Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 9

[Michael Allen]

Just to be clear, the use of "just is" and "nothing special" is to clarify the relationship between consciousness (feeling) and matter.

My argument is that consciousness (feeling) is not an ontologically distinct substance/substrate from matter, nor is consciousness (feeling) an irreducible substance/substrate that emerges from or "oozes" from neural or some other physical process.

Thus the claim the consciousness (feeling) just is matter and is nothing special, isn't a claim that matter is nothing special or just is something simple; it's a claim that consciousness (feeling) and matter are ontologically identical.

How this can be though is the question. The answer is that it's a matter of perspective.

---

I'm gonna toss this analogy out there and see if there's any takers...

Life is to matter as subjective experience is to consciousness (feeling).

That is, life is a process that manifests within the substrate of matter; subjective experience is a process that manifests within the substrate of consciousness (feeling).

Said differently: The mainstream thinking is that consciousness (feeling) and subjective experience arise together via neural processes in the brain.

This is akin to saying that matter and life arise together. But we know that life is a processes that arises within the substrate of matter.

I argue that so too subjective experience is a process that arises within the substrate of consciousness (experience).

Finally, extension, mass, spin, and processes such as life are properties and processes of matter as perceived from the 3rd person perspective; phenomenality/feeling and processes such as subjective experience are properties and processes of matter as experienced from the 1st person perspective.

or...we as "physically realized entities" are unable to either reduce our nature to that which we "perceive" and experience to the representations or we are unable to provide a "meaningful" our-less (US-less) narrative which is self-sufficient (i.e. a narrative w/o a narrator or listener). We keep falling into the same traps of our own beingness-contrition...which tries to "elementalize" our relations into concrete particulars and then use a framework of logic to reconstruct the entire "meaning" and "being" of those concrete particulars independent of the explicit first encounters we had with those same.

Its really, really, really...(really), almost embarrassing for me to repeat this, but the very problem we are trying to solve is the source of our ability to inject life, awareness, drama and meaning into our fundamental inadequacies." The object "we" which 'we' are trying to analyze cannot be broken down into components which are comprehensible by our same framework of understanding and comprehension.

Why? Because the very components which we are trying to find when reconstructed bring us back to the original platform of intrigue and questioning. IF you are ABLE to answer all these questions to yourself, then you cease to have the very nature which provided you the ability to formulate the question (and even be "mystified" by it). You dissect the human centroid of sentience and sentience dies...plain and simple. But in our hubris, we imagine that our abilities can reach such an end. The end of being is the end of answers--is the end of time--is the end of all movement and change. Your mind requires an unpredictable realm of relations for which you can develop the ability to "care" or to even "wonder."

It is hard for humans beings to imagine a state of being that is so derelict of being as omniscience. That is why we constantly worship such ideas and aspire to ultimate power...knowledge...because we cannot even in our best moments comprehend the undoing of our own nature. Even the saga of Christianity fulfills our need to "comprehend uncomprehension" through the mind experiment experience of temporary cessation of perfect omniscience. Logically we have no recourse but to suspend ourselves and project our abilities into the cosmos... Our inability to recognize the inner recognizer is repeated countless times...in every myth, legend, bedtime story.

The "mind" which we are so "familiar" with, is not a substance like the things ...but then again neither do we have the ultimate elemental understanding of our world--or ourselves.

An axiom I will propose might help...if you give it some thought (it may sound crazy...trust me)

Axiom of Sentience: Any being that fully understands and "groks" the background of its own existence is dead

There...that's probably not the answer most here are looking for...but nevertheless.

 

[Randall]

Axiom of Sentience: Any being that fully understands and "groks" the background of its own existence is dead.

You are the master of paradoxical paradigms. If I were to take any meaning away from all that, I'd say that it speaks to the idea that we don't really have to know all the answers about consciousness in order to make use of it. On some level everything is some sort of unfathomable mystery, and if we were to always wait to figure that mystery out before making any practical use of it, we'd never get any further ahead. IMO the technology that this discussion would apply to is still nowhere as evolved as the discussion itself, and if AI is ever invented and becomes self-replicating and aware, it might just fit your Axiom of Sentience. After all, it would rapidly evolve to exceed the capacity of it's own creators to understand itself. But would it therefore really be dead?

 

[Constance]

Our language is bewitching, in that it allows us to place an entire cosmos of relations between the world and WORLD into a sound-byte that has the appearance of taking the place of the entire affair of existence.

Very insightful. In addition to emphacizing the word 'appearance', I'd emend your ramifying statement slightly in the following instances:

'Human language is misleading in that it seems to enable us to place an entire cosmos of relations between our existentially experienced 'world' and the World as a whole into a sound-byte that has the appearance of taking the place of the entire affair of existence.'

I think it's clear that animal languages precede human languages in evolution and that animal languages include the capacities both to refer to things and situations and to communicate meanings, so that human languages emerge from a background of earlier signifying expressions by living species that have been (and continue to be) similar to our species up to a point.

The differences between our species and others arise with reflective consciousness and mind in which 'self-awareness' becomes more fully funded and sets up an understanding of the difference and distance between the streams of liveed 'subjective' experience in the environing world and the comparatively fixed nature of encountered 'things' in the world. As Merleau-Ponty recognized, the interpretation of what-is becomes far more complex in human perception and language, both of which include the capacity for imagination, in thought and thus in the evolving languages by which we attempt to express what we feel [sense] and what we think [how we 'make sense'] of our lived experience.

Merleau-Ponty, in his later writing, argued that perception as well as language are expressive, following Sassure in differentiating between 'langue' [language as a comparatively closed 'system' of references in which words function as 'signs' having fixed meanings] and 'parole' [spontaneous expressions of lived meaning in existential speech, which add to linguistic systems of signs]. I've linked in the past to books by Richard Lanigan developing MP's existential phenomenology of speaking and semiotics. See Amazon.com: Richard L. Lanigan: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle

Here I want to link to and extract some paragraphs from a recent paper -- "Merleau-Ponty from Perception to Language: New Elements of Interpretation," by Roberta Dreon -- which more succinctly presents MP's later thought re expression in perception:

"... In order to understand what the philosopher means when he speaks about expression and presents perception itself as something expressive, we should move away both from the common-sense idea of expression and from a certain philosophical assumption that perception is the way things are not only originally given to us, but also clearly and immediately given to us.

From Merleau-Ponty’s perspective, expression is not the outside transmission of a pre-existing meaning – for example the communication to other people of an allegedly private state of mind, which ought to be already completely determined before it is conveyed. Expression is rather that peculiar property characterizing objects, human artefacts, utensils and works of art (and it would be helpful if Merleau-Ponty had also spoken about practices or behaviors as expressive) as implying something other than themselves as given in presence, that is something that is not given in presence or which remains opaque, implicit and not visible, by contrast to the object which is given. Something is expressive because it belongs to a human world – that is, it can be expressive only from an anthropological point of view – and moreover it is expressive in the sense that it makes us glimpse, half-see or imagine something else which is not given in its full presence and determinacy. This 'further' thing is nothing mysterious or esoteric: it may be the background of a figure standing on the foreground, the écart in comparison to a more primitive level, a certain practice from which a specific thing derives its own significance, or a whole form of life in reference to which something finds its proper function or meaning.

On the other hand, perception is always understood by Merleau-Ponty as the primary source of sense, but this does not imply that perceptive experience supplies an immediately clear and distinct picture of what exists. When we perceive something as determined, we always perceive a more nuanced something else alongside it that is not given in presence, but which constitutes the necessary background or the ground level in reference to which we can perceive a certain object, that is our focus – a figure in the background or a difference in comparison to a specific level representing the norm for us in a particular context.

It may be noted that in Merleau-Ponty’s notions of expression and perception as something expressive many influences are at work. First of all we can detect an appropriation of the Gestalt-psychologie idea of the necessary correlation between figure and background, object and perceptive field: perception, including visual perception, does not primarily give us access to mere isolated objects, whose boundaries are conceived as being completely and autonomously defined. On the contrary, it has to do with selective and dynamic structures that always imply a certain degree of opacity or indeterminacy as the correlative condition for clarity and determinacy. Secondly, we can perceive the influence of the structuralist assumption that no sign has its own significance autonomously or per se. On the contrary, sense – both on the perceptive and on the linguistic level – is conceived as a diacritic phenomenon, that is as something emerging from the mutual differentiation of signs. Perception itself has to do with a sort of interplay among different moving features, which are not definitely given and can be fixed only provisionally and in certain situations. Frequently as I will later point out, ordinary and scientific language [53 Lebenswelt, 9 (2016)] tend to artificially stiffen these reciprocal differentiations among meanings by interpreting the connection between a single sign and its correlative reference as something given once and forever. From a structuralist perspective, these circumstances tend to make us consider the system of signs – la langue – as preeminent and pre-established in comparison to any further contingent act of parole.

Furthermore, I would add that the concept of expression developed here by Merleau-Ponty is resonant with Heidegger's analysis of the so called «hermeneutisches als», which emphasizes that something – a utensil, in Heidegger’s case too – can be perceived and understood as what it is only by reference to certain human practices and to an articulated web of references which are not thematic, but constitute the necessary pre-assumptions – the Vorhabe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff – for grasping something as that particular thing and not a different one (Heidegger 1927, § 32). Moreover, in the French philosopher's definition of expression as something implying a reference to men and to a whole human world we can detect an echo of Heidegger’s interpretation of the world as the ultimate system of cross-references, which is virtually involved in the fact of experiencing something as something – a system whose ultimate reference is human existence. For this reason, I agree with Stefan Kristensen when he states that «l'analyse de la perception devient herméneutique sans que cela n'implique la ré- duction du contenu perceptif à un contenu linguistique» (Kristensen 2010, 78).

To sum up, perception, still maintains its primacy in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. However, his characterization of perception as expression makes it clear that he rejected the so-called Cartesian form of intuitionism, that is the idea of perception as the direct grasping of what there is, basically coinciding with a dyadic relation between a knowing subject and a perceived object. In his view, perceptions always imply a third, more indeterminate but necessary element: a more or less nuanced field of perception, an implicitly assumed system of reciprocal differentiation between senses, a reference to a human practice and action. But his original point here is that this reference to a third aspect is realized by means not of a semiotic interpretation – an inference, in Peirce’s terms – but rather of a body, and more precisely a bodily schema [7].

2. The mediating body

From this point of view, the thesis that the body is the medium of perception acquires a new light. In the following lessons it becomes clear that the expressive root of perception is connected to the moving body, which shares the same field as the perceived object and actively operates from within it. The body appears as the natural subject (Lanfredini 2011, 73) of a praxis in an environment with which it constantly coordinates its moves, by practically taking into account what it meets, what can or cannot be reached, what remains opaque, nuanced or invisible simply because we, as body, are heavy and limited in our movements, and necessarily occupy a certain position in any given moment and cannot be ubiquitous. Hence, Merleau-Ponty says that the human body is expressive because in every human gesture it designs and develops an Umwelt – it never primarily perceives an object as an isolated entity in a vacuum, but perceives it by means of a practical triadic coordination with a certain environment constituting the third reference involved, without any need for interpretation. . . . ."

MERLEAU-PONTY FROM PERCEPTION TO LANGUAGE. NEW ELEMENTS OF INTERPRETATION

In the first few paragraphs of the above paper, the author cites a number of works in progress and lecture notes by MP in the last years of his life which develop his later philosophy. Perhaps the most helpful of these is the revised third chapter of his uncompleted book The Prose of the World which he published in the journal Le Temps Moderne and titled "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence." I'm looking for an English translation of this revised chapter online but have not yet found one.

In the meantime, a chapter from a new book on MP's philosophy, Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology by Glen A. Mazis, linked below, can serve as an explication of the development of MP's thought concerning perception, expression, and language in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence."

http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/63429.pdf

 

[smcder]

A Theory of Reality as More Than the Sum of Its Parts

LMGTFY

 

[smcder]

or...we as "physically realized entities" are unable to either reduce our nature to that which we "perceive" and experience to the representations or we are unable to provide a "meaningful" our-less (US-less) narrative which is self-sufficient (i.e. a narrative w/o a narrator or listener). We keep falling into the same traps of our own beingness-contrition...which tries to "elementalize" our relations into concrete particulars and then use a framework of logic to reconstruct the entire "meaning" and "being" of those concrete particulars independent of the explicit first encounters we had with those same.

Its really, really, really...(really), almost embarrassing for me to repeat this, but the very problem we are trying to solve is the source of our ability to inject life, awareness, drama and meaning into our fundamental inadequacies." The object "we" which 'we' are trying to analyze cannot be broken down into components which are comprehensible by our same framework of understanding and comprehension.

Why? Because the very components which we are trying to find when reconstructed bring us back to the original platform of intrigue and questioning. IF you are ABLE to answer all these questions to yourself, then you cease to have the very nature which provided you the ability to formulate the question (and even be "mystified" by it). You dissect the human centroid of sentience and sentience dies...plain and simple. But in our hubris, we imagine that our abilities can reach such an end. The end of being is the end of answers--is the end of time--is the end of all movement and change. Your mind requires an unpredictable realm of relations for which you can develop the ability to "care" or to even "wonder."

It is hard for humans beings to imagine a state of being that is so derelict of being as omniscience. That is why we constantly worship such ideas and aspire to ultimate power...knowledge...because we cannot even in our best moments comprehend the undoing of our own nature. Even the saga of Christianity fulfills our need to "comprehend uncomprehension" through the mind experiment experience of temporary cessation of perfect omniscience. Logically we have no recourse but to suspend ourselves and project our abilities into the cosmos... Our inability to recognize the inner recognizer is repeated countless times...in every myth, legend, bedtime story.

The "mind" which we are so "familiar" with, is not a substance like the things ...but then again neither do we have the ultimate elemental understanding of our world--or ourselves.

An axiom I will propose might help...if you give it some thought (it may sound crazy...trust me)

Axiom of Sentience: Any being that fully understands and "groks" the background of its own existence is dead

There...that's probably not the answer most here are looking for...but nevertheless.

"IF you are ABLE to answer all these questions to yourself, then you cease to have the very nature which provided you the ability to formulate the question (and even be "mystified" by it). You dissect the human centroid of sentience and sentience dies...plain and simple."

If that's true then just knowing that if one were ABLE will have the same sentience-killing effect.

Reminds me of Blackwood's "The Man Who Found Out" see also the film PontyPool... again noting that it's enough to know such knowledge exists.

 

[smcder]

Science

Wandering Towards a Goal Essay Contest (2016-2017)
Agent Above, Atom Below: How agents causally emerge from their underlying microphysics by Erik P Hoel

Essay Abstract

Some physical entities, which we often refer to as agents, can be described as having intentions and engaging in goal-oriented behavior. Yet agents can also be described in terms of low-level dynamics that are mindless, intention-less, and without goals or purpose. How we can reconcile these seemingly disparate levels of description? This is especially problematic because the lower scales at first appear more fundament in three ways: in terms of their causal work, in terms of the amount of information they contain, and their theoretical superiority in terms of model choice. However, recent research bringing information theory to bear on modeling systems at different scales significantly reframes the issue. I argue that agents, with their associated intentions and goal-oriented behavior, can actually causally emerge from their underlying microscopic physics. This is particularly true of agents because they are autopoietic and possess (apparent) teleological causal relationships.

http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/alife20.../2016/07/ALife_XV_LBA_booklet-1-1.pdf#page=23

 

[smcder]

Absolute Human: The Communicology and Intentionality of Embodiment (2012) REVISED (2015) as "HUMAN EMBODIMENT" below in Journal Articles.

 

[smcder]

In the Machine We Trust: Cyborg Body of Philosophy, Religion and Fiction (working paper)

 

[smcder]

MERLEAU-PONTY FROM PERCEPTION TO LANGUAGE. NEW ELEMENTS OF INTERPRETATION

In the first few paragraphs of the above paper, the author cites a number of works in progress and lecture notes by MP in the last years of his life which develop his later philosophy. Perhaps the most helpful of these is the revised third chapter of his uncompleted book The Prose of the World which he published in the journal Le Temps Moderne and titled "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence." I'm looking for an English translation of this revised chapter online but have not yet found one.

In the meantime, a chapter from a new book on MP's philosophy, Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology by Glen A. Mazis, linked below, can serve as an explication of the development of MP's thought concerning perception, expression, and language in "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence."

http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/63429.pdf

"Perhaps the most helpful of these is the revised third chapter of his uncompleted book The Prose of the World which he published in the journal Le Temps Moderne and titled "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence." I'm looking for an English translation of this revised chapter online but have not yet found one."

I'm finding several links to the chapter and the whole book from 1973 - I'm assuming you've found these and they are not the revised chapter?

Merleau Ponty Indirect Language Voices of Silence
https://monoskop.org/images/0/04/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_The_Prose_of_the_World_1973.pdf

Google translate is getting better - I don't know if the French original of the revised chapter is available? if so, you might run it through a translation - since you are familiar with MP's work and would have the above copies available for comparison - you could make allowances for the Google translation.

 

[smcder]

or...we as "physically realized entities" are unable to either reduce our nature to that which we "perceive" and experience to the representations or we are unable to provide a "meaningful" our-less (US-less) narrative which is self-sufficient (i.e. a narrative w/o a narrator or listener). We keep falling into the same traps of our own beingness-contrition...which tries to "elementalize" our relations into concrete particulars and then use a framework of logic to reconstruct the entire "meaning" and "being" of those concrete particulars independent of the explicit first encounters we had with those same.

Its really, really, really...(really), almost embarrassing for me to repeat this, but the very problem we are trying to solve is the source of our ability to inject life, awareness, drama and meaning into our fundamental inadequacies." The object "we" which 'we' are trying to analyze cannot be broken down into components which are comprehensible by our same framework of understanding and comprehension.

Why? Because the very components which we are trying to find when reconstructed bring us back to the original platform of intrigue and questioning. IF you are ABLE to answer all these questions to yourself, then you cease to have the very nature which provided you the ability to formulate the question (and even be "mystified" by it). You dissect the human centroid of sentience and sentience dies...plain and simple. But in our hubris, we imagine that our abilities can reach such an end. The end of being is the end of answers--is the end of time--is the end of all movement and change. Your mind requires an unpredictable realm of relations for which you can develop the ability to "care" or to even "wonder."

It is hard for humans beings to imagine a state of being that is so derelict of being as omniscience. That is why we constantly worship such ideas and aspire to ultimate power...knowledge...because we cannot even in our best moments comprehend the undoing of our own nature. Even the saga of Christianity fulfills our need to "comprehend uncomprehension" through the mind experiment experience of temporary cessation of perfect omniscience. Logically we have no recourse but to suspend ourselves and project our abilities into the cosmos... Our inability to recognize the inner recognizer is repeated countless times...in every myth, legend, bedtime story.

The "mind" which we are so "familiar" with, is not a substance like the things ...but then again neither do we have the ultimate elemental understanding of our world--or ourselves.

An axiom I will propose might help...if you give it some thought (it may sound crazy...trust me)

Axiom of Sentience: Any being that fully understands and "groks" the background of its own existence is dead

There...that's probably not the answer most here are looking for...but nevertheless.

Its really, really, really...(really), almost embarrassing for me to repeat this,
Why embarrassed?

Who is the "we" in the above paragraphs?

 

[smcder]

@Constance - enjoying the Kaelin commentary ... these are nice resources for Merleau-Ponty:

http://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=philosophical_fridays

http://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/Merleau-Ponty-EssentialWritings.pdf

 

[smcder]

Succcint history of mind and body in Philosophy:

philosophy and the body - Dictionary definition of philosophy and the body | Encyclopedia.com: FREE online dictionary

 

[smcder]

@smcder

If consciousness (feeling) is primary in relation to matter or fundamental a la panpsychism, and if reality—at least at the layer of consciousness and matter—is analog, then an answer to the combination problem is within reach methinks.

In chalmers approach to panprotopsychism, he seems to assume that reality—at least at the layer of consciousness-matter—is digital, consisting of quarks/electrons.

So the combination problem asks how these units of proto-consciousness can combine into a unified field of subjective experience.

But if this consciousness-matter substrate is analog, then it is already unified, and subjective experiential processes (1st person perspective) and neural processes (3rd person perspective) are not combinatorial processes but rather filtrative processes.

Not unlike methinks a rainbow of colors being filtered out from pure white.

I know, if, if, if...

 

[smcder]

@smcder

If consciousness (feeling) is primary in relation to matter or fundamental a la panpsychism, and if reality—at least at the layer of consciousness and matter—is analog, then an answer to the combination problem is within reach methinks.

In chalmers approach to panprotopsychism, he seems to assume that reality—at least at the layer of consciousness-matter—is digital, consisting of quarks/electrons.

So the combination problem asks how these units of proto-consciousness can combine into a unified field of subjective experience.

But if this consciousness-matter substrate is analog, then it is already unified, and subjective experiential processes (1st person perspective) and neural processes (3rd person perspective) are not combinatorial processes but rather filtrative processes.

Not unlike methinks a rainbow of colors being filtered out from pure white.

I know, if, if, if...

lim(if(x)) = ~(why?)
x-->+-00

Limit of if(x) as x goes to plus or minus infinity = why not?

 

[smcder]

@smcder

If consciousness (feeling) is primary in relation to matter or fundamental a la panpsychism, and if reality—at least at the layer of consciousness and matter—is analog, then an answer to the combination problem is within reach methinks.

In chalmers approach to panprotopsychism, he seems to assume that reality—at least at the layer of consciousness-matter—is digital, consisting of quarks/electrons.

So the combination problem asks how these units of proto-consciousness can combine into a unified field of subjective experience.

But if this consciousness-matter substrate is analog, then it is already unified, and subjective experiential processes (1st person perspective) and neural processes (3rd person perspective) are not combinatorial processes but rather filtrative processes.

Not unlike methinks a rainbow of colors being filtered out from pure white.

I know, if, if, if...

The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole - Reality Sandwich

 

[smcder]

In the spirit(s) of some of the creative techniques in the article above, here is a word cloud of Hoffman's "Conscious Realism and the Mind Body Problem"

from wordcloud.com you can enter any test and get a cloud (from the cloud) interesting to do with your own posts - you also get word lists

 

[smcder]

What Is It Like To Be a Word Cloud? - by Thomas Nagel

 

[smcder]

Heidegger's "Question Concerning Technology"

 

[smcder]

A longer post by @Soupie

 

[Constance]

The Brain as Filter: On Removing the Stuffing from the Keyhole - Reality Sandwich

Excellent overview of the evidence that the brain filters consciousness rather than producing it.

". . . as the eminent consciousness researcher and philosopher K. Ramakrishna Rao says, “The cognitive structure [the brain] does not generate consciousness; it simply reflects it; and in the process limits and embellishes it. In a fundamental sense, consciousness is the source of our awareness. In other words, consciousness is not merely awareness as manifest in different forms but it is also what makes awareness possible.”

I'm wondering how @Soupie responds to this perspective on consciousness and look forward to hearing from him about it. It might be that in this vein of thinking all our individual approaches can find a common ground.