Consciousness and the Paranormal

[Constance]

I just came across a remarkable passage from Heidegger quoted in Gallagher and Zahavi's The Phenomenological Mind. It's on page 124 in the chapter on Intentionality.

“A related point can be found in Heidegger, who denies that the relation between Dasein and world can be grasped with the help of the concepts ‘inner’ and ‘outer’:

In directing itself toward . . . and in grasping something, Dasein 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 Dasein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its object, Dasein is ‘inside’ correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Dasein that knows remains outside as Dasein.” (1986/1996, p. 62)

 

[smcder]

I just came across a remarkable passage from Heidegger quoted in Gallagher and Zahavi's The Phenomenological Mind. It's on page 124 in the chapter on Intentionality.

can you "unpack" this ... ? Heidegger fascinates me - like learning a new language ...

 

[Constance]

I'll try to do so tomorrow. I suggest reading it alongside Hazel Barnes's introduction to Sartre's Being and Nothingness at the link below [EDIT TO ADD] and especially Sartre's introductory section, "The Pursuit of Being." (btw, don't buy this new edition of Barnes's translation of B&N; it's badly abridged) CORRECTION: this edition is fine; it's the one with the orange cover that's grievously, ineptly, abridged.

 

[Constance]

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

As the flower and the visible portions of the EM spectrum available to each species of organism both play a role in the visual experiences of the two organisms, I would say it's over-reaching to claim that it is the brains of the organisms that 'generate' the experiences. But we'll likely never agree, so yes, let's agree to disagree.

 

[smcder]

I appear unable to edit earlier posts ... anyone else have this problem ?


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[smcder]

ok - I've just been told that the edit time has been cut to two hours because of abuse.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

If you must change something, let us know and we will take care if it. We had one poster going in and wiping his entire history. That was too much.

 

[smcder]

is this accurate to your understanding of Sartre ?

from Buddhism and western philosophy Wikipedia

"Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness lacks an essence or any fixed characteristics and that insight into this caused a strong sense of Existential angst or Nausea. Sartre saw consciousness as defined by its ability of negation, this happens because whenever consciousness becomes conscious of something it is aware of itself not being that intentional object. Consciousness is nothingness because all being-in-itself - the entire world of objects - is outside of it.[30] Furthermore, for Sartre, being-in-itself is also nothing more than appearance, it has no essence.[31] This conception of the self as nothingness and of reality as lacking any inherent essence has been compared to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness and Not-self.[32][33] Just like the Buddhists rejected the Hindu concept of Atman, Sartre rejected Husserl's concept of the transcendental ego. "


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[smcder]

so Barnes is the recommended translation? not the orange cover ... I'm going to check the library first -

... the waiter story keeps coming up - I think I can relate

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[Constance]

is this accurate to your understanding of Sartre ?

from Buddhism and western philosophy Wikipedia

"Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness lacks an essence or any fixed characteristics and that insight into this caused a strong sense of Existential angst or Nausea. Sartre saw consciousness as defined by its ability of negation, this happens because whenever consciousness becomes conscious of something it is aware of itself not being that intentional object. Consciousness is nothingness because all being-in-itself - the entire world of objects - is outside of it.[30] Furthermore, for Sartre, being-in-itself is also nothing more than appearance, it has no essence.[31] This conception of the self as nothingness and of reality as lacking any inherent essence has been compared to the Buddhist concept of Emptiness and Not-self.[32][33] Just like the Buddhists rejected the Hindu concept of Atman, Sartre rejected Husserl's concept of the transcendental ego. "

Most phenomenologists including Sartre did not follow Husserl into his conceptualization of a transcendental ego, and Husserl himself discarded and moved beyond it in his later works. This wiki article, like so many of them concerning philosophical subjects, is inadequate and misleading. The thought of all these major phenomenological philosophers -- Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty -- is too subtle (and too ramifying) to be reduced to a few sentences based on a lack of comprehension of their ideas and insights. Such comprehension requires considerable immersion in reading their major works (often requiring a second reading). Moreover, the significance of the phenomenological turn in philosophy cannot be appreciated without sufficient familiarity with the history of philosophy preceding that 'turn'. There have been some good books published by philosophers that attempt to clarify phenomenological and existentialist philosophy, but there is no substitute for reading the major texts themselves. The first section of Being and Nothingness, which I recommended in an earlier post, is a good place to begin. I myself am going to read BN again after several decades of pursuing an understanding of Heidegger and concentrating on MP.

I'll attempt a brief correction of the wiki quote you posted. Consciousness in Sartre is not 'Nothing' or 'Nothingness'. It is the recognition of the difference between itself {the for-itself} and what-is beyond itself {the in-itself}, which appears to us in phenomena and our perspectives on phenomena. That we encounter the world through phenomenal appearances does not signify that we have only illusory contact with the things we see phenomenally. Indeed, the being of phenomena opens up for us the recognition of the reality of being<Being behind phenomena [which we do not know directly] and simultaneously the reality of our own being, which we do know upon thorough examination of our conscious experience. Existentialism recognizes that within this structure of reality, lacking a guaranteed, given, meaning from 'beyond' our existence, the task laid upon consciousness, the for-itself, is the generation of meaning in the lived world. Thus Sartre and MP engaged deeply in the struggles against fascism and economic injustice unfolding in the world they lived in in the 30s and 40s and beyond. Existentialism is a Humanism (the title of a key essay by Sartre), founding existentialist ethics in the authenticity of the individual who recognizes the claims of other subjectivities upon us. 'Bad faith' in Sartre is the fear, the flight from, the denial of the difficulty of taking the human situation upon ourselves in responsible behavior toward others. That may help a bit, but it's just off the top of my head.

Further note: Heidegger's failure to stand against the Nazi regime, indeed his complicity with it, was a major scandal for existential phenomenologists. It's difficult to account for how a mind as penetrating as his could countenance his own behavior, but it seems to me that he suffered from a fundamental lack of empathy, which Scheler had identified as the primary characteristic of authentic human consciousness -- the recognition of the 'personhood' of others as of one's self.

 

[smcder]

very helpful / I'm looking for Being & Nothingness now ... I think I can read the intro on Google books ... I'm also looking at Being and Time - it being a major time commitment! but it would also serve to improve my German ... and that's an understatement but the original is readily available, I'd need a good translation too - side by side if I can find it.


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[Constance]

This paragraph, which I copied in Word last night from pp. 27-28 of Being and Nothingness, might be clarifying as to the necessary interrelation of the 'being of the phenomenon' and the 'being of consciousness':

“The self-consistency of being is beyond the active as it is beyond the passive. {par} Being is equally beyond negation as beyond affirmation. Affirmation is always affirmation of something; that is, the act of affirming is distinguished from the thing affirmed. But if we suppose an affirmation in which the affirmed comes to fulfill the affirming and is confused with it, this affirmation can not be affirmed – owing to too much of plenitude and the immediate inherence of the noema in the noesis. It is there that we find being—if we are to define it more clearly—in connection with consciousness. It is the noema in the noesis: that is, the inherence in itself without the least distance. From this point of view, we should not call it ‘immanence,’ for immanence in spite of all connection with self is still that very slight withdrawal which can be realized—away from the self. But being is not a connection with itself. It is itself. It is an immanence which cannot realize itself, an affirmation which cannot affirm itself, an activity which cannot act, because it is glued to itself. Everything happens as if, in order to free the affirmation of self from the heart of being, there is necessary a decompression of being. Let us not, however, think that being is merely one undifferentiated self-affirmation; the undifferentiation of the in-itself is beyond an infinity of self-affirmations, inasmuch as there is an infinity of modes of self-affirming. We may summarize these first conclusions by saying that being is in itself."

from the reprinted text of Barnes's translation of BN at this link:

Amazon.com: Being and Nothingness (9780671867805): Jean-Paul Sartre, Hazel E. Barnes: Books

 

[Constance]

After a few concluding paragraphs following the above extract, Being and Nothingness continues as follows:

"Ch. 1, The Origin of Negation / I. The Question

Our inquiry has led us to the heart of being. But we have been brought to an impasse since we have not been able to establish the connection between the two regions of being which we have discovered. No doubt this is because we have chosen an unfortunate approach. Descartes found himself faced with an analogous problem when he had to deal with the relation between soul and body. He planned then to look for the solution on that level where the union of thinking substance and extended substance was actually effected—that is, in the imagination. His advice is invaluable. To be sure, our concern is not that of Descartes and we do not conceive of imagination as he did. But what we can retain is the reminder that it is not profitable first to separate the two terms of a relation in order to try to join them together again later. The relation is a synthesis. Consequently the results of analysis cannot be covered over again by the moments of this synthesis.

M. Laporte says that an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. The concrete by contrast is a totality which can exist by itself alone. Husserl is of the same opinion; for him red is an abstraction because color cannot exist without form. On the other hand, a spatial-temporal thing, with all its determinations, is an example of the concrete. From this point of view, consciousness is an abstraction since it conceals within itself an ontological source in the region of the in-itself, and conversely the phenomenon is likewise an abstraction since it must ‘appear’ to consciousness. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. The concrete is man within the world in that specific union of man with the world which Heidegger, for example, calls “being-in-the-world.” We deliberately begin with the abstract if we question ‘experience’ as Kant does, inquiring into the conditions of its possibility – or if we effect a phenomenological reduction like Husserl, who would reduce the world to the state of the noema-correlate of consciousness. But we will no more succeed in restoring the concrete by the summation or organization of the elements which we have abstracted from it than Spinoza can reach substance by the infinite summation of its modes.

The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. But we discovered this in our first observations. It is enough now to open our eyes and question ingenuously this totality which is man-in-the-world. It is by description of this totality that we shall be able to reply to these two questions: (1) What is the synthetic relation which we call being-in-the-world? (2) What must man and the world be in order for a relation between them to be possible? In truth, the two questions are interdependent, and we cannot hope to reply to them separately. But each type of human conduct, being the conduct of man in the world, can release for us simultaneously man, the world, and the relation which unites them, only on condition that we envisage these forms of conduct as realities objectively apprehensible and not as subjective affects which disclose themselves only in the face of reflection. . . ."

 

[Constance]

Steve, the extracts from BN above, and particularly the parts of the above extract summarized below, should enable you to 'unpack' that quotation from Heidegger you asked about yesterday:

from the BN extract above:

"M. Laporte says that an abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. The concrete by contrast is a totality which can exist by itself alone. Husserl is of the same opinion; for him red is an abstraction because color cannot exist without form. On the other hand, a spatial-temporal thing, with all its determinations, is an example of the concrete. From this point of view, consciousness is an abstraction since it conceals within itself an ontological source in the region of the in-itself, and conversely the phenomenon is likewise an abstraction since it must ‘appear’ to consciousness. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. The concrete is man within the world in that specific union of man with the world which Heidegger, for example, calls “being-in-the-world.” . . . The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. . . . It is enough now to open our eyes and question ingenuously this totality which is man-in-the-world. It is by description of this totality that we shall be able to reply to these two questions: (1) What is the synthetic relation which we call being-in-the-world? (2) What must man and the world be in order for a relation between them to be possible? In truth, the two questions are interdependent, and we cannot hope to reply to them separately. But each type of human conduct, being the conduct of man in the world, can release for us simultaneously man, the world, and the relation which unites them, only on condition that we envisage these forms of conduct as realities objectively apprehensible and not as subjective affects which disclose themselves only in the face of reflection."

the extract from Heidegger, quoted in Gallagher and Zahavi, The Phenomenological Mind:

"In directing itself toward . . . and in grasping something, Dasein 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 Dasein dwells together with a being to be known and determines its character. Rather, even in this ‘being outside’ together with its object, Dasein is ‘inside’ correctly understood; that is, it itself exists as the being-in-the-world which knows. Again, the perception of what is known does not take place as a return with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it. Rather, in perceiving, preserving, and retaining, the Dasein that knows remains outside as Dasein.” (1986/1996, p. 62)

 

[Soupie]

As the flower and the visible portions of the EM spectrum available to each species of organism both play a role in the visual experiences of the two organisms, I would say it's over-reaching to claim that it is the brains of the organisms that 'generate' the experiences. But we'll likely never agree, so yes, let's agree to disagree.

But would you agree that in the absence of bees and humans - but not flowers and the EM spectrum, that phenomenal experience of colorful flowers would cease to exist?

After all, the ingredients for a pie exist prior to the baker using them, but we still credit the baker with making the pie...

 

[Constance]

But would you agree that in the absence of bees and humans - but not flowers and the EM spectrum, that phenomenal experience of colorful flowers would cease to exist?

Sure, unless plants are aware of one another and other things present in the environment. Steve has posted some research on some level of consciousness in plants, and it was already supported in experiments by Clive Beckster and Ingo Swann some decades back in New York. I sometimes like to think about the range of phenomenal experiences of our local world on the part of a variety of animals, fish, birds, and so forth. They each 'world their own world' as we do -- one and the same world seen and felt through innumerable eyes and types of openness to what-is, the whole being indescribable in its multiple worlding.

After all, the ingredients for a pie exist prior to the baker using them, but we still credit the baker with making the pie...

It's becoming a general understanding in science that the universe we live in is constituted, evolved, and maintained in its integrity by 'information' and evolution. Information exists only to the extent that it is received and responded/reacted to, in the quantum substratum and all the way up through the evolution of interacting physical fields and forces, the beginning of life, and the resulting 'sense of being' in living organisms, which expands and deepens immensely in the 'lived reality' of our species. But 'information' itself is more than a concept; it requires definition that is yet to be achieved to our penetrating more deeply into uncountable processes in the evolution of what we call consciousness. At this point, 'information' generally remains merely a word, a term, in science and systems theory. What we lack and need to pursue (to reach understanding of how information results in the universe and consciousness) is an immense and detailed investigation of the immense activity of information from the Big Bang {if that is an accurate theory} to the present state of the universe.

Responding more directly to your analogy of the pie and its baker, I increasingly think that the baker is likely a God or a lifeform vaster and more complex than we can imagine who/that either designed this universe teleologically (with an end in mind) or set it in motion from the entangled and entangling quantum substrate with both the freedom to proliferate and the constraints necessary for it to maintain its integrity -- proliferating without generating pure chaos and disintegration. Alternatively, it all happened by chance, but cosmologists provide us with many reasons to doubt that.

 

[Constance]

Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists
By Ian Sample, The Guardian
Sunday, May 18, 2014 14:12 EDT

Topics: demonstration ♦ Gregory Breit ♦ John Wheeler ♦ subatomic particles

• 3707
  In a neat demonstration of E=mc2, physicists believe they can create electrons and positrons from colliding photons
  
  Researchers have worked out how to make matter from pure light and are drawing up plans to demonstrate the feat within the next 12 months.
  
  The theory underpinning the idea was first described 80 years ago by two physicists who later worked on the first atomic bomb. At the time they considered the conversion of light into matter impossible in a laboratory.
  
  But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists.
  
  “We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light,” said Steven Rose at Imperial. “If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter.”
  
  The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. The kind of matter they aim to make comes in the form of subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye.
  
  The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. They worked out that – very rarely – two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us.
  
  But Breit and Wheeler had no expectations that their theory would be proved any time soon. In their study, the physicists noted that the process was so rare and hard to produce that it would be “hopeless to try to observe the pair formation in laboratory experiments”.
  
  Oliver Pike, the lead researcher on the study, said the process was one of the most elegant demonstrations of Einstein’s famous relationship that shows matter and energy are interchangeable currencies. “The Breit-Wheeler process is the simplest way matter can be made from light and one of the purest demonstrations of E=mc2,” he said.
  
  Writing in the journal Nature Photonics, the scientists describe how they could turn light into matter through a number of separate steps. The first step fires electrons at a slab of gold to produce a beam of high-energy photons. Next, they fire a high-energy laser into a tiny gold capsule called a hohlraum, from the German for “empty room”. This produces light as bright as that emitted from stars. In the final stage, they send the first beam of photons into the hohlraum where the two streams of photons collide.
  
  The scientists’ calculations show that the setup squeezes enough particles of light with high enough energies into a small enough volume to create around 100,000 electron-positron pairs.
  
  The process is one of the most spectacular predictions of a theory called quantum electrodynamics (QED) that was developed in the run up to the second world war. “You might call it the most dramatic consequence of QED and it clearly shows that light and matter are interchangeable,” Rose told the Guardian.
  
  The scientists hope to demonstrate the process in the next 12 months. There are a number of sites around the world that have the technology. One is the huge Omega laser in Rochester, New York. But another is the Orion laser at Aldermaston, the atomic weapons facility in Berkshire.
  
  A successful demonstration will encourage physicists who have been eyeing the prospect of a photon-photon collider as a tool to study how subatomic particles behave. “Such a collider could be used to study fundamental physics with a very clean experimental setup: pure light goes in, matter comes out. The experiment would be the first demonstration of this,” Pike said.
  
  Andrei Seryi, director of the John Adams Institute at Oxford University, said: “It’s breathtaking to think that things we thought are not connected, can in fact be converted to each other: matter and energy, particles and light. Would we be able in the future to convert energy into time and vice versa?”

Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists | Science | The Guardian

 

[Soupie]

How to Learn to Love Your Doppleganger - Issue 13: Symmetry - Nautilus

In the fall of 2011, a 15-year-old girl came to the Department of Neurology at the University of Geneva suffering from seizures. She told Olaf Blanke, a neurology professor at the university, that during her seizures she saw her own double. Her visions happened during the aura stage—the initial stage of a seizure when patients are still conscious but their vision and senses begin to blur. First, the girl would feel nauseous and extremely warm, and then she would see a transparent body rising from her stomach. The body would shape itself into a mirror image of her own self and look back at her, giving her the impression that this was her “soul” leaving her body. As her seizure wound down, it would re-enter her body.

The girl was diagnosed with a lesion in her insular cortex, the part of the brain involved in perception, self-awareness, and regulating the body’s homeostasis. The brain generates our experience of self by merging information about our body from external sources such as the eyes, the ears, and the skin, and internal sources such as the heart and the stomach. Blanke and his colleague Lukas Heydrich, who examined her, say that such a lesion in the insular cortex prevents the brain from integrating the body’s external and internal perceptions, resulting in a corrupted sense of self. “We found that the system representing the internal and external bodily states is no longer in sync,” explains Heydrich. “The brain tries to solve this conflict by coming up by the most plausible explanation: a second self in the form of a doppelganger.”

In a study1 in the journal Brain, Heydrich and Blanke noted that all of the epileptic patients they saw who reported seeing doubles also had a lesion in the insular cortex. Heydrich and Blanke’s research suggests that when lesions are surgically removed, doppelganger visions disappear. Other causes of doppelganger visions, however, are less understood. Schizophrenics, for example, also report seeing doubles, but the reasons behind these visions are not clear, in part due to lack of research. Such symptoms are usually treated with medication.

Blanke and his colleagues found that doppelgangers can also be induced. Blanke was able to evoke a vision of a double by stimulating patients’ temporoparietal junction, which integrates and processes inputs from the external environment and from within the body. “To a certain degree, we can induce something that resembles a doppelganger, e.g. a full body illusion,” Blanke says, although it wouldn’t be as strong of an experience as a full-blown hallucination.

 

[Constance]

CONSCIOUSNESS, INFORMATION, AND LIVING SYSTEMS
B.J. DUNNE✍ and R.G. JAHN (2005)

Abstract - The possibility of a proactive role for consciousness in the establishment of physical reality has been addressed via an extensive 26-year program investigating physical anomalies in human/machine interactions and non-sensory acquisition of information about remote geographical locations. Empirical databases comprising many hundreds of millions of random events confirm that information can be introduced into, or extracted from, otherwise random physical processes solely through the agencies of human intention and subjective resonance. Much of the evidence mitigates the likelihood that the anomalies are manifestations of neo-cortical cognitive activity. Rather, they may be expressions of a deeper information organizing capacity of biological origin that emerges from the uncertainty inherent in the complexity of all living systems.

Key words: Anomalies, biological complexity, complementarity, consciousness, human/machine interactions, intention, PEAR, random event generators (REGs), remote perception, resonance, subjectivity, uncertainty

 

[Constance]

Steve, a short time ago you expressed an interest in research concerning near-death experiences suggesting the survival of consciousness following the death of the body. The linked page from the Horizon Research Foundation, and the website as whole, focuses on this research, presents some introductory material, and has updated the project being undertaken in hospitals and emergency rooms led by Dr. Sam Parnia. The current update at this site reports that the scientists and medical doctors involved in this project have written a first report and submitted it to medical journals. They can release no further information until the paper has been critiqued by the journal's peer reviewers and the paper is published, if it is published. In the meantime, here's a good place to being at the Horizon Research website.

Human Consciousness Project
The Human Consciousness Project is an international consortium of multidisciplinary scientists and physicians who have joined forces to research the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the brain, as well as the neuronal processes that mediate and correspond to different facets of consciousness. The Human Consciousness ProjectSM will conduct the world’s first large-scale scientific study of what happens when we die and the relationship between mind and brain during clinical death. The Human Consciousness ProjectSM was successfully launched in September 2008 at a symposium held at the United Nations. The diverse expertise of the team ranges from cardiac arrest, near-death experiences, and neuroscience to neuroimaging, critical care, emergency medicine, immunology, molecular biology, mental health, and psychiatry. . . .

Science of what happens when we die

Description of the AWARE study headed by Dr. Parnia:
AWARE Study

AWARE Study Update 2014:
Dr Parnia gives AWARE Study Update 2014