Consciousness and the Paranormal

[smcder]

Additionally, this paper compares and contrasts Husserlian phenomenology
with meditation as methods for observing and studying
consciousness. Those who are familiar with both Husserlian
phenomenology and Eastern yogic or meditative practices often
notice a striking similarity between the phenomenological method
and certain meditative techniques. In particular, a step in phenomenology
called "the phenomenological reduction" (or "epoche")
resembles meditative procedures of mindfulness by which one
becomes aware of the fullness, variety and transiency of experiences
in the stream of consciousness." Like mindfulness meditation,
the phenomenological reduction is an intentional practice of
observing and accepting all experiences, without allowing the
usual, everyday attitude of "needing to do something, go somewhere,
believe something, etc." distort or organize what is experienced.

Phenomenology and most meditation techniques share the rudimentary
methodological aim of carefully observing the contents
and processes of consciousness. They differ, however, in their
ultimate purpose: phenomenology has the goal of being, in Hussed's
words, "a rigorous science," which aims to identify the recurring or essential structures of the contents and processes of consciousness, whereas most yogic and meditative practices have an ultimate soteriological goal of spiritual liberation or enlightenment.

....

In this regard, Husserlian phenomenology? and meditation are
similar, for they are both methods, rather than explanatory metaphysical
theories. They are to be performed, practiced and, over
time, refined within one's own consciousness. One cannot truly
understand either meditation or phenomenology without actually
doing them. Moreover, neither of these methods necessitates a
commitment to a specific philosophical theory of reality. In the
East, meditation has accompanied a wide range of philosophical
theories (Vedanta, Samkhya, Buddhism, Jainism, etc.) or has been
practiced independently of any religious or philosophical theory.
Similarly, phenomenology's explicit use ofthe phenomenological
reduction (described below) amounts to a deliberate attempt to
abstain from metaphysical commitments.

...

the reduction and eidetic reduction are then discussed ... interesting and helps me a lot!

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[smcder]

Thanks Steve. I am in a good place and don't feel the need for the practice. I also don't want to spend the time on it that it would require.



I'd be interested in what you have to say about that connection.

I understand - you had mentioned an interest in meditation practice in your post on Austin's book Zen and the Brain a little while back and I thought it would be interesting to hear your experiences.

I've spent the last several hours reading parts of the Austin book (recommended by Steve) at amazon and Google Books and I've got to have it. Fortunately, a number of used copies are available at amazon for around $5.00, though even new copies are not that expensive ($26.59 for an 800-pp. book). Austin writes extremely well and, while I'm not interested much in whether his neurological explanations for states of enlightenment will hold up, I am fascinated by his descriptions of his own experiences in meditation. I'm going to have to apply myself to this practice because I want to experience that state of seeing what-is beyond the scenery, and in one case described in the amazon review below [highlighted in blue], what appears in one instance to be 'there' without a viewer. Here's an amazon review that provides a sense of what happens in this book:

 

[Constance]

Yes, I remember my enthusiasm about Austin's book based in that extraordinary experience he described at a train station in London. But on reflecting on his statement that it was the only experience of this type he had in many years of his meditation (and given that there might be various explanations of it including paranormal ones), I decided not to pursue Austin's book or meditation in general.

You raised some questions about similarities among Husserl's phenomenological method, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of embodied consciousness, and various Buddhist and other Eastern spiritual philosophies. I've noted that such comparisons occur in the secondary literature concerning Husserl and MP but I haven't personally pursued them so can't offer any suggestions for reading. But I'm sure that you will find them. In your next to last post you refer to and quote from (or summarize) a paper which I don't see a link to. The following paragraph from your post is significant in contrasting the goals of the phenomenological v. the Eastern thought:

Phenomenology and most meditation techniques share the rudimentary methodological aim of carefully observing the contents
and processes of consciousness. They differ, however, in their
ultimate purpose: phenomenology has the goal of being, in Hussed's
words, "a rigorous science," which aims to identify the recurring or essential structures of the contents and processes of consciousness, whereas most yogic and meditative practices have an ultimate soteriological goal of spiritual liberation or enlightenment.

Please link the paper; I'd like to read it. I do wish I could be more helpful concerning the comparison that interests you.

 

[smcder]

@Constance

thunderstorm woke me here ... may also mean I don't go to work today

http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-26-94-01-037.pdf

that should be the link - at the beginning of page four is some very interesting about the phenomenological reduction ... I would like to know your opinion of their explanation here ... is it accurate?

I'll post the quotes a little later if I don't work


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[smcder]

eidetic reduction, suspending the reality status - then he does a reduction on two meditative experiences ... this is definitely a method I'm interested in learning ...

I can't copy from the .pdf on my phone ... or I'd post specific examples. ... but I think he does an excellent job describing the meditative experiences - focus, heightened awareness and perception / he comments that it seems like an ordinary and underlying process at times - just one we don't notice in our everyday stream of experiences ... that this matches well with various other descriptions - in part with the jhanas - indicates there is an underlying structure, processed that we can bring into focus - if so that's an extraordinary capacity of the mind to go "down into itself" and see and make changes

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[smcder]

back to neutral monism:

from the SEP article:

More recently Sayre has provided the following helpful characterization of his position:

Neutral Monism is the view that neither mind nor matter is ontologically basic, but are both reducible (in some appropriate sense of reduction that requires specification) to another more fundamental principle that is “neutral” between them. The neutral monism I advocate holds that the fundamental principle to which both mind and matter are reducible is not a substance in any sense (Aristotelian, Cartesian, whatever), but is rather [a] structure of a sort that can only be represented mathematically. This structure is what information theorists…call “information.” The neutral monism I advocate, accordingly, has more in common with the ontology of the late Platonic dialogues than with that of the early Russell which the name ‘neutral monism’ commonly brings to mind. (Memo circulated in the Notre Dame philosophy department)


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[smcder]

Even if it is granted that the proponents of neutral monism did not intend it as a form of eliminativism, the worry that it is eliminativist may persist. All reductionist doctrines give rise to this suspicion, as is evidenced by the ongoing debate about the place of the mind in reductive materialism. At the end of the day the reductive materialist hopes to be able to describe and explain the world in purely physical terms. The neutral monist has an analogous vision that “in a completed science, the word ‘mind’ and the word ‘matter’ would both disappear, and would be replaced by causal laws concerning ‘events’” (Russell 1927b, 226). This vividly raises the question how the distinction between explaining and explaining away is to be drawn. Some have argued that the boundary between reductionism and eliminativism a merely pragmatic matter. But it must be noted that the difficulties that neutral monism encounters on this front are no different from those that any reductionist doctrine has to face.


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[smcder]

this was posted to The PEL facebook page:

Oct 13, 2011http://The European Graduate School - Media and Communication - Graduate & Postgraduate Studies Program Manuel De Landa, philosopher, artist and author, talking about the ontology of Aristotle and Gilles Deleuze. In this lecture, Manuel De Landa discusses metaphysics, universality, particularity, generality, singularity, realism, mathematics, and social science in relationship to Leonhard Euler, Kurt Gödel, Henri Poincaré and Michel Foucault focusing on a priori truths, virtual capacities, affects, differential calculus, necessity and contingency. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Manuel De Landa.

... I've got to get more active on the PEL chat site

Blog | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog




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[Constance]

Steve, just came across this page discussing a paper you might find useful, and its bibliography will likely provide further sources for you.

L. Ma and J. van Brakel: ‘Heidegger’s Comportment Toward East-West Dialogue’ | Between Husserl and Heidegger

The website as a whole sounds promising.

 

[smcder]

looks very promising - the language barrier ... one of the things in my "bucket list" is to read Heidegger auf Deutsche ... I got some if Nietzsche in the original ... German is a pretty different language ... having the benefit of living there and absorbing some culture and history - I can appreciate the barriers to Eastern thinking but we have good resources now ... only in the last 20 years maybe but there is a lot of dialog East & West. the other thing is to learn Sanskrit or Pali ... no small feat

there is an excellent website for it ... got to get a little further along in spanish first though


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[Constance]

“Philosophy is a [never-ending] battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (P.I. 109).

Have you spent much time with Wittgenstein? I haven't. I think he's correct in that statement to the extent that we tend to reify words, terms, and concepts, and also given that we have too few ill-defined terms with which to refer to mind, brain, cognition, consciousness, experience, and -- worst of all these days -- 'information'.[/QUOTE]

 

[smcder]

Learn Sanskrit Online

and this is relevant:

Sanskrit was dangerous, then, because anyone who studied it might see it as an end to understanding rather than a means to it. For this reason, the man who was later called by the name "Buddha" refused to let his disciples translate his words into Sanskrit, perhaps because he hoped his disciples would focus on his ideas instead of the language that contained them. But as Sanskrit grew in stature, reach, and utility, this concern was brushed aside. Ironically, some of the most popular Sanskrit texts today — religious and otherwise — were written by Buddhists.

... I have some Wittgenstein - from college and it's interesting what we have words for - so in Tibet, I understand there are specific words for mind states that don't have an equivalent in other languages - but one Tibetan commented: I didn't know I had so many emotions until I learned English!


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[smcder]

you mentioned neologisms - wishing the author had created some in terms of his discussion - I'll find the post ... but perhaps we need, well clearly we do need new language to make progress ...


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[smcder]

What becomes clearer as we follow various researchers of consciousness is the poverty of the available language at our disposal in attempting to characterize the complexities of consciousness, mind, and self that we recognize through both neuroscience and philosophy in our time. Damasio's approach in this latest book is immensely clarifying, but I balk at the use of the word 'mind' to refer to unconscious evolutionary operations of the brain. I don't know what other term Damasio might have used in place of 'mind', given the paucity of terminology we inherit historically, to describe the evolution of the brain structures ultimately enabling consciousness, but I wish he could have found one or substituted a neologism to refer to it.



It's possible that I'll change my mind about that formulation after reading Self Comes to Mind, but for the present it seems to me to be a mystification. In the works of the phenomenological philosophers we experience the dawning realization of how consciousness discloses the chiasmic relationship through which it expresses nature while simultaneously standing apart from nature, introducing something new and qualitatively different in nature. What consciousness expresses, what it becomes through historically lived experience in the sedimentations of cultures and ideas {thinking}, is also 'information' that is added to and entangled in the holographic structure physicists recognize at the level of physics, the physical. But the information we add is not merely physical but also mental, emotional, purposeful, value-laden, and intensely felt, both at the individual and collective levels of our species life. As such it cannot be explained by physics with its sedimented materialist, objectivist, mechanistic, and deterministic presuppositions.

ps: 'experience' is another term that is inadequate to cover both unconscious and conscious being. We'd need another term to make the distinction between 'what happens' and 'the feeling of what happens' (the title of Damasio's most recent book before Self Comes to Mind)..

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[Constance]

Here is an amusing blog that demonstrates the level of confusion concerning Wittgenstein, MP, and the problems presented by language. The author, evidently a graduate student in philosophy at Edinburgh, comments on MP's Phenomenology of Perception despite admitting that he hasn't read it (and like many major texts in philosophy it requires reading more than once along with reading the interpretations provided by MP scholars). At least he points us in the direction of the immersion required of us if we would understand what these philosophers were saying through language despite their recognition of its limitations. There's an excellent book on language and speech in MP and in semiotics and the sciences by Richard Lanigan, which I'll link below the link to this blog. For MP, speech is primary in human sense-making of the world and consciousness and began in gesture, whereas for Derrida the printed word, the written text, was primary.

Meating of Minds: Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, and philosophical mysticism

 

[Constance]

The Lanigan book I cited above was preceded by an earlier one concerning semiotic phenomenology, which I read about ten years ago (with difficulty) but found immensely clarifying. Following the link below to the earlier work is a table of its contents:


Chapter Titles (I - V) September 13, 2000
By Richard L. Lanigan
Format:Hardcover
(I) Existential Communication as Phenomenology: (1) Existential Communication; (2) The Apparent Antinomy of Existential Communication; (3) Communication as Existentialism; (4) Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy as Existential Communication; (II) Existential Phenomenology as Semiology: (1) The Cartesian Dualism: Semiotic Phenomenalism (Peirce, Morris, Ogden and Richards, Russell); (2) Dualistic Synthesis: Semiotic Existentialism (Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre); (3) Semiotic as Existential Phenomenology (Barthes, Merleau-Ponty); (III) Perception: The Lived Body Experience: (1) The Primacy of Perception (Description); (2) Radical Reflection as Gestalt [Reduction]; (3) Radical Cogito [Interpretation]; (IV) Expression: Existential Phenomenology as Speaking: (1) Expression as Phenomena; (2) Language; (3) Tongue [Langue]; (4) Speaking [Parole]; (V) Introduction to the Prose of the World. Definitive Bibliography of Merleau-Ponty's work [Primary Sources] and commentaries [Secondary Sources] on it (in eight langugaes, including English).

 

[Constance]

you mentioned neologisms - wishing the author had created some in terms of his discussion - I'll find the post ... but perhaps we need, well clearly we do need new language to make progress ...

The problem inherent in language as it developed historically was the sedimentation of fixed presuppositions about the nature of reality that constrain thinking. The subject-object duality is a prime example, the overcoming of which is MP's most significant contribution to philosophy. Earlier, Heidegger worked through his multiple hyphenated-compounds (which casual readers considered to torture the German language) in order to turn the language inside-out in the effort to open new paths to existential insight and ontology.

 

[Constance]

eidetic reduction, suspending the reality status - then he does a reduction on two meditative experiences ... this is definitely a method I'm interested in learning ...

I can't copy from the .pdf on my phone ... or I'd post specific examples. ... but I think he does an excellent job describing the meditative experiences - focus, heightened awareness and perception / he comments that it seems like an ordinary and underlying process at times - just one we don't notice in our everyday stream of experiences ... that this matches well with various other descriptions - in part with the jhanas - indicates there is an underlying structure, processed that we can bring into focus - if so that's an extraordinary capacity of the mind to go "down into itself" and see and make changes.

Which paper is this^, Steve? The one you just linked is by Linda Something and here you refer to the author as 'he'? I'd like to see the paper you're discussing in this post too. Thanks.

 

[Constance]

@Constance

thunderstorm woke me here ... may also mean I don't go to work today

http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-26-94-01-037.pdf

that should be the link - at the beginning of page four is some very interesting about the phenomenological reduction ... I would like to know your opinion of their explanation here ... is it accurate?

I'll read the paper's account of Husserl's reductions and give you my opinion, but I'm not an expert on Husserl. SEP and the Internet Enclopedia of Philosophy should also provide a breakdown of Husserl's methodology of reductions. The book linked first below is a new introduction to phenomenology by Shaun Gallagher (an expert in phenomenology) that I came across today in looking at the amazon entry on a major book (second link below) that would benefit us in this thread. At the first link quite a lot is sampled from the text and the third chapter concerns Husserl's reductions. There are some gaps in the text, but you should be able to get a reliable characterization of the three reductions there.

 

[Soupie]

What is the point in ordinary human development at which you suppose the physical brain becomes fully enough organized that it begins to generate integrated information that 'enables phenomenal consciousness' ?

I'm not a neurologist and a simple Google search would probably go a long way here, but my guess would be sometime pre-birth for sure. As for non-phenomenal consciousness, I can also vouch that some type of consciousness-related milestone is hit at 3 months. I'd be very curious to know what neurologically is going on at ~3 months.

And what is the source of the information the brain suddenly 'integrates', enabling us to see and smell and touch the phenomenal world we live in, even as infants? Is the source the 'quantum foam'? Can you clarify your theory?

As I understand it, it's different for each sense. For instance, vision involves eyes and photons, sound involves ears and sound waves, smell involves the nose and various molecules, etc., and of course the corresponding brain regions for all these sensory organs/systems.

Yes, the quantum foam is the source of the information.

We've had this discussion regarding the "generation" of experience, and it's clear that you don't agree with this concept. Let me try one more time to explain what I mean, and then, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

Let me use vision as an example. My understanding is that colors are not intrinsic properties of physical objects. So for instance, two different organisms, such as a human and a bee, will generate different visual experiences based on their unique physical differences.

For example, these two organisms may look at the same flower and generate different subjective experiences like so:

Photography of the Invisible World: Treasury flower - Gazania rigens in deep reflected ultraviolet photography making blemishes and deterioration visible - plant forensics

I've also said that in the absence of information processing systems such as brains, there would be no subjective experience at all. Subjective experience is generated by unique systems - such as brains - and just as each brain is unique, so too is the subjective experience generated by each brain.

Again, this is what I mean by the use of the term "generate:" in the absence of brains (organisms) there is no subjective experience, and the subjective experience generated by any two organims will different to the extent that the two organisms are different.