things) practice. The products of this activity are brought forth by something else [en alloi--"in another"], that is, the poet makes the poem, the craftsperson makes the wood carving, etc. The second is physis, the bringing forth that occurs in nature, in which things such as flowers are brought forth in themselves {en heautoi]. Both instances, however, fall into the category of poeisis in the sense that something that was not present is made present.

Heidegger states the idea of bringing forth again in slightly different terms: "Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into unconcealment" (293). This image of poeisis as a kind of revealing leads him to yet another Greek word: aletheia, which literally means "unveiling" or "revealing." It is also the Greek word for "truth."


It is uncanny how closely Wallace Stevens's poetry develops the same understanding of being and of Being's 'appropriation' of human consciousness and activity as that which is expressed in the phenomenological philosophies of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

I'll next post several poems by Stevens as examples.
 
LANDSCAPE WITH BOAT

"An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turquoise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.

It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.

He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer's track
And say, "The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime."

~~Wallace Stevens
 
Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,
As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.
They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,
Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.
They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost
And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves
And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,
The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:
Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,
Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are
And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

-- Wallace Stevens
 
eme said:
Jack Panksepp has apparently passed away. I was unable to find an article with details however.
Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about this, especially for those he leaves behind personally and professionally. On the other hand, if NDE experiencers and other reporters are correct, he is likely capable now of a much greater insight into the difficult questions he pursued in this life than he had already achieved. And his achievements in affective neuroscience and biology were already great.
 
Thought-provoking article on the origin of language and the nature of the unconscious by Cormac McCarthy:

Cormac McCarthy on the Origin of Language

"Problems in general are often well posed in terms of language and language remains a handy tool for explaining them. But the actual process of thinking—in any discipline—is largely an unconscious affair. Language can be used to sum up some point at which one has arrived—a sort of milepost—so as to gain a fresh starting point. But if you believe that you actually use language in the solving of problems I wish that you would write to me and tell me how you go about it.

I’ve pointed out to some of my mathematical friends that the unconscious appears to be better at math than they are. My friend George Zweig calls this the Night Shift. Bear in mind that the unconscious has no pencil or notepad and certainly no eraser. That it does solve problems in mathematics is indisputable. How does it go about it? When I’ve suggested to my friends that it may well do it without using numbers, most of them thought—after a while—that this was a possibility. How, we dont know. Just as we dont know how it is that we manage to talk. If I am talking to you then I can hardly be crafting at the same time the sentences that are to follow what I am now saying. I am totally occupied in talking to you. Nor can some part of my mind be assembling these sentences and then saying them to me so that I can repeat them. Aside from the fact that I am busy this would be to evoke an endless regress. The truth is that there is a process here to which we have no access. It is a mystery opaque to total blackness."
 
Intriguing essay, Soupie. Thanks for posting the link to it. Very few of the commentators seem to me to have taken the author's most significant points under consideration. We'll probably do much better with the essay here.
 
Constance said:
Intriguing essay, Soupie. Thanks for posting the link to it. Very few of the commentators seem to me to have taken the author's most significant points under consideration. We'll probably do much better with the essay here.
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I thought this comment was interesting and strikingly relevant to the direction the discussion took in this particular thread. However it seems to maybe be a quote from McCarthy himself:

"Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."

smcder said:
Have you read any of McCarthy's books?
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I haven't. (I have seen the movie No Country.)
 
Neuroscientists are apparently in a tizzy because "functional connectivity" has been documented between parts of the brain which have been physically, surgically separated.

Functional Connectivity Between Surgically Disconnected Brain Regions? - Neuroskeptic

Its been documented—and we've discussed the fact in this discussion—that neurons can influence one another without being connected cellularly.

I'm not suggesting this gives us any insight to consciousness. It just serves to highlight as one comment or put it:

"But let's be clear -- it's ALL about statistical activity patterns of large-scale proxy phenomena, not neural activity per se, abut which we have only the faintest and most rudimentary knowledge, and that (again) from animal and lesion studies and the extremely rare cases where limited neurosurgical experiments on humans are ethically feasible."
 
"Corvids, such as crows, ravens, and magpies, are among the most intelligent birds on the planet—the list of their cognitive achievements goes on and on—yet neuroscientists have not scrutinized their brains for one simple reason: They don’t have a neocortex. The obsession with the neocortex in neuroscience research is not unwarranted; what’s unwarranted is the notion that the neocortex alone is responsible for sophisticated cognition. Because birds lack this structure—the most recently evolved portion of the mammalian brain, crucial to human intelligence—neuroscientists have largely and unfortunately neglected the neural basis of corvid intelligence.

10426_8553adf92deaf5279bcc6f9813c8fdcc.png

A DIFFERENT KIND OF INTELLIGENCE: Along with ravens and magpies, crows are among the most intelligent birds on the planet. But their brains do not have a neocortex. Life on White
This makes them miss an opportunity for an important insight. Having diverged from mammals more than 300 million years ago, avian brains have had plenty of time to develop along remarkably different lines (instead of a cortex with its six layers of neatly arranged neurons, birds evolved groups of neurons densely packed into clusters called nuclei). So, any computational similarities between corvid and primate brains—which are so different neurally—would indicate the development of common solutions to shared evolutionary problems, like creating and storing memories, or learning from experience. If neuroscientists want to know how brains produce intelligence, looking solely at the neocortex won’t cut it; they must study how corvid brains achieve the same clever behaviors that we see in ourselves and other mammals."

How Can Crows Be So Smart When They Don't Have a Neocortex?
 
Soupie said:
. . . I'm not suggesting this gives us any insight to consciousness.
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I do think, though, that the phenomenon you're referring to does put us on one of the main roads we need to take in investigating the brain/mind/consciousness relationship.

It just serves to highlight as one commentor put it:

"But let's be clear -- it's ALL about statistical activity patterns of large-scale proxy phenomena, not neural activity per se, abut which we have only the faintest and most rudimentary knowledge, and that (again) from animal and lesion studies and the extremely rare cases where limited neurosurgical experiments on humans are ethically feasible."
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I don't know if it's "ALL about statistical activity patterns" yet to be understood and demonstrated, if they can be. I wish the commentator had defined or described what he means by "large-scale proxy phenomena." I've yet to read the paper creating so much attention; will do so tonight. I'm glad you brought it into our discussion.
 
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The Neuroskeptic article begins with these two paragraphs:

"A new article posted on preprint site bioRxiv has generated a lot of interest among neuroscientists on Twitter. The article reports the existence of ‘functional connectivity‘ between surgically disconnected distant brain regions using fMRI, something that in theory shouldn’t be possible.

This is big news, if true, because it suggests that fMRI functional connectivity isn’t entirely a reflection of actual signalling between brain areas. Rather, something else must be able to produce connectivity – most likely it has to do with the constriction of blood vessels in the brain. Whatever the source of the non-neuronal connectivity is, it raises the worrying possibility that it might be contaminating fMRI studies."

A helpful development, however much it might/will be resisted since it undermines the major presupposition of 'brain science'.

Link to the paper itself:

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/04/15/127571.full.pdf
 
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