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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

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Haha you already know what I think the answer is, but I was curious if you (or anyone else) had an answer that I might prefer. :D

To find that out your going to have to swim outside your comfort zone - several other options have been presented here and there's volumes of literature available, but you have to look at them from within, not from your same point of view ... You're going to have to make these "living options " as James would say.
 
"So do you suppose bowling balls have all/any of the experiences listed above? Why or why not?"

I don't think so, because they don't seem to have brains.
So consciousness is external to brains, but brains "channel" consciousness into minds?

That seems to be where your logic leads. And this logic is perfectly compatible with Constitutive Russelian Panprotopsychism.

Re: swimming outside my comfort zone. I certainly would if I felt a need. The section of pool I'm swimming in currently is plenty interesting (explanatory) enough. Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm.
 
So consciousness is external to brains, but brains "channel" consciousness into minds?

That seems to be where your logic leads. And this logic is perfectly compatible with Constitutive Russelian Panprotopsychism.

Re: swimming outside my comfort zone. I certainly would if I felt a need. The section of pool I'm swimming in currently is plenty interesting (explanatory) enough. Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm.

[/QUOTE]

Your a hard case, McGee!

There's always a need to check our thinking from the outside. Why, sometimes I spend whole miserable days as a grumpy materialist or determinist or logical positivist (my religious upbringing was as at the Church of Russell). ;-)

The problem with CRPp is the combination problem - I.e. the hard problem by any other name. And what does CRPp say about the paranormal phenomena described above? I've not specifically looked for that.

"Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm."

I certainly hope so! Meditate ... Be open. But always come back to the breath.

I was going to suggest we clear the table and read one of Constance's suggestions on phenomenology. But you'll have to swim over here to do that!
 
So consciousness is external to brains, but brains "channel" consciousness into minds?

That seems to be where your logic leads. And this logic is perfectly compatible with Constitutive Russelian Panprotopsychism.

Re: swimming outside my comfort zone. I certainly would if I felt a need. The section of pool I'm swimming in currently is plenty interesting (explanatory) enough. Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm.

There you go with your corners again ... It's not compatible IF consciousness isn't a material thing then "external" and other temporal and spatial metaphors don't apply.

With CRPp, what's the basis for ethics? What are moral truths grounded in? What special status could be given to suffering or pleasure other than states of matter or stuff (ultimately)? Given determinism such states simply occur - why pay any attention to them beyond what unavoidable physiological reactions?
 
Soupie, previously to Steve:

Are you purposefully making a distinction between consciousness and minds? Either way, can you expand on that a little? Consciousness is the same, but different "minds" adapt it differently? How so? By what mechanism do they "adapt" it? If it's adapted differently, how do we know it's the same? Why assume it's the same in the first place?

Not the same, I would guess, but coming from the same well and the same ground. The well is in the ground, enabling lived experience within the physical base of the existence of life. "The fish is in the water and the water is in the fish," in one of Merleau-Ponty's metaphors. (The 'well' metaphor I'm offering works well in the context of what we understand, far from perfectly, as the collective unconscious, deeper water beneath the subconscious mind.) Heidegger uses the metaphor of the Lichtung (referring to the clearings made in forests to admit light to support further growth and health of the forest) to represent the ecstatic nature of consciousness {ek-stase}, [edited:] a standing out from what-is that enables the feeling {the sense} and then the understanding of what-is. It is experience in the world, from a multitude of perspectives, through which the world worlds in innumerable ways and becomes thinkable for us and perhaps in varying ways for other animals.

Finally, you think consciousness may be "the same" for dolphins, cities, cats, and humans? What about worms and bowling balls? Is it the same for them too? Why or why not?

I reject bowling balls (as Steve, I'm guessing, also does), but for the rest, yes. But again, consciousness in all these respects is not the same thing -- indeed not a thing at all -- but an enabling condition for the real-ization of world and being. {in which, in Heidegger again, 'world' emerges from 'earth'}. The worlding of 'world' takes place in innumerable ways from the perspectives of innumerable beings existing in it. In my house, for example, there are two overlapping and interacting 'worlds', my own and that of my cat.
 
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To cite Mr. Homburg again,

"The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can."

Wallace Stevens
 
The whole poem again:

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly


Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.


POEM: LOOKING ACROSS THE FIELDS AND WATCHING THE BIRDS FLY BY WALLACE STEVENS
 
So what about worms and bowling balls? Are they not sentient? If not, why not? Why are some objects sentient and some not?

So now we have consciousness, minds, and sentient minds? How do we determine which objects (Strawson processes) have which?

It seems to me that the highlighted term is your stumbling block, your presupposition.

Edited to add:

You also wrote: "Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm." It probably won't so long as you are wedded to the objectivist paradigm.
 
Haha, yes.

I didn't mean to throw us of by adding the Strawson piece, but I think it's important. What we see as objects may actually be processes. So the distinction between objects and processes may not be firm.


'Processes' seems suitably mechanistic, and reductive, for your purposes.

Ok, so why are some "objects" or things capable of suffering and some not?

'Why' is a still harder question; why not begin by acknowledging the evidence that various kinds of beings are capable of suffering (and, further along on the spectrum of experience, of a multitude of other feelings and emotions and reflections and thoughts, including a passionate desire for understanding the world and the self)? You seem to want someone to prove to you that there is an objective, material, mechanical basis for consciousness (at any point along a lengthy evolutionary spectrum) before you will explore your own consciousness and philosophies of consciousness, phenomenology in particular.

Aren't you becoming curious about what Steve and I are presenting here?
 
The whole poem again:

Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly


Among the more irritating minor ideas
Of Mr. Homburg during his visits home
To Concord, at the edge of things, was this:

To think away the grass, the trees, the clouds,
Not to transform them into other things,
Is only what the sun does every day,

Until we say to ourselves that there may be
A pensive nature, a mechanical
And slightly detestable operandum, free

From man's ghost, larger and yet a little like,
Without his literature and without his gods . . .
No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air,

In an element that does not do for us,
so well, that which we do for ourselves, too big,
A thing not planned for imagery or belief,

Not one of the masculine myths we used to make,
A transparency through which the swallow weaves,
Without any form or any sense of form,

What we know in what we see, what we feel in what
We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation,
In the tumult of integrations out of the sky,

And what we think, a breathing like the wind,
A moving part of a motion, a discovery
Part of a discovery, a change part of a change,

A sharing of color and being part of it.
The afternoon is visibly a source,
Too wide, too irised, to be more than calm,

Too much like thinking to be less than thought,
Obscurest parent, obscurest patriarch,
A daily majesty of meditation,

That comes and goes in silences of its own.
We think, then as the sun shines or does not.
We think as wind skitters on a pond in a field

Or we put mantles on our words because
The same wind, rising and rising, makes a sound
Like the last muting of winter as it ends.

A new scholar replacing an older one reflects
A moment on this fantasia. He seeks
For a human that can be accounted for.

The spirit comes from the body of the world,
Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world
Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind,

The mannerism of nature caught in a glass
And there become a spirit's mannerism,
A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can.


POEM: LOOKING ACROSS THE FIELDS AND WATCHING THE BIRDS FLY BY WALLACE STEVENS


"Is only what the sun does every day" I love that line (and the preceding ones) ... It puzzles me too.

This seems a good short biography of Stephens:

Hog River Journal

Interesting person, I liked the story about his co worker Polley and how they left him to his eccentricities at work.

Favorite quote:

"During rare interviews he vacillated between the terse and the obtuse. When asked once why his writing seemed obscure to so many readers, he remarked simply, "The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." "
 
"Is only what the sun does every day" I love that line (and the preceding ones) ... It puzzles me too.

This seems a good short biography of Stephens:

Hog River Journal

Interesting person, I liked the story about his co worker Polley and how they left him to his eccentricities at work.

Favorite quote:

"During rare interviews he vacillated between the terse and the obtuse. When asked once why his writing seemed obscure to so many readers, he remarked simply, "The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." "

Steve, thanks for posting this bio-essay on Stevens. I hadn't run across it before and enjoyed it. I'm glad you're enjoying Stevens's poetry.
 
So consciousness is external to brains, but brains "channel" consciousness into minds?

That seems to be where your logic leads. And this logic is perfectly compatible with Constitutive Russelian Panprotopsychism.

Re: swimming outside my comfort zone. I certainly would if I felt a need. The section of pool I'm swimming in currently is plenty interesting (explanatory) enough. Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm.

"Perhaps someday reality will smack me with an experience that appears to transcend the physical/informational paradigm."

This occurred to me in the middle of the night:

You theory, any theory of consciousness, still needs to account for the thousands and thousands of people who have reported these experiences, whether or not you personally have.

You either have to say they are illusory, in which case you have to deal with veridical accounts and witnesses, etc. or the theory has to account for them in some other way, I don't see where CRPp does this - but it might?

Over the weekend, someone was telling me about how when he was younger, he would black out in anger and come to choking the person or hitting them with no memory of what happened ... I've never had that experience, but he's not the only person who's told me that and I've read or heard of many other such cases and I believe him 100%. So too, I think we have to consider the reported experiences of people who have had these kinds of experiences - they are reported throughout history and agree in detail.
 
Steve, thanks for posting this bio-essay on Stevens. I hadn't run across it before and enjoyed it. I'm glad you're enjoying Stevens's poetry.

I want to get where reading is an actual pleasure again - I've been thinking back to when I experienced this last ... and I'm not sure. I've shared before that reading has seemed to become difficult in the past few years, and I remember reading voraciously as a child and into college ... so maybe I need to actually focus on taking pleasure in it.
 
Phenomenological reflections on language and meaning . . .

Merleau-Ponty; Reckoning with the Possibility of An Other
Nicholas Alexander Smith

“When I speak or understand, I experience that presence of others in myself or of myself in others which is the stumbling-block of the theory of intersubjectivity, I experience the presence of what is represented which is the stumbling-block of the theory of time, and I finally understand what is meant by Husserl’s enigmatic statement, ‘transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity.” (94).

If we are attentive to the above quotation, provided that we are possessed of the particular acquisitions which might enable us to be so attentive, we notice that it is, indeed, saying something. Can we use the words in the above quotation as so many orientational devices? In order to demonstrate some understanding of the above quote, as much for myself, as to possible others whose gaze might also come across the present engagement, it seems necessary to be able to organize a discourse around it and hence point to a certain style of ‘thinking’ which has been acquired. We are dealing with a kind of expressive intention, which, while contained, or present, within the quote above necessarily outstrips it and goes beyond the words of the quote as such. As such, the current offering will attempt to point to the theory of corporeality that underlies this, otherwise enigmatic, declaration. If the current offering is successful it will manage to express something, perhaps, taking possession of what it is able to say. By being attentive to the thoughts expressed in the above quotation we are reckoning with the expression of another, which may be the result of a similar kind of reckoning. This line of thought seems to point to a further question, which may merit some attention.

Disembodied, and treated as an object for scientific investigation, language is emptied of its sense and seemingly appears as arbitrary and non-sensical. Language is meaningful only as it is lived by speaking subjects. The, otherwise, seemingly accidental historical procession of language, appears as a unity only through its usage by a speaking subject as it relates to a community of speakers. Language, therefore, as a system of differences, or disparate elements, becomes unified by a silent intention to express. Language, as a kind of enabling, is the primary mode of intending to mean anything at all. If we are attentive to the opening fragment of the statement, “when I speak, or understand,” it seems almost as if speaking and understanding are used interchangeably as if they are signifying a single phenomenon. Rather, it is the case that speaking and understanding, complete each other in the act of speech, which is made possible through the body as my corporeal unity. As embodied, our relation to the world around us takes place within a kind of phenomenal field, which has been silently given over to the habitual modes of coping with things in the ‘world’ where we find ourselves already disposed. It is not the case that, when I conduct myself in the ‘world,’ I am expressly thematizing my manner of coping with the objects therein; rather, in silence my coping takes place in a kind of pre-reflective awareness. It is, therefore, the case that the body acts as a kind of mediation of my relations to objects in the ‘world.’ Similarly, with language, the speaking subject does not pick and choose the words, within which he will attempt to contain a pre-established thought; rather, words are offered to the silent intention which makes use of them in an act of speaking.

“Signification arouses speech as the world arouses my body- by a mute presence which awakens my intentions without deploying itself before them” (86).
Informed by a certain ‘style’ of speaking, language allows for expression by affording itself to my silent intention. It is the case, therefore, that language comes to mediate between my urge, or desire, to express, and the words which offer themselves. It is this movement, from a silent intention to wordy embodiment, which allows Merleau-Ponty to declare that: “my spoken words surprise me and teach me my thought” (85).

Speech, therefore, is a gesture, an indication, or a pointing toward, a certain intended signification. Speech, if it is understood, brings a certain something before us, but what is the status of that something? Firstly, given that language is equivocal, the signified necessarily goes beyond any attempt to signify it. As such, language never affords total expression, but rather, is merely the linguistic embodiment of an attempt to signify. It is therefore, the case that these significations have the status of “Ideas,” which target, or aim at total expression but are constantly outstripped by the “things themselves” which they signify. The signified is never present before the act of expression; rather, it is this act of expression which realizes it as an intention. It is, furthermore, appropriate to say that we have, or possess, a language as the sum total of available significations.[1] The significative intention, therefore, must draw from available meanings but is also limited by the ‘world’ as the limit of possible meanings. The speaking subject, therefore, through the power of expression, is able to draw from available meaning and in turn, through them, constitute a new meaning. Understanding the meaning, therefore, is a process of taking up the signification of others, or having them “dwell within me,” such that a new ‘style’ of thought has been awakened. What has, thereby, been ‘acquired’ will remain available, without the need to reactivate the original process of constitution. A new ‘sedimentation’ has been constituted, which does not erase, or eliminate, the ‘sedimentations’ previously available. Rather the new ‘acquisition’ is incorporated into the cultural tradition that is language and is added as a new possibility for an expressive intention. The speech of others comes to “dwell” within me in a movement of transcendence, beyond the merely available meanings of the language, and is understood the moment I am able to take it within myself and express it anew. It seems to be the case, therefore, that what is available to me is not solely my ‘own,’ but ‘ours’ in the sense that what is available to me is available to everyone and only becomes mine specifically when, through my mute intention, I take it up into myself and express it anew. The ‘tradition,’ or language, is that which gives us the means of realizing our significative, or mute, intentions, however, at the same time it is constituted as the result of our expressivity.

We have, hitherto, examined how it is that, “when I speak or understand, I experience that presence of others in myself or of myself in others.” At this point we must point to the ‘representation,’ which seems to inform the ‘theory of time.’ The movement toward expression, we have taken up in our examination, is necessarily a temporal one. We have pointed to the intrinsic historicity of language, which brings into the present all present existing previously. Furthermore, we have demonstrated how it is that speech seems to teach me my thought. It, therefore, seems to be the case that the speaking subject comes to find itself through the temporal event of speech. That which is understood through the act of speaking, or listening, is gathered up into the speaking subject and projected forward in a further act of speaking. It is, therefore, the case that when I come to understand something, when something has been ‘acquired,’ I must incorporate my acquisition into a totality of meanings which were already available. The ‘field of understanding’ has thus been opened to a meaning beyond what was available in the previous moment and is, thereby, able to project what has been retained into a further moment. The temporality of this movement is precisely that which informs the theory of time.[2] Merleau-Ponty alludes to this theory of time when he states: “Our present keeps the promises of our past; we keep others’ promises” (92). The speaking subject is, therefore, a kind of temporal movement, taking place temporally, within which, every singular subjects brings with it the entirety of its past, as well as the past of others.

The body seems to be that which informs me that I am not merely a kind of transcendent consciousness. The “intentional transgression,” is that which informs me that my body is not a mere ‘thing’ in the Cartesian sense. The body forces us to reckon with a ‘pre-constituted’ ‘world,’ whose as suchness is forever beyond our grasp, although, we continuously attempt to speak it through the speech of the past. Every expression seems to shed new ‘light’ upon it, but only as it is ‘recollected’ through the moment, which we cannot grasp except as something which has already gone beyond us. The ‘intentional transgression’ seems to be enacted the moment I come across my body as already constituted in the ‘world.’ Through this, ‘intentional transgression,’ I come across the body of others whose ego I am not, whose understanding, although I know nothing of it in any sense I can call my own, is not my mode of being. The expressions of ‘others’ inform, or inhabit me, in the sense that I am given over to their expression, to the ‘ways’ they demarcate through their expressivity. We, therefore, speak the ‘world’ to each other in a communal way making our ‘thought’ available to the ‘thoughts’ of others, and having the ‘thoughts’ of others available to ourselves. We transcend, or transgress, beyond limits, which, if we reflect upon them, seem insurmountable. We bring our light, and the light of our past, forward through the temporal moment, which is but a flash in time.

Husserl’s ‘enigmatic’ statement seems to benefit from a certain clarity if we are attentive to what Merleau-Ponty has described. If we understand the declaration that “transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity,” then we have gone through the movement we have examined above. We have taken up the thought of Husserl, through the thought of Merleau-Ponty. If it is possible to say that Husserl remains present in Merleau-Ponty, it is, furthermore, possible to say that Husserl is present here in the moment of this text. However, at the same time, what perhaps remains unclear is what we mean to say when we invoke the names Husserl, or Merleau-Ponty. Do we have to reckon with the entirety of their thought in order to intend something through them? If these names are somehow present in the current offering what does this mean? Perhaps, this is what is meant by the declaration that “transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity?” I have these names, whose meanings will constantly be stretched, or perhaps altered, as my field of understanding is stretched by the power of expression. If I consider this text to be my own, do I not owe a debt to the names I invoke? In what sense are the names speaking through me as so many past intentions, awakening me to the possibility of my ‘own’ thought, or speech. In the present offering, if I seem to be taking possession of these thoughts in what way do these thoughts become mine? Or, perhaps further, in what sense am I responsible for them? Indeed, it would seem that these names carry themselves forward, through my present offering, in the moment of this text whose flux I cannot arrest. If I return to this offering a week, or perhaps, a year from the present moment will these words not seem as if they had been written by another? Or, even further, in what sense might it be the case that these thoughts written by an ‘Other?’

[1] Language is intrinsically historical, in the sense that any synchronic moment possesses all previous synchronic moments within it. Any particular present carries with it all presents occurring prior to it. The distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic, therefore, cannot be maintained in a language as it is lived. It is the case, therefore, that any particular signification becomes available as a kind of ‘sedimentation’ within the ‘tradition’ of a language.
[2] In its specificity this theory of time is Husserl’s, and is grounded upon the ‘Living Present,’ as my Living Present which ‘intertwines’ with the historical present of the ‘traditions’ which are available to me."

The Movements of Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty; Reckoning with the Possibility of An Other
 
@Pharoah, as I recall from reading some of your work you have cited books on consciousness by Michael Tye. When/if you return to this discussion thread, would you summarize the changes in his approach represented in his four books on consciousness, the most recent of which was published by the MIT press in 2011? I think this would help us refocus this thread. Thanks.

 
A review of an earlier book by Tye:

Michael Tye:
TEN PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS (MIT Press, 1995)

Copyright © 1999 Piero Scaruffi

With this book the American philosopher Michael Tye dramatically changed his materialistic theory of the mind, admitting that phenomenal aspects of mental life are representational and that they are not to be found in neural events.
First, Tye lists ten problems of phenomenal consciousness, such as ownership (feelings are private to an individual, i.e. "why can't anyebody else feel my feelings?") and perspectival subjectivity (feelings can be understood only by individuals who have felt them), and more traditional issues such as duplicates and inverted qualia.

Tye focuses on "what it is like", on our feelings. Tye attacks physicalism with the view that our feelings are not in the head at all. Neurophysiologists can never explain what it is like to smell or taste. Phenomenal consciousness is not in the neurons. Phenomenal consciousness is in the "representations". Tye separates "phenomenal" consciousness (sensations, perceptions, emotions, feelings) from "higher-order" consciousness. Tye begins with the usual paradox (originally proposed by Jackson) of a scientist who knows everything about a subject, but has not experienced that subject. Tye pictures a scientist who has lived her entire life in a black and white environment but studied all there is to know about colors. She has even seen colored objects on a black and white tv set. She just has not seen them in color. But she knows what color is and what properties it obeys and so forth. Then one day she steps outside her black and white environment and experiences the color of those objects. No matter how much she knew about colors, when she actually sees a red object, she will experience something that she had not experienced before, she will "learn" something that she did not know: the "what it is like" of seeing a color (what Tye calls the "phenomenal character" of seeing a color).

There is a difference between objective knowledge of something and subjective experience of something. The latter constitutes the phenomenal consciousness of something. Tye believes that phenomenal states cannot be possibly realized only by neural states. Tye believes that mental states are symbolic representations, but he differs from Fodor in that he does not believe that the representation for a sensation involves a sentence in the language of thought. The belief of something is represented by a symbol structure which is a sentence. The sensation of something is represented by a symbol structure which is not a sentence. The format (the symbolic structure) of a sensory representation is instead maplike: a pattern of activation occurring in a three-dimensional array of cells each containing a symbol and to which descriptive labels are attached. The patterns are analyzed by computational routines that are capable of extracting information and then attaching the appropriate descriptive labels. A sentence would not be enough to represent a sensation, as a sensation includes some kind of "mapping" of the domain it refers to. For example, pain is about the body, and needs a way to represent the body parts that are affected by pain. Sentences lack this maplike representational power. Tye's patterns of activation in those maplike structures are therefore representations of bodily changes that trigger some computational processing. And this is what an emotion is, according to Tye.

Tye's theory of sensations borrows heavily from his theory of mental imagery, where he also presupposes the existence of patterns of activation (in the visual buffer, the three dimensional array of cells), with attached labels, which are interpreted by computational processes. In this case each cell contains (local) information such as (local) orientation, shade of color, texture, and the labels provide information such as the shape or the category of the image. Tye believes that the body is equipped (as a product of evolution) with a set of specialized sensory modules for bodily sensations (for pain, hunger, and so forth) just like the specialized sensory modules for the five senses (and he is thinking of physically different neural regions). Each module is capable of some computation on some symbolic structure.

Additionally, Tye notes that the object of a feeling is non-conceptual: we have different feelings for different shades of red even if we don't have different concepts for those shades of red, we are capable of many more feelings than concepts. Tye concludes that "phenomenal states lie at the interface of the nonconceptual and conceptual domains", at the border between the sensory modules and the cognitive system.

Tye analyzes the phenomenal character ("what it is like") of an experience and its phenomenal content ("what is being experienced"). Tye shows that the phenomenal character of an experience is identical to its phenomenal content (the feeling of pain in a foot cannot be abstracted and remains the fact that it is pain in that foot). Therefore, Tye concludes that phenomenal aspects are a subset of the representational aspects, and not distinct from them.
Tye reiterates that phenomenal character is not neurophysiological, biochemical, or whatever. It is not in the head. But, notwithstanding his technical cogitation of "poised abstract non conceptual intentional contents", it is also not clear in the end where it is.

Because phenomenal character (the "what it is like" feeling) is phenomenal content, experiencing "what it is like" depends on having the approprieta system of concepts: one must have the appropriate system of concepts in order to understand what it is like to experience something. I cannot know what it feels like to be a bat because I don't have the appropriate concepts to feel what a bat feels. Appropriate concepts are predicative and indexical, which can be acquired only from direct experience (past or present).

Tye does not truly solve the "explanatory gap" between phenomenal states and physical states (how subjective feelings arises from neural states which are not subjective): Tye claims that there is no gap, there are two different modes of presentation: the gap is only conceptual. This explains why we cannot know "what it feels like" to be a bat, but does not explain why the bat feels whatever it feels, i.e. how feelings are created from brain states. It is almost as if Tye considered the discussion closed, a' la McGinn, with the idea that we don't have the concepts to understand consciousness, whether the bat's or ours, period.

The book's flaw is a limited knowledge of neurophysiology. FOr example, Tye's thought experiments with "zombie replicas" are pointless: a replica of me that has exactly the same cells that I have would, yes, have my same memory. Zombie replicas with a different memory are neurophysiological oxymorons, period."

Book review of Michael Tye
 
For those lacking a background in phenomenological philosophy, Shaun Gallagher's Phenomenology provides a clear and expert grounding in its history and explains its applications to the major issues and problems pursued in current Consciousness Studies.


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This new introduction by Shaun Gallagher gives students and philosophers not only an excellent concise overview of the state of the field and contemporary debates, but a novel way of addressing the subject by looking at the ways in which phenomenology is useful to the disciplines it applies to. Gallagher retrieves the central insights made by the classic phenomenological philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and others), updates some of these insights in innovative ways, and shows how they directly relate to ongoing debates in philosophy and psychology. Accounts of phenomenological methods, and the concepts of intentionality, temporality, embodiment, action, self, and our ability to understand other people are integrated into a coherent contemporary statement that shows why phenomenology is still an active and vital philosophical approach.

Each chapter begins with a discussion of the classic analyses and then goes on to show their relevance to contemporary debates in philosophy about embodied, enactive and extended approaches to our understanding of human experience. Along the way Gallagher introduces some novel interpretations that suggest how phenomenology can both inform and be informed by the terms of these debates.
 
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