Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 3

[smcder]

Pharoah

Part IV

4. What is outside of phenomenal experience and phenomenal conceptualisation?

As a ‘thing-in-itself’ or “thing as-such” (das Ding an sich – Kant, 1781/8 – Critique of Pure Reason) one would consider consciousness in terms of an entity whose empirical object is transcendentally separate from all the conditions under which a subject can gain knowledge of it. Conceived in this manner, consciousness as a thing as-such, is unknowable. To date, science has been unable to say anything of the intrinsic material nature of all known physical entities-‘as-such‘ (Russell, 1927 – The Analysis of Matter) and similarly, we can know of consciousness only by virtue of its relation to other physical dynamics.

Consequently, if we cannot examine the thing as-such – that is, consciousness as an empirical material entity – but wish to understand consciousness beyond phenomenal experience, what other conceptual framework is open to us?

In answer to this question, my proposal is to explore, not the phenomenon of conscious experience (the phenomenon being impossible to analyse directly using experimental tools), nor the thing as-such (which, like all physical entities, will always remain intrinsically unknowable), but rather the noumenon of consciousness – a thing denoted in a manner that is not knowable through the phenomenon of experience or by the senses.

*smcder - so the noumenon of consciousness is that aspect of consciousness that is not knowable through the phenomenon of experience or by the senses ... (what I think Chalmers calls "what it is like to be") ...

Pharoah
Immanuel Kant
There are four know fundamental forces in nature: Gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces. Consider this scenario: Before you came into existence as a sentient being, you were unobservable because you had no mass, no charge, and no gravity and therefore no physical means to exist. Undoubtedly, there came a point when you did become observable. I am not talking about the point when other people saw you as a physical body – There is nothing distinctive about such an observation other than that other people are observing just an organized body of matter. Rather, I am talking about the point when you observed yourself and recognized that you existed as a sentient being. This was the point when you recognized that you were an individual with phenomenal experience and a unique feature of existence if only for the fact that there was only one of you.

What is the fundamental nature of that observation?

It must be physical for it to be observably measured in this manner. Animals observably measure their environment through their senses, but only humans have a measure of themselves beyond self recognition. (@Constance?)
A physicalist reductive explanation of consciousness is distinct from a physicalist reductive explanation of phenomenal experience.

An explanation of consciousness requires identifying not just the unique first person phenomenal perspective, but the distinct personal consciousness of every viable individual consciousness. The explanation would have to explain, unlikely as it may seem, you and me, rather than merely explain how and why phenomenal experience is merely an emergent consequence of physical dynamics. When a human looks in a mirror and sees its face, it sees a material incarnation of an exceptional event that has never before occurred in the history of the universe. What elements of nature or physics determine one’s own specific frame of reference? What are the material points of reference or measurement, for ‘the self’?

*smcder - now this next part takes a quantum leap and gets very interesting:

Pharoah
Quantum mechanics demonstrates that the most probable path of the event always is the one that takes the shortest time. With ever increasing masses, the probability increases to a degree that displaces quantum effects and heightens the reliability of classical behaviours.
How might this principle apply to the mysterious phenomenon of consciousness?

6. The State Vector (Wave function) Interpretation of consciousness
6.1 State Vector Consciousness version 1 – narrow context
In what way can I relate to my experiences of 28th November last year? I have no memory of what I did nor remember the nature of my phenomenal experiences on that particular day. My existence appears to me to have been circumstantial. All I can be sure of is that I probably existed. The past experiences that colour my consciousness in the present, are a conflation of my memories, which are determined by their ‘weighted’ values. These weighted values generate the amplitude by which I make the inference that I probably existed as a conscious being. The context of all my relationships to all past experience is determined in this manner in every unit of time that I seek to conceive of them. This is the context of my present, a context that is determined by the confluence of all these states. These states are the state vector for my consciousness in all its known and unknown elements.
From Page’s (2002) model, one can propose that following the inception of its phenomenal experience, a human brain is compelled to explore all viable consciousness paths.

Consequently, if all viable consciousnesses are assigned a certain weight, this means that some part of an individual’s consciousness is, just like the path of a photon to some improbable degree, every possible consciousness.

However, the actual total resultant amplitude determines only one specific consciousness.

The specificity of this resultant consciousness is a temporal illusion. For a photon, the probable path happens to be the quickest route from source and receptor. In the case of consciousness, an individual’s specific consciousness is the probabilistic outcome of the exploration of all possible consciousness paths.
Unfortunately, as is the case with a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience, interpreting consciousness in this manner does not identify the cause for the individual “me” as distinct from all other individuals that I might otherwise be or have been. If the application of state vectors as a solution to the problem of consciousness as suggested above had validity, it would apply to all individuals indistinguishably, excepting that the content of each individual’s values differ because their experiences differ.
In this model, quantum mechanics formulates a bridge between the phenomenon of experience and all possible consciousnesses which are; the noumenon of consciousness. Interestingly, one’s decisions affect one’s phenomenal experiences, which in turn influence the ‘resultant amplitude’ that determines the course of one’s consciousness. From this viewpoint, one can appreciate that the individual choices determine the weighted ‘path’ of our consciousness and also those other individuals’ paths in whom we have contact. In other words, our decisions impact on the evolution of consciousnesses.

 

[smcder]

In the home stretch ...


6.2 State Vector Consciousness version 2- wide context

Pharoah
When originally considering state vector consciousness version 2, I concluded that there are difficulties in determining “my” specific state vector: The difficulties lie in the fact that there are no comparative values, no frames of reference, no forms of measurement that distinguish individual consciousnesses in this context. And yet without any known frame of reference, I am able to say; I am me and not anyone else.
However, it is notable that equally, without any objective frame of reference, Hartle & Hawking (1983 – Wave function of the universe) propose the “No Boundary” model of the origin of the universe. In the Hartle-Hawking model of the natural origin of our universe, and out of the limitless past in the time before our big bang, the prior universe deflates to the point where it becomes unphysical and time is imaginary. Its wave function then tunnels through the unphysical region and our universe appears on the other side (Stenger, 2009).

Stephen Hawking
With this attempted description, it seems conjectural to assign comparative values to a state prior to the big bang where there appear no equivalent frames of reference. Nevertheless, the Hartle-Hawking supposition remains an acceptable argument for explaining the origins of the big bang. So why should it seem to anyone unacceptable to assign a state vector for consciousness in this wide context:
Let us assume that any given individual exists as a potential before it observes itself for the first time as a sentient being. Think of the combined potential of all possible sentient beings as a state vector. At a given point in space and time, this state has a value. In quaatum mechanics, the square of this value gives the probability for finding a particle at a certain point in space at a certain time, per unit volume. But, in the context of the noumenon of consciousness, any equivalent values determine the probability for finding a particular individual self out of all the potential individuals that could ever have existed.
One may well ask, what is consciousness in this context? For example, is it a wave or is it a particle, that it can be physically observed, if only by ourselves as ourselves? What exactly is the nature of the physical interaction that is taking place when we look in a mirror? We remain unable to explore the ‘thing-as-such’ just as physicists were originally unable to determine if photons were particles or not. Nevertheless, although unable to determine the empirical object of consciousness, one can use a reductive explanation of phenomenal experience to divide consciousness into constituent phenomenal parts and be satisfied with the formulation of an underlying quantum model whose correspondence limit gives rise to the classical characteristics that we all recognize as our specific conscious experience… which is phenomenal.

*smcder - and that's it, so is HCT actually an explanation of the "easy problems" and SVC a proposed explanation of the "hard problem"?

 

[Soupie]

@smcder

I'm seeing the Hard Problem as less of a metaphysical problem lately.

All we really have is cogito ergo sum. What we think/experience is our 1st person perspective. It seems that what we think/experience is about something. We can describe this something objectively.

I don't see the subjective and the objective as correlating with distinct, metaphysical substances. Rather, they are both "descriptions" (or models) of what-is. One is a 1st person, experiential model of what-is, the other is a 3rd person, conceptual model of what-is.

You say that the failure to objectively describe subjectivity means that physicalism fails. What does that mean? Is physicalism the idea that (1) all of what-is is physical or is it the idea that (2) all of what-is can be objectively described?

I think I said this before, but it's one thing to see a causal chain of events and quite another to be a causal chain of events. It seems to me a bit like the ouroboros in my avatar eternally chasing its tail.

The reductive paradigm tells us that subjectivity is as the top. That subjectivity has no causal power. However, by that same token, subjectivity can be influenced from below.

Objectively, we have no way of proving this. Subjectivity is completely invisible to objectivity. (And objectivity only comes to us through subjectivity; ergo, objectivity is only a subjective concept.)

When we take drugs, get punched, and eat a cracker (all objective concepts) we subjectively experience an effect. However, this subjective effective is completely invisible to objectivity. Even if someone reports that eating a cheeseburger or taking drugs has made them feel a certain way, it is invisible to us. We can experience their words and facial expression, but not their alleged feelings and experiences.

Physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are built on 3rd person, objective concepts. Therefore, they can't incorporate subjectivity. They are two different, ultimately subjective ways of describing what-is.

However, while we will never be able to objectively describe the subjective, we can produce an objective account about how subjectivity might arise within what-is.

If the hard problem is to objectively describe subjectivity, it can't be done. Objectivity is built out of subjectivity. However, I believe we can coherently seek an objective description of how subjectivity can exist in what-is, but it will have to stop there. (And it appears that we can't even assign an objective function to subjectivity.)

Since physicalism is an objective concept, and objectivity is born from subjectivity, the inability of physicalism to describe and account for subjectivity is an indication of the limits of objectivity more so than a failure of physicalism. That is, the failure to answer the hard problem is not a failure of physicalism but a limit of objectivity.

I don't see pure subjectivity being of much help either. As soon as we put our subjective thoughts/experience into words, we shift to the objective description of what-is.

Objectivity (and thus physicalism) is inherently subjective; our objective concepts are built out of our subjective experiences. Maybe to get a true accounting of what-is, there needs to be a resurgence of metaphysics. So, not a subjective physics, nor an objective physics, but a physics that incorporates both. I think there are approaches out there that strive for this. Biocentrism? How about the Constructor approaches?

 

[Pharoah]

Nagel's paper is specifically about the mind-body problem (nowhere does he mention a 'hard problem')
Chalmers paper is specifically about the hard problem of consciousness which he defines as the problem of experience. (he coined the phrase 'hard problem', as far as I am aware)
Both are guilty of conflating the two problems—the problem of phenomenal experience and the mind body problem.
As far as I am concerned, neither of them make it clear that they understand where phenomenal experience stands in relation to the mind body problem. This is unsurprising because both are currently viewed as deeply mysterious aspects to existence whilst being very closely entwined.

In Nagel's paper there is evidence of this conflation everywhere:

"fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism. We may call this the subjective character of experience."
In this quotation, the "something that it is" is not necessarily the same as the "something that it is like" and that therefore we cannot say of both, that we may call them "the subjective character of experience". In other words, the something that it is for me, is for me and me alone, whereas the something that it is like for me, is for the likes of me, and for the likes of others like me.

If that is too much of a headache consider the next two sections. The first are quotations where phenomenal experience (which is standing in for the mind body problem—which is what the paper is about) is treated as a general plural, non-individuated problem. In the second section, the quotations indicate that Nagel is treating phenomenal experience as an individuated, viewpoint specific problem.
Alternatively, if you don't want or need to be convinced, you can skip sections 1. and 2. below

1. Conceiving the problem as a plurality, general, non-individuated problem

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. [a specific bat or bats generally as a species?]
To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. [those animals in general... non individuated]
The structure of their own minds [Martians wondering what it is like to be human] might make it impossible for them to succeed, but we know they would be wrong to conclude that there is not anything precise that it is like to be us: [Nagel says "us" not "me" i.e. the plurality, general, non-individuated relation]
we know what it is like to be us. [non individuated]
And we know that while it [specifically: "what it is like to be us" - italics and bold added] includes an enormous amount of variation and complexity, and while we do not possess the vocabulary to describe it adequately, its subjective character is highly specific, and in some respects describable in terms that can be understood only by creatures like us. ["us" again, not "me"]
bats and Martians have experiences fully comparable in richness of detail to our own. [general, non-individuated]
we believe that these experiences [of bat's.. sonar etc] also have in each case ["each case" referring to each of the following, "pain, fear, hunger, and lust"] specific subjective character, which it is beyond our ability to conceive. [only species specific not individual specific]
I am not adverting here to the alleged privacy of experience to its possessor. The point of view in question is not one accessible only to a single individual. Rather it is a type.
in discovering sound to be, in reality, a wave phenomenon in air or other media, we leave behind one viewpoint to take up another, and the auditory, human or animal viewpoint that we leave behind remains unreduced.... The reduction can succeed only if the species-specific viewpoint is omitted from what is to be reduced. [here we have the concept of a point of view for a species]

2. Conceiving the problem as a specific view, individuated, identity specific problem

...every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view. [person specific]
Whatever may be the status of facts about what it is like to be a human being, or a bat, or a Martian, these appear to be facts that embody a particular point of view. [individual by species type]
In our own case we occupy the relevant point of view, but we will have as much difficulty understanding our own experience properly if we approach it from another point of view as we would if we tried to understand the experience of another species without taking up its point of view. This bears directly on the mind-body problem. [specific point of view]
if the facts of experience—facts about what it is like for the experiencing organism—are accessible only from one point of view, then it is a mystery how the true character of experiences could be revealed in the physical operation of that organism. [a specific point of reference]
reduction is a move in the direction of greater objectivity, toward a more, accurate view of the real nature of things. This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view. [individuated]
If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.

Why does Nagel and Chalmers conflate the two problems?

I take next quotation I take to be a confession. What Nagel admits to is being currently unable to conceive of the problem of subjective character of experience from any perspective other than his own. But at least he can conceive of a situation where this would no longer be the case. For Chalmers that very possibility is an anathema.

"At present we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience without... taking up the point of view of the experiential subject. This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method.... Though presumably it would not capture everything, its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences."

Amen to that.

As I have said before, there is a big difference between phenomenal experience (as a general thing humans and many animals possess) and my phenomenal experience (unique to me). Both mind body related, both ential a first-person perspective, but they are not the same problem by any stretch of the imagination

 

[Pharoah]

Q2. Physiological mechanisms specifically, are those kind that have evolved because of replication.

 

[Constance]

Nagel's paper is specifically about the mind-body problem (nowhere does he mention a 'hard problem')
Chalmers paper is specifically about the hard problem of consciousness which he defines as the problem of experience. (he coined the phrase 'hard problem', as far as I am aware)
Both are guilty of conflating the two problems—the problem of phenomenal experience and the mind body problem.
As far as I am concerned, neither of them make it clear that they understand where phenomenal experience stands in relation to the mind body problem. This is unsurprising because both are currently viewed as deeply mysterious aspects to existence whilst being very closely entwined.

I think you're quite wrong in your approach here, but you're not likely to see why until you have added phenomenological philosophy to your store of philosophical capitol. Later I'll get to specifics in engaging the way you attempt to break down and break apart the contributions of Chalmers and Nagel to understanding what consciousness is and how it is enabled. For now I want to comment on what is developed in your post concerning what you hope to define as 'noumenal' consciousness {not yet defined by you}. What develops is a radical and unfounded gulf between individual consciousness and human consciousness in general, and a further radical and unfounded gulf between consciousness in humans and in our species' more recent forebears in evolution. You also seem to think that philosophy exists abstractly above and outside of human experience and nature in general rather than being an expression of thinking out of nature itself through its evolutionary production of the very possibility of thinking. Your philosophical approach to reality and consciousness is so different from mine that I am not sure we can actually arrive at a meaningful dialogue. But perhaps we can.

I have to go out for the evening but will return later to respond further to what you've written here.

 

[Soupie]

What is blue and how do we see color? - Business Insider

Until relatively recently in human history, "blue" didn't exist, not in the way we think of it.

As the delightful Radiolab episode "Colors" describes, ancient languages didn't have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there's evidence that they may not have seen it at all. ...

There was no blue, not in the way that we know the color — it wasn't distinguished from green or darker shades.

Geiger looked to see when "blue" started to appear in languages and found an odd pattern all over the world.

Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a color to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the color of blood and wine.

After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colors to appear in every language is blue. ...

But do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, who speak a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they couldn't pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one.
​

So unconsciously (physiologically) the Namibia were able to perceive the color blue, but consciously they failed or struggled to do so. Very interesting.

And from the comments:

Physically there are no lines between colors. The spectrum is continuous.
​

But this is true of all of reality. And if humans can't consciously see a color unless they have a concept for said color (if indeed this is what is happening here), then does this provide a function for consciousness? That is, if a human can't see blue unless they have a concept "blue," and to have a concept "blue," one would need to be conscious, right? (Remember Hellen Keller...)

I'd be very curious to see brain scans of the Namibia individuals while looking at the color circle before and after they had a conscious concept "blue."

Did their brain light up differently when seeing the color blue when they did and didnt have a conscious concept of it?

 

[Pharoah]

I think you're quite wrong in your approach here, but you're not likely to see why until you have added phenomenological philosophy to your store of philosophical capitol. Later I'll get to specifics in engaging the way you attempt to break down and break apart the contributions of Chalmers and Nagel to understanding what consciousness is and how it is enabled. For now I want to comment on what is developed in your post concerning what you hope to define as 'noumenal' consciousness {not yet defined by you}. What develops is a radical and unfounded gulf between individual consciousness and human consciousness in general, and a further radical and unfounded gulf between consciousness in humans and in our species' more recent forebears in evolution. You also seem to think that philosophy exists abstractly above and outside of human experience and nature in general rather than being an expression of thinking out of nature itself through its evolutionary production of the very possibility of thinking. Your philosophical approach to reality and consciousness is so different from mine that I am not sure we can actually arrive at a meaningful dialogue. But perhaps we can.

I have to go out for the evening but will return later to respond further to what you've written here.

Constance: "Your philosophical approach to reality and consciousness is so different from mine that I am not sure we can actually arrive at a meaningful dialogue."

If I were to engage in phenomenology there would be meaningful dialogue and I am trying to become sufficiently knowledgeable to make such a dialogue possible, in large part because of your dripping-water-like insistence. One day I'll be ready...
Similarly, if you let go of the phenomenological stance, you might be open to what I have to offer you. I respect your stance much more than you realise - it is more than half of me.

In essence, Nagel is saying he cannot conceive of how phenomenal experience can be explained except from a viewpoint. By this, is he saying that the phenomenological approach is the only viable approach? That is how I see it.
If so, this is no more than an opinion. He does not present an argument in this paper. And this opinion resonates with how a lot of people feel. I understand that.
His inability to see how phenomenal experience can be explained as a principle – a physical characteristic in nature - is a thought provoking declaration of ignorance which many people subscribe to.

Aside of the analysis, the reason why I think N and C conflate mind-body with phenomenal experience is very simple:
I know (as far as one might know) that HCT explains phenomenal experience. Admittedly, it does not explain an individual's phenomenal experience; I'm not going to explain your phenomenal experience. Rather, HCT just explains why phenomenal experience evolves (the form and dynamics of it), why it has qualitative character, why it necessarily must entail the possession of a viewpoint (a first-person). These aspects of phenomenal experience are Chalmers' "hard problem" (his definition) not his "easy problems".

 

[Constance]

Constance: "Your philosophical approach to reality and consciousness is so different from mine that I am not sure we can actually arrive at a meaningful dialogue."

If I were to engage in phenomenology there would be meaningful dialogue and I am trying to become sufficiently knowledgeable to make such a dialogue possible, in large part because of your dripping-water-like insistence. One day I'll be ready...
Similarly, if you let go of the phenomenological stance, you might be open to what I have to offer you. I respect your stance much more than you realise - it is more than half of me.

In essence, Nagel is saying he cannot conceive of how phenomenal experience can be explained except from a viewpoint. By this, is he saying that the phenomenological approach is the only viable approach? That is how I see it.
If so, this is no more than an opinion. He does not present an argument in this paper. And this opinion resonates with how a lot of people feel. I understand that.
His inability to see how phenomenal experience can be explained as a principle – a physical characteristic in nature - is a thought provoking declaration of ignorance which many people subscribe to.

Aside of the analysis, the reason why I think N and C conflate mind-body with phenomenal experience is very simple:
I know (as far as one might know) that HCT explains phenomenal experience. Admittedly, it does not explain an individual's phenomenal experience; I'm not going to explain your phenomenal experience. Rather, HCT just explains why phenomenal experience evolves (the form and dynamics of it), why it has qualitative character, why it necessarily must entail the possession of a viewpoint (a first-person). These aspects of phenomenal experience are Chalmers' "hard problem" (his definition) not his "easy problems".

Thank you for extending the hope of dialogue, Pharoah, and I apologize for my persistence in reminding you about phenomenological philosophy, that steady "dripping-water theme" that runs like a leitmotif in what I write here. I'm glad you are open to pursuing phenomenology and I think that understanding it is necessary for HCT. I think that after you have read some key works of phenomenology you will see philosophy as a whole in a different way because it will have become more clearly contextualized for you within the examined existential limits of our knowledge of being and of the nature of reality as these become our species' gradual accumulation. The phenomenological turn in philosophy is essentially important because it takes us back, in an archaeological way, to the essential nature of our situation in a reality only partly physical and physically definable, a reality accessible first to our bodily awareness and perceptions, our emerging consciousnesses, and our minds and what they work upon, how they work upon it. After reading this philosophy one is never able to look at mind and world in our species' currently accustomed way -- as a collection of objects that can be 'thought' from a point of view outside the being of what-is as we experience it. We have to arrive at our understanding of what-is from within what-is, from always situated and temporally changing circumstances. Our knowledge is always necessarily partial and perspectival. We are most productive in coming to understand what-is when we multiply our perspective on it, both individually/personally and as a collective in time recognized as temporality, in a context of always accruing sedimentations of insight accumulated in our species' history.

To orient you to some degree to phenomenological thinking before you become immersed in the writing of its major exponents, I think it might be helpful if I quote some extracts from a paper I've just read: David Abrams, "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth." MP's ontology and its relationship to Heidegger's ontology is explored further in Bryan E. Bannon, "Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s Relational Ontology," which I also recommend. Both are linked at the bottom of this post.

From the Abrams paper:

“. . . By thus shifting the prime focus of subjectivity from the human intellect to what he called the “body-subject” or the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty uncovered the radical extent to which all subjectivity, or awareness, presupposes our inherence in a sensuous, corporeal world. And this presupposed world is not entirely undefined, it is not just any world, for it has a specific structure—that is, it exists in both proximity and distance, and it has a horizon. More specifically, this always-already-existing world is characterized by a distant horizon that surrounds me wherever I move, holding my body in a distant embrace while provoking my perceptual exploration. It is a world that is structured in depth, and from the Phenomenology of Perception on, depth—the dimensional spread from the near to the far—becomes the paradigm phenomenon in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. . .

The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one’s own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world where indeed no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves—their other side, or their interior depths—for further exploration. Depth, this mysterious dimension, which every schoolchild knows as the “third” dimension (after height and breadth), Merleau-Ponty asserts is the first, most primordial dimension, from which all others are abstracted.(5) To the student of perception, the phenomenon of depth is the original ambiguity: it is depth that provides the slack or play in the immediately perceived world, the instability that already calls upon the freedom of the body to engage, to choose, to focus the world long before any verbal reflection comes to thematize and appropriate that freedom as its own. And so the experience of depth runs like a stream throughout the course of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophizing, from the many analyses of visual depth and the incredible discussion of focussing the eyes in the Phenomenology of Perception(6) to the extended meditation on depth in his last complete essay, “Eye and Mind”(7) —a subterranean stream which surfaces only here and there, but which ceaselessly provides the texture of his descriptions, the source of his metaphors. As he himself asserts in a late note:

The structure of the visual field, with its near-bys, its far-offs, its horizon, is indispensable for there to be transcendence, the model of every transcendence.(8)

It is no accident that the crucial chapter of his final, unfinished work is entitled “The Chiasm,”(9) a term commonly used by neurologists and psychologists to designate the “optic chiasm,” that place in the brain where the two focusing eyes intertwine. Yet Merleau-Ponty always maintained a critical distance from the sciences that he studied, acknowledging specific discoveries while criticizing the standard, Cartesian interpretations of those findings. Merleau-Ponty was one of the first to demonstrate, contrary to the assertions of a dualistic psychology, that the experience of depth is not created in the brain any more than it is posited by the mind. He showed that we can discover depth, can focus it or change our focus within it, only because it is already there, because perception unfolds into depth—because my brain, like the rest of my body, is already enveloped in a world that stretches out beyond my grasp. Depth, which we cannot consider to be merely one perceptual phenomenon among others, since it is that which engenders perception, is the announcement of our immersion in a world that not only preexists our vision but prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind that curved horizon. . . .

As Merleau-Ponty has written, “it is by borrowing from the world structure that the universe of truth and of thought is constructed for us.’’(13) His thesis of the primacy of perception suggests that all of our thoughts and our theories are secretly sustained by the structures of the perceptual world. It is precisely in this sense that philosophies reliant upon the concept of “horizon” have long been under the influence of the actual visible horizon that lies beyond the walls of our office or lecture hall, that structural enigma which we commonly take for granted, but which ceaselessly reminds us of our embodied situation on the surface of this huge and spherical body we call the Earth.

Yet we should not even say “on” the Earth, for we now know that we live within the Earth. Our scientists with their instruments have rediscovered what the ancients knew simply by following the indications of their senses: that we live within a sphere, or within a series of concentric spheres. We now call those spheres by such names as the “hydrosphere,” the “troposphere,” the “stratosphere,” and the “ionosphere,” and no longer view them as encompassing the whole universe. We have discovered that the myriad stars exist quite far beyond these, and now recognize these spheres to be layers or regions of our own local universe, the Earth. Collectively these spheres make up the atmosphere, the low-viscosity fluid membrane within which all our perceiving takes place.

While science gains access to this knowledge from the outside, philosophy has approached it from within. For once again, the entire phenomenological endeavor has taken place within a region of enquiry circumscribed by a tacit awareness of Earth as the ground and horizon of all our reflections, and the hidden thrust of the phenomenological movement is the reflective rediscovery of our inherence in the body of Earth. We can glimpse this trajectory most readily in certain essays by Husserl such as his investigations of the “Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” in which Husserl refers again and again to “Earth, the original ark,” and speaks enigmatically of Earth as that which precedes all constitution,(14) as well as in the later essays of Heidegger which are a direct invocation of “earth” and “sky” along with “mortals” and “gods” in “the fourfold.’’(15) Nevertheless, it is in Merleau-Ponty’s work that the full and encompassing enigma of Earth, in all its dense, fluid, and atmospheric unity, begins to emerge and to speak.

This new sense of Earth contrasts with Heidegger’s notion of “earth” as that which remains concealed in all revelation, the dark closedness of our ground which he counterposes to the elemental openness of “sky.” The Merleau-Pontian sense of Earth names a more diverse phenomenon, at once both visible and invisible, incorporating both the deep ground that supports our bodies and the fluid atmosphere in which we breathe. In discovering the body, or in discovering a new way of thinking the body and finally experiencing the body, Merleau-Ponty was also disclosing a new way of perceiving the Earth of which that body is a part. To assert, as he did throughout the course of his life, that the human intellect is a recapitulation or prolongation of a transcendence already underway at the most immediate level of bodily sensation—to assert, that is, that the “mind” or the “soul” has a carnal genesis—is to suggest, by a strange analogy of elements that stretches back to the very beginnings of philosophy, that the sky is a part of the Earth, to imply that the sky and the Earth need no longer be seen in opposition, that this sky, this space in which we live and breathe, is not opposed to the Earth but is a prolongation, even an organ, of this planet. If the soul is not contrary to the body, then human beings are no longer suspended between a dense inert Earth and a spiritual sky, no more than they are suspended between Being and Nothingness. For the first time in modern philosophy, human beings with all of their thoughts and their ideas are enveloped within the atmosphere of this planet, an atmosphere which circulates both inside and outside of their bodies: “there really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being….”(16) Although Merleau-Ponty never quite gives the name Earth to this unity, he does write of “the indestructible, the Barbaric Principle,’’(17) of “one sole sensible world, open to participation by all, which is given to each,”(18) of a “global voluminosity” and a “primordial topology,’’(19) and of the anonymous unity of this visible (and invisible) world.(20) He writes of “a nexus of history and transcendental geology, this very time that is space, this very space that is time which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh,”(21) but without calling it by name. In another luminous passage he writes of “the prepossession of a totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly."(22) But again, this totality remains anonymous. . .

In any case, it is enough here to recognize (1) that Merleau-Ponty sensed that there was a unity to the visible-invisible world that had not yet been described in philosophy, that there was a unique ontological structure, a topology of Being that was waiting to be realized, and (2) that whatever this unrealized Being is, we are in its depths, and of it, like a fish in the sea, and that therefore it must be disclosed from inside. These points are clear from his published notes, where, for example, in a note from February 1960, he writes of his project as “an ontology from within.”(24)

NATURE

"It suffices for us for the moment to note that he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless …he is one of the visibles, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them."(25)

"Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother."(26)

In the book on which he was working at the time of his death, published posthumously, with working notes, as The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty makes a significant terminological shift. He refers much less often to the body—whether to the “lived-body,” upon which he had previously focused, or to the “objective body,” from which it had been distinguished—and begins to speak more in terms of “the Flesh.” Indeed he no longer seems to maintain the previously useful separation of the “lived-body” from the “objective body”; rather, he is now intent on disclosing, beneath these two perspectives, the mystery of their nondistinction for truly primordial perception. The singular “objective body,” had lingered quietly in Merleau-Ponty’s writings—a residual concept, and a minor concession to the natural sciences, that was necessary as long as the rest of sensible or “objective” nature remained unattended to in his work, as long as nonhuman nature remained the mute and inert background for our human experience. However, with the shift from the “lived-body” to the “Flesh”—which is both “my flesh” and “the Flesh of the world”—Merleau-Ponty inaugurates a sweeping resuscitation of nature, both human and nonhuman. . . .

As a number of commentators have suggested, it is likely that Merleau-Ponty’s move from the lived-body to the Flesh constitutes less a break than a logical continuation of his earlier stylistic move to de-intellectualize transcendence in The Phenomenology of Perception.(27) In the language and argumentation of that earlier work, Merleau-Ponty managed to shift subjectivity from the human intellect to the body-subject. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty follows through on that first shift by dislodging transcendence as a particular attribute of the human body and returning it to the sensuous world of which this body is but a single expression. Merleau-Ponty accomplishes this by describing the intertwining of the invisible with the visible—by demonstrating that the invisible universe of thought and reflection is both provoked and supported by the enigmatic depth of the visible, sensible environment:

"…the visible is pregnant with the invisible,…to comprehend fully the visible relations one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible."(28)

Thus, the invisible, the region of thought and ideality, is always inspired by invisibles that are there from the first perception—the hidden presence of the distances, the secret life of the Wind which we can feel and breathe but cannot see, the interior depths of things, and, in general, all the invisible lines of force that constantly influence our perceptions. The invisible shape of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, or the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. For Merleau-Ponty our own reflections are supported by the play of light and its reflections; the mind, the whole life of thought and reason is a prolongation and expansion, through us, of the shifting, polymorphic, invisible natures of the perceptual world. In the words of Paul Elouard, “there is another world, but it is in this one.”(29) Or as Merleau-Ponty himself writes in one note, all the “invisibles,” including that of thought, are “necessarily enveloped in the Visible and are but modalities of the same transcendence.”(30) The “flesh” is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to this sensible-in-transcendence, this inherence of the sentient in the sensible and the sensible in the sentient, to this ubiquitous element which is not the objective matter we assign to the physicists nor the immaterial mind we entrust to the psychologists because it is older than they, the source of those abstractions:

There is a body of the mind, and a mind of the body….The essential notion for such a philosophy is that of the flesh, which is not the objective body, nor the body thought by the soul as its own (Descartes), [but] which is the sensible in the twofold sense of [that which is sensed and that which senses](31)

The “flesh” is the animate element which Merleau-Ponty has discovered, through his exploration of pre-objective perception, to be the common tissue between himself and the world:

The visible can thus fill me and occupy me because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself….(32). . . ."



To add: human consciousness and mind do not, of course, dissolve in the process of recognizing their generation in nature. There is always for us an asymmetry in the relation between mind and nature recognized in the fact that thinking stands apart by degrees from the being of what-is as we are able to think the being of what-is and our own being as part of it, an expression of it. This is the 'ontological difference' that concerned Heidegger, about which see the Brannon paper.

Abram's "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth" - There It Is . org

Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Relational Ontology | Bryan Bannon - Academia.edu

 

[Pharoah]

Thank you for extending the hope of dialogue, Pharoah, and I apologize for my persistence in reminding you about phenomenological philosophy, that steady "dripping-water theme" that runs like a leitmotif in what I write here. I'm glad you are open to pursuing phenomenology and I think that understanding it is necessary for HCT. I think that after you have read some key works of phenomenology you will see philosophy as a whole in a different way because it will have become more clearly contextualized for you within the examined existential limits of our knowledge of being and of the nature of reality as these become our species' gradual accumulation. The phenomenological turn in philosophy is essentially important because it takes us back, in an archaeological way, to the essential nature of our situation in a reality only partly physical and physically definable, a reality accessible first to our bodily awareness and perceptions, our emerging consciousnesses, and our minds and what they work upon, how they work upon it. After reading this philosophy one is never able to look at mind and world in our species' currently accustomed way -- as a collection of objects that can be 'thought' from a point of view outside the being of what-is as we experience it. We have to arrive at our understanding of what-is from within what-is, from always situated and temporally changing circumstances. Our knowledge is always necessarily partial and perspectival. We are most productive in coming to understand what-is when we multiply our perspective on it, both individually/personally and as a collective in time recognized as temporality, in a context of always accruing sedimentations of insight accumulated in our species' history.

To orient you to some degree to phenomenological thinking before you become immersed in the writing of its major exponents, I think it might be helpful if I quote some extracts from a paper I've just read: David Abrams, "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth." MP's ontology and its relationship to Heidegger's ontology is explored further in Bryan E. Bannon, "Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s Relational Ontology," which I also recommend. Both are linked at the bottom of this post.

From the Abrams paper:

“. . . By thus shifting the prime focus of subjectivity from the human intellect to what he called the “body-subject” or the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty uncovered the radical extent to which all subjectivity, or awareness, presupposes our inherence in a sensuous, corporeal world. And this presupposed world is not entirely undefined, it is not just any world, for it has a specific structure—that is, it exists in both proximity and distance, and it has a horizon. More specifically, this always-already-existing world is characterized by a distant horizon that surrounds me wherever I move, holding my body in a distant embrace while provoking my perceptual exploration. It is a world that is structured in depth, and from the Phenomenology of Perception on, depth—the dimensional spread from the near to the far—becomes the paradigm phenomenon in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. . .

The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one’s own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world where indeed no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves—their other side, or their interior depths—for further exploration. Depth, this mysterious dimension, which every schoolchild knows as the “third” dimension (after height and breadth), Merleau-Ponty asserts is the first, most primordial dimension, from which all others are abstracted.(5) To the student of perception, the phenomenon of depth is the original ambiguity: it is depth that provides the slack or play in the immediately perceived world, the instability that already calls upon the freedom of the body to engage, to choose, to focus the world long before any verbal reflection comes to thematize and appropriate that freedom as its own. And so the experience of depth runs like a stream throughout the course of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophizing, from the many analyses of visual depth and the incredible discussion of focussing the eyes in the Phenomenology of Perception(6) to the extended meditation on depth in his last complete essay, “Eye and Mind”(7) —a subterranean stream which surfaces only here and there, but which ceaselessly provides the texture of his descriptions, the source of his metaphors. As he himself asserts in a late note:

The structure of the visual field, with its near-bys, its far-offs, its horizon, is indispensable for there to be transcendence, the model of every transcendence.(8)

It is no accident that the crucial chapter of his final, unfinished work is entitled “The Chiasm,”(9) a term commonly used by neurologists and psychologists to designate the “optic chiasm,” that place in the brain where the two focusing eyes intertwine. Yet Merleau-Ponty always maintained a critical distance from the sciences that he studied, acknowledging specific discoveries while criticizing the standard, Cartesian interpretations of those findings. Merleau-Ponty was one of the first to demonstrate, contrary to the assertions of a dualistic psychology, that the experience of depth is not created in the brain any more than it is posited by the mind. He showed that we can discover depth, can focus it or change our focus within it, only because it is already there, because perception unfolds into depth—because my brain, like the rest of my body, is already enveloped in a world that stretches out beyond my grasp. Depth, which we cannot consider to be merely one perceptual phenomenon among others, since it is that which engenders perception, is the announcement of our immersion in a world that not only preexists our vision but prolongs itself beyond our vision, behind that curved horizon. . . .

As Merleau-Ponty has written, “it is by borrowing from the world structure that the universe of truth and of thought is constructed for us.’’(13) His thesis of the primacy of perception suggests that all of our thoughts and our theories are secretly sustained by the structures of the perceptual world. It is precisely in this sense that philosophies reliant upon the concept of “horizon” have long been under the influence of the actual visible horizon that lies beyond the walls of our office or lecture hall, that structural enigma which we commonly take for granted, but which ceaselessly reminds us of our embodied situation on the surface of this huge and spherical body we call the Earth.

Yet we should not even say “on” the Earth, for we now know that we live within the Earth. Our scientists with their instruments have rediscovered what the ancients knew simply by following the indications of their senses: that we live within a sphere, or within a series of concentric spheres. We now call those spheres by such names as the “hydrosphere,” the “troposphere,” the “stratosphere,” and the “ionosphere,” and no longer view them as encompassing the whole universe. We have discovered that the myriad stars exist quite far beyond these, and now recognize these spheres to be layers or regions of our own local universe, the Earth. Collectively these spheres make up the atmosphere, the low-viscosity fluid membrane within which all our perceiving takes place.

While science gains access to this knowledge from the outside, philosophy has approached it from within. For once again, the entire phenomenological endeavor has taken place within a region of enquiry circumscribed by a tacit awareness of Earth as the ground and horizon of all our reflections, and the hidden thrust of the phenomenological movement is the reflective rediscovery of our inherence in the body of Earth. We can glimpse this trajectory most readily in certain essays by Husserl such as his investigations of the “Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” in which Husserl refers again and again to “Earth, the original ark,” and speaks enigmatically of Earth as that which precedes all constitution,(14) as well as in the later essays of Heidegger which are a direct invocation of “earth” and “sky” along with “mortals” and “gods” in “the fourfold.’’(15) Nevertheless, it is in Merleau-Ponty’s work that the full and encompassing enigma of Earth, in all its dense, fluid, and atmospheric unity, begins to emerge and to speak.

This new sense of Earth contrasts with Heidegger’s notion of “earth” as that which remains concealed in all revelation, the dark closedness of our ground which he counterposes to the elemental openness of “sky.” The Merleau-Pontian sense of Earth names a more diverse phenomenon, at once both visible and invisible, incorporating both the deep ground that supports our bodies and the fluid atmosphere in which we breathe. In discovering the body, or in discovering a new way of thinking the body and finally experiencing the body, Merleau-Ponty was also disclosing a new way of perceiving the Earth of which that body is a part. To assert, as he did throughout the course of his life, that the human intellect is a recapitulation or prolongation of a transcendence already underway at the most immediate level of bodily sensation—to assert, that is, that the “mind” or the “soul” has a carnal genesis—is to suggest, by a strange analogy of elements that stretches back to the very beginnings of philosophy, that the sky is a part of the Earth, to imply that the sky and the Earth need no longer be seen in opposition, that this sky, this space in which we live and breathe, is not opposed to the Earth but is a prolongation, even an organ, of this planet. If the soul is not contrary to the body, then human beings are no longer suspended between a dense inert Earth and a spiritual sky, no more than they are suspended between Being and Nothingness. For the first time in modern philosophy, human beings with all of their thoughts and their ideas are enveloped within the atmosphere of this planet, an atmosphere which circulates both inside and outside of their bodies: “there really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being….”(16) Although Merleau-Ponty never quite gives the name Earth to this unity, he does write of “the indestructible, the Barbaric Principle,’’(17) of “one sole sensible world, open to participation by all, which is given to each,”(18) of a “global voluminosity” and a “primordial topology,’’(19) and of the anonymous unity of this visible (and invisible) world.(20) He writes of “a nexus of history and transcendental geology, this very time that is space, this very space that is time which I will have rediscovered by my analysis of the visible and the flesh,”(21) but without calling it by name. In another luminous passage he writes of “the prepossession of a totality which is there before one knows how and why, whose realizations are never what we would have imagined them to be, and which nonetheless fulfills a secret expectation within us, since we believe in it tirelessly."(22) But again, this totality remains anonymous. . .

In any case, it is enough here to recognize (1) that Merleau-Ponty sensed that there was a unity to the visible-invisible world that had not yet been described in philosophy, that there was a unique ontological structure, a topology of Being that was waiting to be realized, and (2) that whatever this unrealized Being is, we are in its depths, and of it, like a fish in the sea, and that therefore it must be disclosed from inside. These points are clear from his published notes, where, for example, in a note from February 1960, he writes of his project as “an ontology from within.”(24)

NATURE

"It suffices for us for the moment to note that he who sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it, unless …he is one of the visibles, capable, by a singular reversal, of seeing them—he who is one of them."(25)

"Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the flesh, the mother."(26)

In the book on which he was working at the time of his death, published posthumously, with working notes, as The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty makes a significant terminological shift. He refers much less often to the body—whether to the “lived-body,” upon which he had previously focused, or to the “objective body,” from which it had been distinguished—and begins to speak more in terms of “the Flesh.” Indeed he no longer seems to maintain the previously useful separation of the “lived-body” from the “objective body”; rather, he is now intent on disclosing, beneath these two perspectives, the mystery of their nondistinction for truly primordial perception. The singular “objective body,” had lingered quietly in Merleau-Ponty’s writings—a residual concept, and a minor concession to the natural sciences, that was necessary as long as the rest of sensible or “objective” nature remained unattended to in his work, as long as nonhuman nature remained the mute and inert background for our human experience. However, with the shift from the “lived-body” to the “Flesh”—which is both “my flesh” and “the Flesh of the world”—Merleau-Ponty inaugurates a sweeping resuscitation of nature, both human and nonhuman. . . .

As a number of commentators have suggested, it is likely that Merleau-Ponty’s move from the lived-body to the Flesh constitutes less a break than a logical continuation of his earlier stylistic move to de-intellectualize transcendence in The Phenomenology of Perception.(27) In the language and argumentation of that earlier work, Merleau-Ponty managed to shift subjectivity from the human intellect to the body-subject. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty follows through on that first shift by dislodging transcendence as a particular attribute of the human body and returning it to the sensuous world of which this body is but a single expression. Merleau-Ponty accomplishes this by describing the intertwining of the invisible with the visible—by demonstrating that the invisible universe of thought and reflection is both provoked and supported by the enigmatic depth of the visible, sensible environment:

"…the visible is pregnant with the invisible,…to comprehend fully the visible relations one must go unto the relation of the visible with the invisible."(28)

Thus, the invisible, the region of thought and ideality, is always inspired by invisibles that are there from the first perception—the hidden presence of the distances, the secret life of the Wind which we can feel and breathe but cannot see, the interior depths of things, and, in general, all the invisible lines of force that constantly influence our perceptions. The invisible shape of smells, rhythms of cricketsong, or the movement of shadows all, in a sense, provide the subtle body of our thoughts. For Merleau-Ponty our own reflections are supported by the play of light and its reflections; the mind, the whole life of thought and reason is a prolongation and expansion, through us, of the shifting, polymorphic, invisible natures of the perceptual world. In the words of Paul Elouard, “there is another world, but it is in this one.”(29) Or as Merleau-Ponty himself writes in one note, all the “invisibles,” including that of thought, are “necessarily enveloped in the Visible and are but modalities of the same transcendence.”(30) The “flesh” is the name Merleau-Ponty gives to this sensible-in-transcendence, this inherence of the sentient in the sensible and the sensible in the sentient, to this ubiquitous element which is not the objective matter we assign to the physicists nor the immaterial mind we entrust to the psychologists because it is older than they, the source of those abstractions:

There is a body of the mind, and a mind of the body….The essential notion for such a philosophy is that of the flesh, which is not the objective body, nor the body thought by the soul as its own (Descartes), [but] which is the sensible in the twofold sense of [that which is sensed and that which senses](31)

The “flesh” is the animate element which Merleau-Ponty has discovered, through his exploration of pre-objective perception, to be the common tissue between himself and the world:

The visible can thus fill me and occupy me because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogenous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself….(32). . . ."



To add: human consciousness and mind do not, of course, dissolve in the process of recognizing their generation in nature. There is always for us an asymmetry in the relation between mind and nature recognized in the fact that thinking stands apart by degrees from the being of what-is as we are able to think the being of what-is and our own being as part of it, an expression of it. This is the 'ontological difference' that concerned Heidegger, about which see the Brannon paper.

Abram's "Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth" - There It Is . org

Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Relational Ontology | Bryan Bannon - Academia.edu

I don't mind the drip of insistence... it sounds to me as though you want me to start not with Hegel, but MP... Can't say I am enthusiastic about Hegel so far, but...

This section you quote, reminded me of the poem below:

"By thus shifting the prime focus of subjectivity from the human intellect to what he called the “body-subject” or the “lived body,” Merleau-Ponty uncovered the radical extent to which all subjectivity, or awareness, presupposes our inherence in a sensuous, corporeal world. And this presupposed world is not entirely undefined, it is not just any world, for it has a specific structure—that is, it exists in both proximity and distance, and it has a horizon. More specifically, this always-already-existing world is characterized by a distant horizon that surrounds me wherever I move, holding my body in a distant embrace while provoking my perceptual exploration. It is a world that is structured in depth, and from the Phenomenology of Perception on, depth—the dimensional spread from the near to the far—becomes the paradigm phenomenon in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. . . The experience of depth is the experience of a world that both includes one’s own body and yet spreads into the distance, a world where things hide themselves not just beyond the horizon but behind other things, a world where indeed no thing can be seen all at once, in which objects offer themselves to the gaze only by withholding some aspect of themselves—their other side, or their interior depths—for further exploration."


Encapsulate the Globe

With one heart
Nurture the sphere in your crooked hand
Deeply inhale its soft cool mist into your fractured lungs
Wipe its endless soft life gently over red raw eyelids

With one vision
Caress the curved cragged landscapes
Brush the whispering life of trees
A sea of green floss
Cool and gentle in the wandering mist
soothing ragged skin

Soft sounds echo
Chiming as one with the mind
Seas slop and rage.
Scoop the ocean with omnipotent ease
Splash the sea to moisten the intense
drumming.

Draw in infinitely
Internal breath of heady scent
A rush of beauty straight to the head
And breath out a weep of poisonous bitterness
Far out into the distance
Live in time.

 

[smcder]

@smcder

I'm seeing the Hard Problem as less of a metaphysical problem lately.

All we really have is cogito ergo sum. What we think/experience is our 1st person perspective. It seems that what we think/experience is about something. We can describe this something objectively.

I don't see the subjective and the objective as correlating with distinct, metaphysical substances. Rather, they are both "descriptions" (or models) of what-is. One is a 1st person, experiential model of what-is, the other is a 3rd person, conceptual model of what-is.

You say that the failure to objectively describe subjectivity means that physicalism fails. What does that mean? Is physicalism the idea that (1) all of what-is is physical or is it the idea that (2) all of what-is can be objectively described?

I think I said this before, but it's one thing to see a causal chain of events and quite another to be a causal chain of events. It seems to me a bit like the ouroboros in my avatar eternally chasing its tail.

The reductive paradigm tells us that subjectivity is as the top. That subjectivity has no causal power. However, by that same token, subjectivity can be influenced from below.

Objectively, we have no way of proving this. Subjectivity is completely invisible to objectivity. (And objectivity only comes to us through subjectivity; ergo, objectivity is only a subjective concept.)

When we take drugs, get punched, and eat a cracker (all objective concepts) we subjectively experience an effect. However, this subjective effective is completely invisible to objectivity. Even if someone reports that eating a cheeseburger or taking drugs has made them feel a certain way, it is invisible to us. We can experience their words and facial expression, but not their alleged feelings and experiences.

Physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are built on 3rd person, objective concepts. Therefore, they can't incorporate subjectivity. They are two different, ultimately subjective ways of describing what-is.

However, while we will never be able to objectively describe the subjective, we can produce an objective account about how subjectivity might arise within what-is.

If the hard problem is to objectively describe subjectivity, it can't be done. Objectivity is built out of subjectivity. However, I believe we can coherently seek an objective description of how subjectivity can exist in what-is, but it will have to stop there. (And it appears that we can't even assign an objective function to subjectivity.)

Since physicalism is an objective concept, and objectivity is born from subjectivity, the inability of physicalism to describe and account for subjectivity is an indication of the limits of objectivity more so than a failure of physicalism. That is, the failure to answer the hard problem is not a failure of physicalism but a limit of objectivity.

I don't see pure subjectivity being of much help either. As soon as we put our subjective thoughts/experience into words, we shift to the objective description of what-is.

Objectivity (and thus physicalism) is inherently subjective; our objective concepts are built out of our subjective experiences. Maybe to get a true accounting of what-is, there needs to be a resurgence of metaphysics. So, not a subjective physics, nor an objective physics, but a physics that incorporates both. I think there are approaches out there that strive for this. Biocentrism? How about the Constructor approaches?

"You say that the failure to objectively describe subjectivity means that physicalism fails. What does that mean? Is physicalism the idea that (1) all of what-is is physical or is it the idea that (2) all of what-is can be objectively described?"

No I don't say that and Nagel didn't say that in WIILTBAB either.

Its not a "problem" to be solved ... it's a problem for the physicalist claim that everything can be described objectively.

See footnote 15 of WIILTBAB.

This essay may also be helpful:

What is it like to be a bat?

 

[smcder]

Q2. Physiological mechanisms specifically, are those kind that have evolved because of replication.

Are you just saying:

Physiological mechanisms have evolved because of replication?

I'm not sure how

specifically
those kind

Fit in or qualify the sentence above.

Also, replication isn't sufficient - replication, variation and selection ...

As far as I can see right now it would be correct to say physiological mechanisms evolved by natural selection.

Is this line of questioning guided by footnote 9 (Dowel) in the paper you sent me?

 

[smcder]

@Pharoah

"As I have said before, there is a big difference between phenomenal experience (as a general thing humans and many animals possess) and my phenomenal experience (unique to me). Both mind body related, both ential a first-person perspective, but they are not the same problem by any stretch of the imagination."

Yes, that's what the author of the Phi review article says too - see my side by side comparison between your language and Chalmers.

The author refers specifically to Chalmers and Nagel, especially Chalmers list of "easy" problems.

All of your examples seem to fit in the "easy" problems - which Chalmers says should yield eventually to science. So what you call the hard problem - Chalmers calls the easy problems.

What you call the noumenal problem appears to me to be what Chalmers calls the hard problem.

 

[smcder]

Facing Up To The Problem of Consciousness?

In this paper, Chalmers refers to WIILTBAB and "what it is like" so that seems to tie him to Nagel and the author above ties Nagel to this idea:

Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience. It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.

compare that to your quote above:

I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience. The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. The first-person perspective is explainable - namely why first-persons exist and why they possess this qualitative conscious perspective. The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.

Breaking it out piece by piece:

article: Nagel’s deepest question about consciousness is not provoked by the sheer fact of conscious experience.
Pharoah: I do think there is a hard problem but it has nothing to do with phenomenal experience.

article: It’s the plurality of consciousness that’s strange. No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.

Pharoah: The hard problem for me is explaining why I am me, rather than anyone else. ...
Pharoah: The hard question in my view is, why is my first-person mine and not any other first-person in the universe of time and space? It is a hard question because it is person specific and not a general rule of physics about first persons.
article: No objective scientific account of all the elements in the universe could say why I am me and you are you.

How do @Constance and @Soupie read these comparisons?

@ Pharoah - could you use these comparisons as a framework

( ie go back through line by line above)

to distinguish your position from the authors? It appears to me you are both saying the same thing.

 

[smcder]

Came across this - may be of interest:

Conscious Entities » Blog Archive » Why am I me?

"However, I think both sides of this argument are missing the point. To say that my individual consciousness arises from or is constituted by my physical nature and background is not actually to dispose of the essential problem at all, because my physical nature and background are also inexplicably particular.

Perhaps the underlying problem is the vexed question of why anything is anything in particular: it’s just that in the case of my own experience and my own existence the question hits me with a force it lacks when I’m merely wondering about a chair. The basic problem is haecceity or thisness (the same problem which in my view lies at the root of the qualia problem)."

 

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Nagel 20 years after WIILTBAB

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/conceiving.pdf

 

[smcder]

@smcder

I'm seeing the Hard Problem as less of a metaphysical problem lately.

All we really have is cogito ergo sum. What we think/experience is our 1st person perspective. It seems that what we think/experience is about something. We can describe this something objectively.

I don't see the subjective and the objective as correlating with distinct, metaphysical substances. Rather, they are both "descriptions" (or models) of what-is. One is a 1st person, experiential model of what-is, the other is a 3rd person, conceptual model of what-is.

You say that the failure to objectively describe subjectivity means that physicalism fails. What does that mean? Is physicalism the idea that (1) all of what-is is physical or is it the idea that (2) all of what-is can be objectively described?

I think I said this before, but it's one thing to see a causal chain of events and quite another to be a causal chain of events. It seems to me a bit like the ouroboros in my avatar eternally chasing its tail.

The reductive paradigm tells us that subjectivity is as the top. That subjectivity has no causal power. However, by that same token, subjectivity can be influenced from below.

Objectively, we have no way of proving this. Subjectivity is completely invisible to objectivity. (And objectivity only comes to us through subjectivity; ergo, objectivity is only a subjective concept.)

When we take drugs, get punched, and eat a cracker (all objective concepts) we subjectively experience an effect. However, this subjective effective is completely invisible to objectivity. Even if someone reports that eating a cheeseburger or taking drugs has made them feel a certain way, it is invisible to us. We can experience their words and facial expression, but not their alleged feelings and experiences.

Physics, chemistry, biology, etc. are built on 3rd person, objective concepts. Therefore, they can't incorporate subjectivity. They are two different, ultimately subjective ways of describing what-is.

However, while we will never be able to objectively describe the subjective, we can produce an objective account about how subjectivity might arise within what-is.

If the hard problem is to objectively describe subjectivity, it can't be done. Objectivity is built out of subjectivity. However, I believe we can coherently seek an objective description of how subjectivity can exist in what-is, but it will have to stop there. (And it appears that we can't even assign an objective function to subjectivity.)

Since physicalism is an objective concept, and objectivity is born from subjectivity, the inability of physicalism to describe and account for subjectivity is an indication of the limits of objectivity more so than a failure of physicalism. That is, the failure to answer the hard problem is not a failure of physicalism but a limit of objectivity.

I don't see pure subjectivity being of much help either. As soon as we put our subjective thoughts/experience into words, we shift to the objective description of what-is.

Objectivity (and thus physicalism) is inherently subjective; our objective concepts are built out of our subjective experiences. Maybe to get a true accounting of what-is, there needs to be a resurgence of metaphysics. So, not a subjective physics, nor an objective physics, but a physics that incorporates both. I think there are approaches out there that strive for this. Biocentrism? How about the Constructor approaches?

See the Kripke quote a few paragraphs in:

http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1172/nexus.pdf

 

[Pharoah]

@Pharoah

"As I have said before, there is a big difference between phenomenal experience (as a general thing humans and many animals possess) and my phenomenal experience (unique to me). Both mind body related, both ential a first-person perspective, but they are not the same problem by any stretch of the imagination."

Yes, that's what the author of the Phi review article says too - see my side by side comparison between your language and Chalmers.

The author refers specifically to Chalmers and Nagel, especially Chalmers list of "easy" problems.

All of your examples seem to fit in the "easy" problems - which Chalmers says should yield eventually to science. So what you call the hard problem - Chalmers calls the easy problems.

What you call the noumenal problem appears to me to be what Chalmers calls the hard problem.

The phi article I found a bit irritating. I thought the author misrepresented Nagel and Chalmers. which is why i went directly to the nagel article and wrote my response above

 

[smcder]

The phi article I found a bit irritating. I thought the author misrepresented Nagel and Chalmers. which is why i went directly to the nagel article and wrote my response above

My response is based in part on Chalmers - especially see his list of easy problems and how I see that your examples fit in there rather than as examples of the hard problem - they are sensory experiences not "what it is like" - and then my direct comparison of your terminology and Chalmers. Once the terminology is compared it looks to me like you and Chalmers agree on the hard problem but call it different things.

Then, Let's set Chalmers and Nagel aside - why would the author misrepresent Nagel and Chalmers in this way? I think it's because even though they don't explicitly state the hard problem in the terms that you state the nominal, then that view follows directly from Nagel and Chalmers conception of the hard problem.

@Soupie said this is how he saw the hard problem all along (is that right, Soupie?)

To ask what is it like to be a bat? Is to ask what it is like to be a specific bat, it doesn't make sense to just ask about the general nature of a bat's perception - if that was the problem then the response I got early on in part 1 where someone sent me a video taken from a dog's perspective would solve the hard problem.

Nagel's whole argument turns on subjectivity vs objectivity - to be a subject is to be a subject, singular and unique - which is to ask "why am i me"? or why is that bat that bat?

So I think you have to distinguish now how your conception of the noumenal differs from Chalmers and Nagels conception of the hard problem.

 

[Pharoah]

Are you just saying:

Physiological mechanisms have evolved because of replication?

I'm not sure how

specifically
those kind

Fit in or qualify the sentence above.

Also, replication isn't sufficient - replication, variation and selection ...

As far as I can see right now it would be correct to say physiological mechanisms evolved by natural selection.

Is this line of questioning guided by footnote 9 (Dowel) in the paper you sent me?

Ok,
Q2 Physiological mechanisms are the kind of mechanism that have evolved because of replication - proviso: we are to assume the Darwinian/Wallacian theory of evolution, and consequently will not recount the mutation, selection, variation aspects required ontop of replication: that is a given.

Footnote 9 doesn't exist in my copy anymore so I don't know what it says without looking back at the attachment which I can't access at mo... if there is a connection, it is unintentionsal.