• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
I have the article and I've tried to read through it, but I've only got my phone right now. Reading multiple-page text is a pain on a phone methinks.

I did get to the section where he talked of thick and thin and it resonates with me. He even hinted at doing away with "subject" altogether but I haven't gotten there yet.

Reality may realize itself — simultaneously — in two ways, what we have labeled physical and mental. Whether the physical and mental are really the same remains to be seen.

However, that reality may always, simultaneously realize as physical and mental doesn't mean that "minds" are everywhere anymore than it means buses, goats, or hurricanes are everywhere.
 
Re edging closer to Buddhism. :)

If you go back and read my initial posts in Part I, I have been trying to express this same idea from square one.
 
I'm interested to read more of the relationship of Strawson and Thompson and Varela's thinking to Buddhist thought ... In the meantime two final thoughts on Sunyata (emptiness)

SUNYATA

On the provisional character of Buddhism itself

"Among the most important applications of these ideas with Mahayana has been to expose the emptiness and the co-dependently arisen qualities of even Buddhism itself. Mahayana claims itself to be an important vehicle to liberation, but it also points to its own provisional character. Mahayana does not see itself as an end, but as means to an end. That end is liberation, enlightenment, and an end to suffering. However, as with all religions, there is a tendency for the religion to reinforce itself as real, as an end in itself, within the minds of its adherents. The philosophical traditions of emptiness and dependent co-origination are important correctives to this tendency. There is an important saying within Zen: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." When people come to see the Buddha as a being to be revered merely for the sake of piety itself, or when Buddhism itself becomes the chief focus of its practitioners, then it is time to "kill the Buddha", to point to the emptiness and provisional quality of Buddhism itself."


Emptiness

Interpreting the meaning of "emptiness"

"These interpretations not only miss the meaning of emptiness but also keep the mind from getting into the proper mode. If the world and the people in the story of your life don't really exist, then all the actions and reactions in that story seem like a mathematics of zeros, and you wonder why there's any point in practicing virtue at all. If, on the other hand, you see emptiness as the ground of being to which we're all going to return, then what need is there to train the mind in concentration and discernment, since we're all going to get there anyway? And even if we need training to get back to our ground of being, what's to keep us from coming out of it and suffering all over again? So in all these scenarios, the whole idea of training the mind seems futile and pointless. By focusing on the question of whether or not there really is something behind experience, they entangle the mind in issues that keep it from getting into the present mode."


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I have the article and I've tried to read through it, but I've only got my phone right now. Reading multiple-page text is a pain on a phone methinks.

I did get to the section where he talked of thick and thin and it resonates with me. He even hinted at doing away with "subject" altogether but I haven't gotten there yet.

Reality may realize itself — simultaneously — in two ways, what we have labeled physical and mental. Whether the physical and mental are really the same remains to be seen.

However, that reality may always, simultaneously realize as physical and mental doesn't mean that "minds" are everywhere anymore than it means buses, goats, or hurricanes are everywhere.

You might get your phone to read it to you?



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
I have the article and I've tried to read through it, but I've only got my phone right now. Reading multiple-page text is a pain on a phone methinks.

I did get to the section where he talked of thick and thin and it resonates with me. He even hinted at doing away with "subject" altogether but I haven't gotten there yet.

Reality may realize itself — simultaneously — in two ways, what we have labeled physical and mental. Whether the physical and mental are really the same remains to be seen.

However, that reality may always, simultaneously realize as physical and mental doesn't mean that "minds" are everywhere anymore than it means buses, goats, or hurricanes are everywhere.


Webreader text to speech $1.99 on App Store

Do you have trouble typing on a touch screen?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I have the article and I've tried to read through it, but I've only got my phone right now. Reading multiple-page text is a pain on a phone methinks.

I did get to the section where he talked of thick and thin and it resonates with me. He even hinted at doing away with "subject" altogether but I haven't gotten there yet.

Reality may realize itself — simultaneously — in two ways, what we have labeled physical and mental. Whether the physical and mental are really the same remains to be seen.

However, that reality may always, simultaneously realize as physical and mental doesn't mean that "minds" are everywhere anymore than it means buses, goats, or hurricanes are everywhere.

There's talk of deflation not elimination of the subject:

From the same article, the author writes:

"The notion of the subject has been built up into a metaphysical tank, but the message which I take from Strawson is that the self and the subject can be deflated without much harm to subjectivity qua subjectivity. I think ultimately that this falls out from basic metaphysical principles, as Strawson hints:"

Them quoted Strawson:

"Some like to think that there can be subjectivity or experience without a subject.

That’s why it’s important to bring out the full import of the notion of subjectivity or experience by stressing the fundamental sense in which it can’t exist without a subject.

But there’s a no less important point in the other direction. If all you need to know, to know that there is a subject, is that there is subjectivity or experience, then you can’t build more into the notion of a subject than you can know to exist if subjectivity or experience exists."


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
More on thick and thin subjects here

Panexperientialism: Experience and the subject

(There's even a quiz at the end for you and your partner to see which kind you are)

"I won’t attempt to simplify Strawson’s arguments any more, but I think the conclusion he reaches, like the conclusion of Whitehead and others, is one which can address the intuitive qualms which surface when one considers talk of subjects and unified experience at the level of subatomic particles or below.

At such level there is no need to contemplate a persisting self which is the subject of continuous experience. Rather, the conception of brief, discrete processes or occasions of experience in which there is no subject distinct from the experience seems to me to be intuitively acceptable."



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
@Soupie - also keep that Nietzsche lecture by Strawson in your bucket list ... It will resonate with you and maybe entice you to read Nietzsche.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
More on thick and thin subjects here

Panexperientialism: Experience and the subject

(There's even a quiz at the end for you and your partner to see which kind you are)

"I won’t attempt to simplify Strawson’s arguments any more, but I think the conclusion he reaches, like the conclusion of Whitehead and others, is one which can address the intuitive qualms which surface when one considers talk of subjects and unified experience at the level of subatomic particles or below.

At such level there is no need to contemplate a persisting self which is the subject of continuous experience. Rather, the conception of brief, discrete processes or occasions of experience in which there is no subject distinct from the experience seems to me to be intuitively acceptable."

From a little farther down in this discussion:

"Gregg Rosenberg8:47 PM
Hi, this is Gregg Rosenberg. I've already written Amy to let her know that I don't hold the positions she's attributing to me in her paper. I devote the whole second half of my book to explaining a positive framework for understanding what subjects of experience are and what it means to have phenomenal experience without cognition.

I suspect that maybe -- as often happens with commentary on a book as long and difficult as mine -- Amy may have only read parts of it closely, and skipped or skimmed the more difficult second half where the original positive work on natural individuals is explained.

Subjects of experience in my framework are very much like what Strawson descrbes -- unified experiential events linked together into processes, and were inspired by Whitehead's views.

I add detail and analysis to the Whiteheadian view, fitting it into a different kind of framework than Whitehead's own, one closer to a Russellian concept of the inner nature of matter. By adding detailed analytical discussion of the mechanisms and natural purpose behind the existence of natural individuals, I build a framework from which we can make deductions of their properties from first principles and infer connections to scientific knowledge."

This is the book being discussed in that thread:


and it might be one we all want to read to pursue the ideas laid out by Soupie and Steve. Whitehead and process philosophy have been missing in our discussion over the last 120+ pages of this now two-part thread. I especially want to read Rosenberg since I need to understand Whitehead's philosophy {it is daunting} as it has been applied to reading Stevens's poetry. I was first confronted at a Stevens conference more than twenty years ago by a Stevens scholar who disputed my phenomenological approach to Stevens, claiming that Whitehead was the key. I've attempted to read Whitehead in the interim, but life has gotten in the way over these years.

Here is Chalmers's comment on Rosenberg's book, quoted at amazon:

"Gregg Rosenberg systematically explores the idea that consciousness is tied to an inner aspect of processes that science normally studies only from the outside. He develops this idea in unprecedented depth and detail, laying out an original theory of the roots of consciousness in the intrinsic nature of causation. The book is full of fresh ideas in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. The result is a significant work of philosophy that makes compelling reading for anyone interested in the place of consciousness in nature."--David J. Chalmers, University of Arizona

 
Constance:

1. In response to my reply to 'what is consciousness? - To be conscious is to have an understanding of the qualitative relevance of realtime experiences as and when they happen.' you say, "I like this crisp definition of what it is to be conscious."

Two questions arise from the definition however:

a) What does "understanding" entail? For something to understand is for it to possess a particular type of informed construct about experience - a construct that is flexible and relevant to continual experiential change. This is where differing levels of 'information constructs' come into the equation.

b) How does something know whether experience is "qualitatively relevant"?

The ability of neural mechanisms to assimilate, evaluate and prioritise qualitative relevancy is linked to the organism's innately acquired physiologies: bio-chemical and bio-physical mechanisms that are qualitatively relevant - that accurately reflect environment characteristics - tend to enhance survival potential. Thus complex physiologies tend to evolve that are increasingly responsive to the good and bad impact of environmental conditions. As part of that physiological complex, neurological mechanisms evolve that are, in turn, responsive to qualitative relevance but on a realtime, rather than innate generational basis.


2. You say, "It perhaps extends less fully to infants and toddlers and to young animals, but it makes the essential tie between consciousness and its situation in the world. "

Organisms that possess only innately acquired behavioural responses, do not possess a continually changing understanding of the relevancy of the phenomenon of experience. Experience has no varying and personalised qualitative feeling but just happens, causing an innate response.

however, I have estimated that land creatures with over 100,000 neurones and more than 10,000,000 synapses (such as the fruit fly) have the capability to assimilate, evaluate, and prioritise experience and therefore do more than display merely innately acquired inherited behaviour. For such creatures, including humans, their "phenomenal experience" cannot be subjected to introspective analysis - whilst as humans, we 'feel' qualitative relevancy, we cannot introspect it in order to understand why it feels as it does. Consequently, we refer to phenomenal experience as "subjective" or ineffable.
 
Soupie:

You say, "The phrase "subject of experience" can be equated to "self,"..." and "I think an organism can generate/have experience, but lack awareness that "they" are an entity generating/having experiences."

The identification of 'self' i.e. the realisation that one is a cogent being with a body that experiences feeling, is a conceptual realisation of the phenomenon and characteristics of qualitative conscious experience. This 'awareness' of the conscious experience - and the consequential identification of self-identity - is an entirely different type of informed representational construct about experience. Whilst a non-human animal does have a 'self' it has no conceptual realisation to that effect i.e. it does not know it.
 
Very helpful posts, Pharoah. I am glad you are continuing to contribute here since you have thought through the issues raised in philosophical and scientific consciousness studies much more deeply and broadly than those of us still posting here. And you write very clearly about them. I especially appreciate the insight expressed in this sentence and the text that preceded it:

"As part of that physiological complex, neurological mechanisms evolve that are, in turn, responsive to qualitative relevance but on a realtime, rather than innate generational basis."

It seems to me that the analysis of sensorimotor contingencies by O'Regan and Noe is an exemplary illustration of that. Do you agree?

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/surprisesurprise.pdf


Also, have you read Rosenberg's book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World, and do you recommend it?
 
Re: The Subject of Experience

The phrase "subject of experience" can be equated to "self," I believe. If I'm wrong, someone please correct me. That is, the subject of experience isn't meant to mean the physical organism, but rather a mental construct.

That is, the phrase implies there is a mental self "having" mental experiences.

This is a deep issue for me, and one that I haven't entirely worked out for myself. The issue of "self" seems to be central to consciousness and even pan(proto)psychism.

As I've said, I think an organism can generate/have experience, but lack awareness that "they" are an entity generating/having experiences.

Do organisms capable of generating/having phenomenal experiences — but lacking self-awareness — perceive being a subject of experience? I think the answer is "no."

The question was raised above "if (proto) consciousness is pervasive throughout the universe, why are our experiences ours." That was a paraphrase, but the question - I've seen it elsewhere - is essentially, if consciousness is fundamental, how/why is there a boundary between our consciousness and the consciousness of others?

1) I don't think there is a hard boundary, in the same way that there is no hard boundary between any physical objects. However, in our "lived" experience, there are boundaries between physical objects, and thus it's the same for phenomenal objects, such as experiences. That is, we perceive their being a hard inter- and intra-boundary between "our" experiences and the experiences of others, but this boundary may not be "hard" on the micro level. I don't think it is.

2) But why do we perceive there to be a hard boundary? I think this is related to a) memories, b) the unique — but temporal — structure of one's brain, and c) the ability for some entities to generate/have self-aware consciousness.

@Constance you haven't answered my previous questions and I hope you are able to at some point, but another relates to the subconscious; I believe the subconscious of humans gives us insight into the above questions. (And terms will get confusing here.) We call it "subconscious" not because it's non-conscious but because it's sub-self-awareness.

I have more to say on this, but I've got to run.

I'm getting clearer now about your point of view. Sorry about not yet responding to your post of last night; I'd made a mental note to go back to it then, but like many of my mental notes it disappeared in the wind. I'll go back to that post after I catch up on the discussion today.
 
@Constance said:
It seems to me that it makes more sense to consider consciousness as we experience it as having evolved through quantum entanglement from microphysical structures of interaction (subject-object interactions at a primitive level) that appear to be present in the quantum substrate from which we currently think the physical universe we inhabit has evolved to its present complexity. A deep sense of these processes and evolving primordial structures might lie almost inchoate in the collective unconscious and the subconscious mind {'subconscious mind' is a subject that we need to develop in our time, beginning with F.W.H. Myers's insights at the end of the 19th century, which are carried forward in Kelly and Kelly et al's major book Irreducible Mind)}. I disagree with Chalmers's recently expressed view that consciousness and mind are 'constituted' by, explained by, microphysical processes or microphenomenal properties alone. I think rather that those processes and/or properties have enabled over immense tracts of time the emergence of life and the development of experiential consciousness and mind. ...

Can you talk a little more about the process of quantum entanglement and how it may be related to phenomenal consciousness? You've mentioned it several times, and I've never encountered it before. (Not that I'm very well read in philosophy of mind.)

Quantum entanglement and nonlocality are by now well established concepts in physics, taken to describe reality at the microphysical level. As the quantum substrate is also understood to generate the macrophysical level of being and experience on which we have arrived, understanding what is instantiated at the quantum level and how it evolves into the classical reality we inhabit is a, perhaps the, major problem confronting physics. Wolfgang Zurek wrote and rewrote versions of a major paper in physics over a decade or two in which he identified the gap [which he characterized as constituting a 'boundary'] between quantum and classical physics as the major problem for physics. This has also become a major problem to be explored in consciousness studies during its relatively short (25-year) history -- how do consciousness and mind arise in a physical universe? Both science and philosophy are necessary to approach this problem, though most scientists (esp those who do not read philosophy of mind and philosophy of science) do not recognize the need for philosophy's insights. As a result, experimentation in quantum mechanics (under the influence of theories presented by the 'shut up and calculate' school in q physics) has long ignored the ontological significance of what they are investigating, considering what they learn to have only epistemological meaning. But some physicists have disagreed (quantum physicists and theorists such as Penrose, Stapp, Tiller, and others), and neuroscientists, under the influence of phenomenologists in the interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies, have begun to broaden their inquiry into nature to confront consciousness and mind. In short, quantum entanglement and nonlocality appear to be involved in everything we can say about nature, and thus in what we can say about consciousness and mind evolved in nature. That may not be well said, but it's the general picture I've received over the last five years or so and it may be helpful.

Also, why might quantum entanglement relate to macro-level phen. consciousness, but the potential of the micro-phenomenal and micro-physical relation to it seem dubious?

I have not said and don't believe what you've summarized there. Given the recognition that quantum entanglement is universal, it is involved in all phenomena. My disagreement was with Chalmers's current {seems to be current}
viewpoint that the microphysical level of reality itself accounts for everything in mind and world, which I think is reductive given the evolution of the physical universe and of life. consciousness, and mind. It would be good to explore the interactions of Russell and Whitehead on this core issue. I wonder if Chalmers has written about it. Does anybody here know?

It seems to me that though we experience on the macro level, there are surely micro processes behind this — whether micro physical and/or phenomenal.

I agree. But I would at this point delete the 'or' and say "microphysical and phenomenal." If quantum interactions exist and produce entangled information, generating entangled systems of increasing complexity in nature, they must do so on the basis of some primordial exchange of information, which would have to be considered 'phenomenal' -- involving some primitive form of 'subjective-objective' interaction.* We generalize about this but do not yet have [edit:] scientific insight to consult (so far as I have read) on the basis of which to define the particulars of this informational interaction and subsequent evolution of entangled 'information'. I would expect Tononi to attempt some progress in this regard but I have not located it in his online papers. I've asked you before if you have a citation or citations to such an attempt by Tononi.

Also, while Chalmers does discuss "information" and it's potential role in consciousness, Russelian Panprotopsychism doesn't seem to deal with pure info exactly.

What does it deal with exactly? Russell might use that term if he were writing today about the microphysical construction of reality. Chalmers certainly needs to do so. Perhaps he has. Does anybody here know? Also, what is 'pure information'?

I'd like to write much more on the questions you and @smcder have asked in these last posts — especially about info and the Hard Problem — but I'm away from a PC for several days.

I liked your comment recently that what we're discussing now constitutes a 'harder' problem than the problem of qualia. I agree.

*Several international conferences pursuing what is called 'endophysics' might prove helpful here. In Part I of this thread I linked to the abstracts of papers presented in the third of these conferences, and I think the papers themselves might now be available as a collection at the Scribd site. Unfortunately, I have to warn against seeking them out at Scribd since my computer was infected with malware after I downloaded several philosophy papers from that site. A number of the papers from that endophysics conference are, however, accessible singly from other online sources.
 
Last edited:
Very helpful posts, Pharoah. I am glad you are continuing to contribute here since you have thought through the issues raised in philosophical and scientific consciousness studies much more deeply and broadly than those of us still posting here. And you write very clearly about them. I especially appreciate the insight expressed in this sentence and the text that preceded it:

"As part of that physiological complex, neurological mechanisms evolve that are, in turn, responsive to qualitative relevance but on a realtime, rather than innate generational basis."

It seems to me that the analysis of sensorimotor contingencies by O'Regan and Noe is an exemplary illustration of that. Do you agree?

http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/surprisesurprise.pdf


Also, have you read Rosenberg's book A Place for Consciousness: Probing the Deep Structure of the Natural World, and do you recommend it?


1. You asked previously if I have written about collective unconscious or subconscious. No. The extent of my work can mostly be found in this pdf download: http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/On-the-Intentionality-of-life-consciousness-personal-identity.pdf

2. I skimmed the O'Regan and Noe paper. Whilst I found the idea of sensorimotor contingencies interesting and of value, I regard their overarching conclusions too bold e.g. saying that qualia is an illusion or that the explanatory gap does not exist.
I disagree with sentiments like,
"We have proposed that experience is a temporally extended activity of exploration mediated by the perceiver’s knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. The differences in the qualitative character of perceptual experiences correspond to differences in the character of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies."

3. I have not read Rosenberg's book, but I read a review from the Amazon site that starts, "Rosenberg spends the first part of his book arguing against the various flavors of reductive materialism and functionalism, and for a more or less Whiteheadian form of panpsychism."
I can't say that this sells the book to me, however, some other concepts I found intriguing, particularly given my paper on noumenal consciousness and the idea of the state vector solution. So, I will probably get a copy and do my best to find flaws :)
 
Process philosophy has been cropping up in contemporary theory including dissipative systems theory, embodied cognition, and quantum theory. Here are some extracts from the SEP articles on Whitehead and more recent applications of process philosophy.

SEP article on Whitehead

Extract:
. . . Later, Whitehead introduces a new metaphysically primitive notion which he calls an actual occasion. For Whitehead, an actual occasion (or actual entity) is not an enduring substance, but a process of becoming. As Whitehead puts it, actual occasions are the “final real things of which the world is made up”, they are “drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (1929c, Pt 1, Ch. 2, sec. 1, p. 27).

As Donald Sherburne explains, “It is customary to compare an actual occasion with a Leibnizian monad, with the caveat that whereas a monad is windowless, an actual occasion is ‘all window.’ It is as though one were to take Aristotle's system of categories and ask what would result if the category of substance were displaced from its preeminence by the category of relation …” (Sherburne 1995, 852). As Whitehead himself tells us, his “philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant's philosophy … For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world” (quoted in Sherburne 1995, 852).

Significantly, many of these key aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics run counter to the traditional view of material substance: “There persists,” says Whitehead, a fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being. It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. (1925, 22)

According to Whitehead, recognition that the world is organic rather than materialistic is essential for anyone wanting to develop a comprehensive account of nature, and this change in viewpoint can result as easily from attempts to understand human psychology and teleology as from attempts to understand modern physics. Says Whitehead, “Mathematical physics presumes in the first place an electromagnetic field of activity pervading space and time. The laws which condition this field are nothing else than the conditions observed by the general activity of the flux of the world, as it individualises itself in the events” (1925, 190). The result is that nature is no longer thought to be simply atoms in the void, but instead “a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process” (1925, 90)."

Alfred North Whitehead (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
 
SEP article on Process Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/#pagetopright

Extracts:

“Process philosophy is based on the premise that being is dynamic and that the dynamic nature of being should be the primary focus of any comprehensive philosophical account of reality and our place within it. Even though we experience our world and ourselves as continuously changing, Western metaphysics has long been obsessed with describing reality as an assembly of static individuals whose dynamic features are either taken to be mere appearances or ontologically secondary and derivative. For process philosophers the adventure of philosophy begins with a set of problems that traditional metaphysics marginalizes or even sidesteps altogether: what is the role of mind in our experience of reality as becoming? Are there several varieties of becoming — for instance, the uniform going on of activities versus the coming about of developments? Do all developments have the same way of occurring quite independently of what is coming about? How can we best classify into different kinds of occurrences what is going on and coming about? How can we understand the emergence of apparently novel conditions?

While process philosophers insist that all within and about reality is continuously going on and coming about, they do not deny that there are temporally stable and reliably recurrent aspects of reality. But they take such aspects of persistence to be the regular behavior of dynamic organizations that arise due to the continuously ongoing interaction of processes. In order to articulate a process view of reality, a special theoretical effort is required, however, since the standard theoretical tools of Western metaphysics are geared to the static view of reality. Especially the standard interpretation of predicate logic in terms of static individuals with properties that are exemplified timelessly or at a temporal instant consolidates what is from the process-philosophical perspective an unhelpful theoretical bias. This has forced upon process philosophy a double role as metaphysical and metaphilosophical enterprise, taking up the double task of developing new explanatory concepts and providing arguments for why these concepts better serve the aims of philosophy.

Process philosophy has full systematic scope: its concern is with the dynamic sense of being as becoming or occurrence, the conditions of spatio-temporal existence, the kinds of dynamic entities, the relationship between mind and world, and the realization of values in action.
. . .

Despite all differences in constructive detail, Whiteheadian and non-Whiteheadian process philosophy both recommend themselves as gateways to renovating philosophical discourse. Here are just a few of the topics where processists promise philosophical advance. (i) Beginning with a familiar Whiteheadian move, the rejection of the traditional “bifurcation of nature” into a physical and a mental domain, the process approach operates like a gestalt switch, opening up new ways of looking at a wide variety of issues. Whiteheadians argue that the traditional mind-body problem dissolves if all basic constituents of reality are short-lived processes of information transfer that exhibit both ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ aspects in different accentuations according to context. (ii) Similarly, as non-Whiteheadian analytical processists have pointed out, process metaphysics reconfigures the traditional problem of universals since it abandons the substance-metaphysical principle that concrete entities are fully determinate while general or indeterminate entities are abstract (i.e., they must not be, undergo, or initiate changes). (iii) Processists also have offered novel approaches to the problem of persistence, either by taking persistent entities to be “enduring” patterns of processes (Whitehead), or by questioning that “perdurance” vs. “endurance” accounts of persistence form a theoretically necessary exclusive dichotomy. (iv) The dichotomy of ‘fact’ and ‘norm,’ some processists argue, is another traditional “bifurcation” that can be bridged. Some natural processes realize a certain form of low-degree normativity. In some process organizations (e.g., far-from-equilibrium systems) each component process presupposes every other for its own occurrence; in the context of these particular process organizations the dependence amongst the single processes is not merely a matter of linear causation but constrained by the simultaneous interactions of the entire system, ensuring that each process is ‘functional for’ the occurrence of the system (Bickhard 2004). (v) Finally, the process approach also makes a difference in the realm of philosophy of religion. While the opposition between “immanence” and “transcendence” traditionally is taken to amount to an exclusive alternative, whether in application to universals or to God, the tools of process metaphysics allow us to pursue a third option that exploits the explanatory grammar of the ‘mode.’ We often consider the mode or way in which a process, or collection of processes, occurs as a separate kind of process (compare, e.g., scratching a violin string with a bow vs. playing a tone on the violin, or free market economy vs. planned economy). Processes that are modifications of other processes are both immanent in the sense that they affect (by constraining and enabling) how the modified processes occur, but are transcendent in the sense that they are multiply realizable, that is, they are not themselves dependent on the particular spatio-temporal occurrences of the processes that realize them.[6]

In addition, there is a host of other contemporary issues where forefronting processes generates novel answers and accounts that advance our understanding of the familiar questions of philosophy in important ways, even without challenging some central, defining, dichotomy. One might point here, for example, at the ‘process account of causation’ (Salmon 1984, 1997), at investigations of belief revision and non-monotonic reasoning in epistemic logic. The most important case in point, however, is surely N. Rescher's multifaceted analysis of knowledge, which in combination with a more recently developed process-metaphysical frame, clarify and strengthen the link between a pragmatist and a processist stance. Offering detailed reconstructions of the procedures of knowledge production, Rescher argues that rational inquiry, including science, is the process of creating coherent theories that systematize that which we have established as data with increasing complexity (Rescher 1982). That this method of inquiry can yield (temporary) truths is justified by its practical success, but the method is essentially (a) interminable and (b) progressive, since: (a1) each knowledge claim contains presuppositions that raise new questions; (a2) reality is “cognitively inexhaustible”; and (b) since the increasing complexification of scientific knowledge can count as cognitive progress, even though such progress may not be discernible as cumulative or linear advance (Rescher 1977, 1978, 1984). For claims (a2) and (b) Rescher supplies process-metaphysical underpinnings, endorsing a view of nature as continuously evolving and a view of evolution as directed towards increasing complexity (Rescher 1996, 2006 ch. 10, and 2012; see also below section 5).

Harking back to (Claim 2) and (Claim 3) above, extant process-geared treatments of familiar topics surely provide considerable support for the claim that process philosophy is viable (Claim 2). But in the eyes of many processists (Claim 3) matters most—as the next section will sketch, currently it may be process philosophy's primary asset that it enables us to articulate and address important new questions raised by modern science."
 
LOWE : THERE ARE NO EASY PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

EXTRACT
“Chalmers . . . occupies an unstable position, precisely because he has already conceded so much to reductive physicalism. Effectively, he subscribes to a position which we might call ‘functionalism plus qualia’. According to this view, everything about human mentation except for the fact of ‘qualia’ can be explained in reductive (computational or neural) terms. But how, then, can ‘qualia’ be anything but epiphenomenal — and in that case, why should they exist at all? The position is unstable because there is intense pressure on it either to give qualia some more substantive causal role — and this would be to challenge the reductive physicalist account of the rest of human mentation — or else to squeeze qualia out altogether, as Dennett and others have tried to do. The awkwardness of Chalmers’ position is, I think, clearly brought out by his allegiance to what he calls the ‘principle of organizational invariance’ (p. 214). According to this principle, ‘any two systems with the same fine-grained functional organization will have qualitatively identical experiences’ (ibid.). As he himself points out, this means that the ‘philosophical hypotheses of “absent qualia” and “inverted qualia”, while logically possible, are empirically and nomologically impossible’ (p. 215). But this is, in effect, finally to concede the whole game to functionalism. For once one has adopted what I just now called the position of ‘functionalism plus qualia’, the only reason for holding on to a special, physicalistically irreducible notion of phenomenal consciousness is that possibilities like those of absent and inverted qualia escape any attempt at functionalist explanation. But now that these ‘possibilities’ are denied to be anything more than merely logical possibilities, there is nothing substantive left which functionalism is allegedly incapable of explaining about human mentation. One can perfectly well see why Chalmers is attracted to his ‘principle of organizational invariance’, given how much ground he has already conceded to functionalism and given the correspondingly nugatory role he accords to phenomenal consciousness in an account of the nature of human cognition. What he doesn’t seem to appreciate is that, having conceded this much, to adopt this principle as well is effectively to sell out completely to functionalism.”

http://anti-matters.org/articles/46/public/46-41-1-PB.pdf
 
1. You asked previously if I have written about collective unconscious or subconscious. No. The extent of my work can mostly be found in this pdf download: http://mind-phronesis.co.uk/On-the-Intentionality-of-life-consciousness-personal-identity.pdf

Thank you for the link to this impressive work. I've linked it on my desktop and will be reading it over the next several days. I'll perhaps have questions as I read.

2. I skimmed the O'Regan and Noe paper. Whilst I found the idea of sensorimotor contingencies interesting and of value, I regard their overarching conclusions too bold e.g. saying that qualia is an illusion or that the explanatory gap does not exist.
I disagree with sentiments like,
"We have proposed that experience is a temporally extended activity of exploration mediated by the perceiver’s knowledge of sensorimotor contingencies. The differences in the qualitative character of perceptual experiences correspond to differences in the character of the relevant sensorimotor contingencies."

I agree with your statement in blue above. This paper was stronger (and much longer) when it first appeared in a consciousness studies journal about ten years ago, which followed it with critical responses to the paper from about thirty neuroscientists and philosophers. The revised version, accommodating the critiques of many of the critics, diluted it in my opinion. The authors might be at work on following it with a less inhibited paper or book based on additional research and argument. I hope they do.

3. I have not read Rosenberg's book, but I read a review from the Amazon site that starts, "Rosenberg spends the first part of his book arguing against the various flavors of reductive materialism and functionalism, and for a more or less Whiteheadian form of panpsychism."
I can't say that this sells the book to me, however, some other concepts I found intriguing, particularly given my paper on noumenal consciousness and the idea of the state vector solution. So, I will probably get a copy and do my best to find flaws :)

I'm going to order a copy too. Maybe we'll get to discuss it here. I look forward to your critique of it.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top