smcder
Paranormal Adept
search terms "kaftans and these" brought up several interesting YouTube hits:
Exploring Non-Local Consciousness:
Non-Dual Conscious Realism:
Scientific Views and Meaning of Entanglement:
etc. etc.
-
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 8
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
- Start date
- Status
search terms "kaftans and these" brought up several interesting YouTube hits:
Exploring Non-Local Consciousness:
Non-Dual Conscious Realism:
Scientific Views and Meaning of Entanglement:
etc. etc.
This paper/chapter by Evan Thompson should be helpful to us at this point concerning the reflexivity of consciousness: "Memory and Reflexive Awareness," at
https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/self-no-self.pdf
AND ALSO THIS ONE: Aaron Henry and Evan Thompson: WITNESSING FROM HERE: SELF -AWARENESS FROM A BODILY VERSUS EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE
https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/witnessing-from-here.pdf
https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/self-no-self.pdf
AND ALSO THIS ONE: Aaron Henry and Evan Thompson: WITNESSING FROM HERE: SELF -AWARENESS FROM A BODILY VERSUS EMBODIED PERSPECTIVE
https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/witnessing-from-here.pdf
Last edited:
Thanks. I will listen to it.
Thanks Soupie. I wanted to provide that Kafatos link for @Usual Suspect since I've referred him to this paper several times now:
"Fundamental Awareness: A Framework for Integrating Science, Philosophy and Metaphysics"
Neil D. Theise, Menas C. Kafatos
http://www.menaskafatos.com/Theise Kafatos FINAL.pdf
"Fundamental Awareness: A Framework for Integrating Science, Philosophy and Metaphysics"
Neil D. Theise, Menas C. Kafatos
http://www.menaskafatos.com/Theise Kafatos FINAL.pdf
An extract from a paper I linked a few pages back, to build on with reference to Kefatos's comprehensive insights:
"Such terms as satori and kensho are consistent with Merleau-Ponty's concept of preobjective vision. In addition to these interpretations of kensho and satori, which in· corporate western ideology within a distinctly eastern orientation, this hybridized form of Zen shares with its eastern counterpart an interest in embodied perception that has made it particularly appealing to both installation artists and phenomenologists. Zen's emphasis on integrating the body with the mind and spirit is evident in the types of pursuits undertaken by initiates who often choose to learn this belief system indirectly as part of their training in archery, calligraphy, and flower arranging. In undertaking these activities, they seek an inner harmony between themselves and their acts, so that the limitations of the ego are surmounted and an indefinable "it" that superintends the archer, the bow, the arrow, and the target takes over when the bull's eye is hit time after time.' 8 Such transcendence of the self is akin to Merleau-Ponty's desire to move beyond personal subjectivity and find a pre-personal- and even anonymous-being. As he pointed out in his preface to Phenomenology of Perception, "The world is not what I think, but what I live through."'9
http://roberthobbs.net/essay_files/Merleau-Pontys_Phenomenology.pdf
"Such terms as satori and kensho are consistent with Merleau-Ponty's concept of preobjective vision. In addition to these interpretations of kensho and satori, which in· corporate western ideology within a distinctly eastern orientation, this hybridized form of Zen shares with its eastern counterpart an interest in embodied perception that has made it particularly appealing to both installation artists and phenomenologists. Zen's emphasis on integrating the body with the mind and spirit is evident in the types of pursuits undertaken by initiates who often choose to learn this belief system indirectly as part of their training in archery, calligraphy, and flower arranging. In undertaking these activities, they seek an inner harmony between themselves and their acts, so that the limitations of the ego are surmounted and an indefinable "it" that superintends the archer, the bow, the arrow, and the target takes over when the bull's eye is hit time after time.' 8 Such transcendence of the self is akin to Merleau-Ponty's desire to move beyond personal subjectivity and find a pre-personal- and even anonymous-being. As he pointed out in his preface to Phenomenology of Perception, "The world is not what I think, but what I live through."'9
http://roberthobbs.net/essay_files/Merleau-Pontys_Phenomenology.pdf
Several times before I've posted links to papers that I thought might effectively clarify and flesh out the nature of consciousness and being as expressed in MP's philosophy. This paper seems likely to do that for every reader. (Note the parallels between MP's thought and that of Kafatos.)
Douglas Low, MERLEAU-PONTY, ONTOLOGY, AND ETHICS
Extract: ". . . To reiterate, I’m in contact with the world but the world (as other) outruns me, and it is the ontological structure of the body, its two-dimensionality, the fact that it is both sensible and sentient, and the fact that the sensible and sentient cross into one another without becoming one, that allows this to occur. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty explicitly mentions that the human body’s dehiscence, its splitting open and subsequent two-dimensionality, “is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible. For already the cube assembles within itself incompossible visibilia, as my body is at once phenomenal body and objective body” (VI 136). Thus, even though Merleau-Ponty argues that we must recognize the role of the aware, perceiving subject in all experience, he is not just substituting an embodied subject (or an embodied subjectivism) for a disembodied one, for the disembodied subjectivism of Cartesian Modernism. Even though he does make this substitution, and even though this substantially changes how we are to understand human experience (by way of a sensing, aesthetically attuned body rather than detached, conceptually dominant mind), he is even more substantially arguing that human experience is not just the projection of an embodied subject. We must take the aware, embodied perceiving subject into account, but we must also recognize that this awareness recognizes itself as coming second, as being a part of a greater world, and as being structured by it. The embodied perceiver and the world cross into and influence one another yet remain distinct, with the world acting as the more primary term.
It is helpful to say here, when speaking of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, particularly of his use of chiasm or the crossing into one another of experiences or ontological regions, that we should use the terms “divergence (écart) and encroachment, rather than identity and difference.”15 We must recall that Merleau-Ponty, here as elsewhere, is attempting to overcome the dichotomies of Western culture and philosophy, including the complete separation of inner and outer, subjective and objective, etc. When speaking of his philosophy, then, and in this particular case, when we are speaking of the transcendence of the world and others, we must speak of a transcendence that occurs within the context of immanence. Human experience cannot be denied or doubted away, nor can it be constructed from the outside by using discrete units in external relations or from the inside by using abstract concepts and internal relations of meaning, but must be approached from the point of view of the experiencing perceiver. We cannot deny and must even begin with human perceptual experience as it is lived, but this embodied experience immediately opens us upon a world that is always already there, upon a world that always already runs beyond us both temporally and spatially. Thus rather than exclusive experiences or regions, we have the overlapping of experiences and regions. Rather than an internal projection vs. an external imposition, we have an overlapping of internal and external; we have the overlapping and simultaneous mixture of projection and imposition. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the Funderiung relationship once again helps here: we have the perceptual openness upon and the perceptual taking-up of the more primary patterns of the world, the patterns that motivate (not cause or logically require) certain perceptual holds or orientations, orientations that nevertheless fold back upon these patterns to help frame, articulate, and express them more precisely. The other (as world, as animal, as other human beings) encroaches upon me, but I am able to take-up the other actively and interpretively. We are bound together and mutually influence one another, with the world, especially, remaining as the more primary term.
We are now in the position to see how Merleau-Ponty’s theory of nature, with its ontological levels of overlapping being, and his theory of the human body, with its twodimensionality, provide the basis for an environmental ethics, for an ethics with regard to our treatment of animals, and for a human ethics. We have seen that human beings are not outside or above the world. Our “spirit” is not a separate entity that is placed above the world, as it is in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. Human nature and the human awareness that comes along with it have evolved and emerged from nature and remain bound up with it. . . . ."
https://douglaslow.net/Merleau-Ponty_Ontology_And_Ethics.pdf
A further paper by Thiese and Kafatos: Theise ND, Kafatos M. Sentience everywhere: complexity theory, panpsychism & the role of sentience in self-organization of the universe. J Consciousness Exploration & Research. 2013; 4: 378-90.
Douglas Low, MERLEAU-PONTY, ONTOLOGY, AND ETHICS
Extract: ". . . To reiterate, I’m in contact with the world but the world (as other) outruns me, and it is the ontological structure of the body, its two-dimensionality, the fact that it is both sensible and sentient, and the fact that the sensible and sentient cross into one another without becoming one, that allows this to occur. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty explicitly mentions that the human body’s dehiscence, its splitting open and subsequent two-dimensionality, “is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible. For already the cube assembles within itself incompossible visibilia, as my body is at once phenomenal body and objective body” (VI 136). Thus, even though Merleau-Ponty argues that we must recognize the role of the aware, perceiving subject in all experience, he is not just substituting an embodied subject (or an embodied subjectivism) for a disembodied one, for the disembodied subjectivism of Cartesian Modernism. Even though he does make this substitution, and even though this substantially changes how we are to understand human experience (by way of a sensing, aesthetically attuned body rather than detached, conceptually dominant mind), he is even more substantially arguing that human experience is not just the projection of an embodied subject. We must take the aware, embodied perceiving subject into account, but we must also recognize that this awareness recognizes itself as coming second, as being a part of a greater world, and as being structured by it. The embodied perceiver and the world cross into and influence one another yet remain distinct, with the world acting as the more primary term.
It is helpful to say here, when speaking of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, particularly of his use of chiasm or the crossing into one another of experiences or ontological regions, that we should use the terms “divergence (écart) and encroachment, rather than identity and difference.”15 We must recall that Merleau-Ponty, here as elsewhere, is attempting to overcome the dichotomies of Western culture and philosophy, including the complete separation of inner and outer, subjective and objective, etc. When speaking of his philosophy, then, and in this particular case, when we are speaking of the transcendence of the world and others, we must speak of a transcendence that occurs within the context of immanence. Human experience cannot be denied or doubted away, nor can it be constructed from the outside by using discrete units in external relations or from the inside by using abstract concepts and internal relations of meaning, but must be approached from the point of view of the experiencing perceiver. We cannot deny and must even begin with human perceptual experience as it is lived, but this embodied experience immediately opens us upon a world that is always already there, upon a world that always already runs beyond us both temporally and spatially. Thus rather than exclusive experiences or regions, we have the overlapping of experiences and regions. Rather than an internal projection vs. an external imposition, we have an overlapping of internal and external; we have the overlapping and simultaneous mixture of projection and imposition. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the Funderiung relationship once again helps here: we have the perceptual openness upon and the perceptual taking-up of the more primary patterns of the world, the patterns that motivate (not cause or logically require) certain perceptual holds or orientations, orientations that nevertheless fold back upon these patterns to help frame, articulate, and express them more precisely. The other (as world, as animal, as other human beings) encroaches upon me, but I am able to take-up the other actively and interpretively. We are bound together and mutually influence one another, with the world, especially, remaining as the more primary term.
We are now in the position to see how Merleau-Ponty’s theory of nature, with its ontological levels of overlapping being, and his theory of the human body, with its twodimensionality, provide the basis for an environmental ethics, for an ethics with regard to our treatment of animals, and for a human ethics. We have seen that human beings are not outside or above the world. Our “spirit” is not a separate entity that is placed above the world, as it is in the tradition of Cartesian dualism. Human nature and the human awareness that comes along with it have evolved and emerged from nature and remain bound up with it. . . . ."
https://douglaslow.net/Merleau-Ponty_Ontology_And_Ethics.pdf
A further paper by Thiese and Kafatos: Theise ND, Kafatos M. Sentience everywhere: complexity theory, panpsychism & the role of sentience in self-organization of the universe. J Consciousness Exploration & Research. 2013; 4: 378-90.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
By empiricism I mean the scientific method. Forming testable hypotheses, testing them empirically, and augmenting them.
I say it's dangerous to steer away from empiricism because I believe there is a real, shared, subject-independent aspect of reality. I believe there are (ever evolving) patterns within this aspect of reality that we are able to discern via our perceptual apparatus.
Discerning, predicting, and harnessing these patterns has had a powerful impact on our species (and our planet).
Empirically testing (rational) ideas is necessary because we can never know with 100% certainty what patterns will emerge from the interaction of other patterns until we test it empirically.
Relying on rationality alone is dangerous because we never have all the information.
On the other hand, empericism is limited too. As Hoffman has said, we must take our perceptions seriously but not literally. Our ability to perceive the subject-independent world is limited by our perceptual apparatus.
We do have to augment our empirical perceptions/observations of patterns with logic and math as well to uncover larger, deeper patterns.
And as is well noted, the phenomena of consciousness itself is invisible to empericism. Perception cannot get behind consciousness as perception emerges from within consciousness.
Wouldn't that conclusion depend on one's definition of empiricism as 'the scientific method', which restricts itself to measurements of what are assumed to be purely 'objective' phenomena?
Doesn't Kafatos's theory recognize germinal perception in 'awareness' itself in the earliest q interactions that in his view ground and generate the evolution and development of the universe/cosmos as a whole, including the eventual development of life with its evolution of phenomenal and cognitive consciousness out of an original state of awareness?
If awareness arising in the q substrate at the 'Big Bang' already constitutes the 'symmetry-breaking' that generates the development of subjective-objective interactions leading to the evolution of the universe and eventually to life, consciousness, and mind, isn't perception born inchoately in being before conscious beings arise, eventually enabling our own concept of 'perception' developed in our understanding of ourselves as evolving subjects of experience [from primordial organisms to all the branches of species animals, to our own species with its capacities for reflection and thought] and leading to the situation of science in our time as it comes to recognize that 'subjectivity' cannot be thought independently of objectivity, and vice versa?
If so, empirical means must be found to investigate the subjectivity emerging from the beginning of the universe/cosmos as we understand it, or theorize it, in our time, which is what neurophenomenology offers to objectively-oriented neuroscience.
Or so it seems to me at this point, following Kafatos's analysis.
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Yes, but I meant perception in the strict sense of seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, etc.
Perception has emerged within consciousness as a means (I think) to navigate within what-is. But as you frequently point out—and I agree with—there is more to consciousness than perception.
In any case, what I mean is that we can't perceive consciousness empirically with our senses; that is, we can't see, hear, touch, smell, etc. consciousness. Such phenomenal perceptions arise within consciousness, and thus can't "get behind" consciousness.
Regarding James's Radical Empiricism:
Radical empiricism - Wikipedia
Essays in Radical Empiricism - Wikipedia
John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James
--> extract from a review: "Wild of the Yale philosophy department has written a very important analytical study of James' philosophical outlook....[The author's thesis links] James with existentialism and phenomenology and believes that the late discovery of this relationship symbolizes the indefensible tradition that separates continental and Anglo-American intellectual history and philosophy into autonomous cultural units."--Journal of American History
Charles Laughlin and John McManus,
THE RELEVANCE OF WILLIAM JAMES' RADICAL EMPIRICISM
TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Extracts: "This paper will describe James' radical empiricism -- a formulation which turns out to be less transparent than we might suppose from a cursory glance at his writings. We will examine some of the more interesting theoretical and ontological notions embedded in his view and will suggest that James understood the necessity of a phenomenological description of experience, but that he had not yet developed a clear idea of structure. We will also suggest that James was ahead of his time in insisting that a science of consciousness must be founded upon a merger between phenomenology and structuralism, two perspectives that remain polarized in anthropology to this day. We will flesh out his notions of relation and pure experience using a more modern, neuroanthropological perspective, and will use this understanding to critique the post-structuralist views of Jacques Derrida. Finally, we will discuss some of the implications of radical empiricism for the anthropology of consciousness."
". . .
What James is getting at here is that the knowledge of the continuity of consciousness is, as with other types of conjunctive relations, intuitively present in direct experience, and is thus available for phenomenological apprehension -- or as Husserl (1967:xx) would say, available for "bracketing." And it is precisely this claim that makes James' empiricism so perspicacious, even in our present day; for James is saying both (1) that conjunctive relations are phenomenologically available to experience, and (2) that these relations are the manifestation of structures that constitute consciousness.
James, of course, does not use the word "stucture" in this context, so we must say something about the meaning of this term.5 This is necessary because we are using structure in a different way than most anthropologists would ordinarily understand the term today. What most anthropologists mean by structure is informed out of either structural-functionalism, in which case the term refers to the organization of social roles and institutions, or out of semiotic structuralism, in which case the term refers to the deep logic laying behind a text or other symbolic material. What we mean by structure, however, refers to the organizations -- especially the neurophysiological structures -- that produces experience, and it is this sense of structure that we discern in James' interest in conjunction. Although he was uncharacteristically ambiguous when it came to writing about conjunction, what we feel that James was struggling to conceptualize is that structure is immanent in pure experience -- that experience is ordered from the level of pure experience, through perception and into higher orders of cognition.
Again, by relational order we are not referring to an order rationally imposed downwards as it were from cognition onto some kind of chaotic, primordial "stuff." The "glue" that cements even pure experience together is structure, and that structure is apperceivable. It was James' insights along these lines that led Carl Jung to his notion of the "archetype" (Jung 1968:55). And James' psychology is in keeping with later perspectives such as J. Gibson's (1979) perceptual ecology, Jean Piaget's (1971) genetic epistemology, Gregory Bateson's (1979) ecology of mind, Francisco Varela's (1979) neuropsychology, and of course our own biogenetic structuralism (Laughlin, McManus and d'Aquili 1990:43-49).
Structuralism and Post-structuralism
The distinction we are drawing here between a radical empirical understanding of structure and a rationalist notion of structure is crucial to making our discussion relevant to anthropology. The abstraction of "structure" from direct experience and lodging it in some "supernal" domain was the principal weakness of the semiotic structuralism of the seventies -- a perspective against which we originally deployed our own biogenetic strucuralism. It was our bone of contention with Claude Levi-Strauss' views (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974:131, d'Aquili, Laughlin and McManus 1979:3-4) that he and his followers tended to think of the "pure" mind as residing in an epiphenomenal domain removed from everyday experience and activity. Moreover, just as James decried, semiotic structuralist methodology required the deduction of patterned relations (e.g., binary oppositions, metaphorical-metonymic relations, mythemes, etc.) from texts and a reification of those patterns onto an unobservable entity, the "pure" mind, the ontological status of which remained problematic at best (see e.g., Levi-Strauss 1967:278). Typical of any such rationalist project, a semiotic structural analysis of (say) myth revolves around linguistic and culturological interpretations of meaning, an exercise that is devoid of any reference to, or association with direct human experience or embodied activity.
This inability of structuralists to engage with everyday consciousness or activity led to a revealing controversy between Levi-Strauss and the phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur (Levi-Strauss and Ricoeur 1970). It was Ricoeur's contention -- and one that we would share -- that all a semiotic structural analysis can do is produce the attitude in the analyst that myths are indeed meaningful and should be taken seriously and engaged at the level of experience. It is in the context of experience and embodied enactment that the real meaning of the text emerges for most people, and upon which subsequent reflection, if any, occurs.
In order to avoid the individual person and his/her experience, semiotic structuralism went to the ridiculous length of disavowing structures that entail human activity and experience. On the semiotic structuralist account, an understanding of myth does not require any reference to action and allowed the analyst to uncover the hidden, pure structures of mind without the distorting influences of environmental, empirical or experiential contingencies. Victor Turner strenuously disagreed with this interpretation of how texts function in traditional religions, and with the peripheralization of ritual it implies (Turner 1985:209-210, 1992:95-96). Turner saw ritual, and not disembodied myth, as the cornerstone of religion. Religion is an active process with ritual enactment at its core. Turner might well have agreed with Anthony F.C. Wallace (1966) that ritual is "the work" of religion.
Moreover, Turner had an insight into the actual psychological processes operating in rituals of transformation that allowed him to see that much of what human ritual is about is change (Turner 1969, Lavie, Narayan and Rosaldo 1993). In our own terms, Turner taught that certain types of ritual produce states of consciousness that effectively unstructure the "natural attitude" of participants and then restructure a new attitude, one that is considered more appropriate, functional, adaptive or mature by the society. The classic case of such a ritual is a rite of passage which transforms an initiate to a more mature level of social status. The key to the operation of any such ritual is the involvement of embodiedconsciousness in activities that produce transformations of consciousness (literally, the reorganization of the structures mediating consciousness). These activities destabilize the habitual patterns of neurobiological processing, and guide the growth of new patterns.
The over-rationalization of structure continues today in the so-called "post-structuralist" (or "postmodernist," "deconstructionist") movement inspired by the writings of Jacques Derrida (see e.g., Derrida 1973). It is not our intention here to critique Derrida or post-structuralism in detail, but rather to place this movement in its antithetical methodological position relative to James' notion of pure experience. The popularity of both Derrida and the post-structuralist literature is a clear indication of the distance anthropology has moved from James' vision of a radical empiricism.
In critiquing this movement, it is essential that we always keep in mind that Derrida's background -- indeed, the background of the entire movement -- is essentially non-anthropological. It is largely philosophical. The movement is rarely informed from direct ethnographic fieldwork, or for that matter from the actual practice of any phenomenology. And it is primarily concerned with literary criticism. This lack of either a mature phenomenology or a cross-cultural, ethnographic perspective produces a distinct flavor of ethnocentrism in Derrida's philosophical musings -- and hence in his influence upon various post-structuralist theoretical formulations about symbolism and meaning. His ethnocentrism is obvious in the fact that he is almost entirely concerned with the written word; or as Don Ihde (1993:73-77) put it, he is obsessed with the "book metaphor."
Derrida's entire position denies the existence of anything like James' pure experience, and depends upon the claim that all experience is permeated by meaning, and all meaning derives from "historical" (anthropologists would say "enculturative") processes inextricably requiring language. Every possible object of consciousness is conditioned by meaning encoded in language and thus there is no possibility of experience of any object that is epistemologically prior to, independent of, or transcending language-based meaning. Moreover, pure intuition -- or knowing without the influence of language or culture -- is impossible.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Derrida (1973) found it necessary to argue strenuously against the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, for it has been Husserl more than any other thinker who has inspired many to follow a brand of phenomenology grounded in the ability of skilled meditators to access something like James' pure experience, a level of experience which is epistemologically prior to any taint of language-based meaning, and rich with knowledge gained from direct intuition of the essential properties of language (see e.g., Husserl 1960). Direct meditative access to intuitive knowledge of the essential properties of experience is only possible for Husserl when a meditator learns to drop their culturally and linguistically derived "natural attitude" toward experience. The meditator must learn to isolate and query the absolute "presence" of experience -- a skill the possibility of which Derrida emphatically denies.
For Derrida, distinctions made in experience -- even meditative experience -- must ultimately refer back to distinctions encoded in language, a process Derrida calls "differance." Because there can be no escape from this process of linguistically derived signification, intuition of essential structures of experience independant of language is impossible. So too is it impossible to derive absolute truths, or truths pertaining to universal structures of experience, because Derrida recognizes only one source of "differance," namely language. More to the point, Derrida's philosophy and the post-structuralist movement it spawned cannot accept structure immanent in pure experience, but only structure imposed from outside consciousness and communicated via language and culture. As we shall see, this view flies in the face not only of the evidence of mature contemplation, but also of how we know the human brain works to mediate experience.
Relations, Essences and Neurognosis . . . . ."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...m.com/docs/radical_empiricism_aoc_version.rtf
Radical empiricism - Wikipedia
Essays in Radical Empiricism - Wikipedia
John Wild, The Radical Empiricism of William James
--> extract from a review: "Wild of the Yale philosophy department has written a very important analytical study of James' philosophical outlook....[The author's thesis links] James with existentialism and phenomenology and believes that the late discovery of this relationship symbolizes the indefensible tradition that separates continental and Anglo-American intellectual history and philosophy into autonomous cultural units."--Journal of American History
Charles Laughlin and John McManus,
THE RELEVANCE OF WILLIAM JAMES' RADICAL EMPIRICISM
TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Extracts: "This paper will describe James' radical empiricism -- a formulation which turns out to be less transparent than we might suppose from a cursory glance at his writings. We will examine some of the more interesting theoretical and ontological notions embedded in his view and will suggest that James understood the necessity of a phenomenological description of experience, but that he had not yet developed a clear idea of structure. We will also suggest that James was ahead of his time in insisting that a science of consciousness must be founded upon a merger between phenomenology and structuralism, two perspectives that remain polarized in anthropology to this day. We will flesh out his notions of relation and pure experience using a more modern, neuroanthropological perspective, and will use this understanding to critique the post-structuralist views of Jacques Derrida. Finally, we will discuss some of the implications of radical empiricism for the anthropology of consciousness."
". . .
What James is getting at here is that the knowledge of the continuity of consciousness is, as with other types of conjunctive relations, intuitively present in direct experience, and is thus available for phenomenological apprehension -- or as Husserl (1967:xx) would say, available for "bracketing." And it is precisely this claim that makes James' empiricism so perspicacious, even in our present day; for James is saying both (1) that conjunctive relations are phenomenologically available to experience, and (2) that these relations are the manifestation of structures that constitute consciousness.
James, of course, does not use the word "stucture" in this context, so we must say something about the meaning of this term.5 This is necessary because we are using structure in a different way than most anthropologists would ordinarily understand the term today. What most anthropologists mean by structure is informed out of either structural-functionalism, in which case the term refers to the organization of social roles and institutions, or out of semiotic structuralism, in which case the term refers to the deep logic laying behind a text or other symbolic material. What we mean by structure, however, refers to the organizations -- especially the neurophysiological structures -- that produces experience, and it is this sense of structure that we discern in James' interest in conjunction. Although he was uncharacteristically ambiguous when it came to writing about conjunction, what we feel that James was struggling to conceptualize is that structure is immanent in pure experience -- that experience is ordered from the level of pure experience, through perception and into higher orders of cognition.
Again, by relational order we are not referring to an order rationally imposed downwards as it were from cognition onto some kind of chaotic, primordial "stuff." The "glue" that cements even pure experience together is structure, and that structure is apperceivable. It was James' insights along these lines that led Carl Jung to his notion of the "archetype" (Jung 1968:55). And James' psychology is in keeping with later perspectives such as J. Gibson's (1979) perceptual ecology, Jean Piaget's (1971) genetic epistemology, Gregory Bateson's (1979) ecology of mind, Francisco Varela's (1979) neuropsychology, and of course our own biogenetic structuralism (Laughlin, McManus and d'Aquili 1990:43-49).
Structuralism and Post-structuralism
The distinction we are drawing here between a radical empirical understanding of structure and a rationalist notion of structure is crucial to making our discussion relevant to anthropology. The abstraction of "structure" from direct experience and lodging it in some "supernal" domain was the principal weakness of the semiotic structuralism of the seventies -- a perspective against which we originally deployed our own biogenetic strucuralism. It was our bone of contention with Claude Levi-Strauss' views (Laughlin and d'Aquili 1974:131, d'Aquili, Laughlin and McManus 1979:3-4) that he and his followers tended to think of the "pure" mind as residing in an epiphenomenal domain removed from everyday experience and activity. Moreover, just as James decried, semiotic structuralist methodology required the deduction of patterned relations (e.g., binary oppositions, metaphorical-metonymic relations, mythemes, etc.) from texts and a reification of those patterns onto an unobservable entity, the "pure" mind, the ontological status of which remained problematic at best (see e.g., Levi-Strauss 1967:278). Typical of any such rationalist project, a semiotic structural analysis of (say) myth revolves around linguistic and culturological interpretations of meaning, an exercise that is devoid of any reference to, or association with direct human experience or embodied activity.
This inability of structuralists to engage with everyday consciousness or activity led to a revealing controversy between Levi-Strauss and the phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur (Levi-Strauss and Ricoeur 1970). It was Ricoeur's contention -- and one that we would share -- that all a semiotic structural analysis can do is produce the attitude in the analyst that myths are indeed meaningful and should be taken seriously and engaged at the level of experience. It is in the context of experience and embodied enactment that the real meaning of the text emerges for most people, and upon which subsequent reflection, if any, occurs.
In order to avoid the individual person and his/her experience, semiotic structuralism went to the ridiculous length of disavowing structures that entail human activity and experience. On the semiotic structuralist account, an understanding of myth does not require any reference to action and allowed the analyst to uncover the hidden, pure structures of mind without the distorting influences of environmental, empirical or experiential contingencies. Victor Turner strenuously disagreed with this interpretation of how texts function in traditional religions, and with the peripheralization of ritual it implies (Turner 1985:209-210, 1992:95-96). Turner saw ritual, and not disembodied myth, as the cornerstone of religion. Religion is an active process with ritual enactment at its core. Turner might well have agreed with Anthony F.C. Wallace (1966) that ritual is "the work" of religion.
Moreover, Turner had an insight into the actual psychological processes operating in rituals of transformation that allowed him to see that much of what human ritual is about is change (Turner 1969, Lavie, Narayan and Rosaldo 1993). In our own terms, Turner taught that certain types of ritual produce states of consciousness that effectively unstructure the "natural attitude" of participants and then restructure a new attitude, one that is considered more appropriate, functional, adaptive or mature by the society. The classic case of such a ritual is a rite of passage which transforms an initiate to a more mature level of social status. The key to the operation of any such ritual is the involvement of embodiedconsciousness in activities that produce transformations of consciousness (literally, the reorganization of the structures mediating consciousness). These activities destabilize the habitual patterns of neurobiological processing, and guide the growth of new patterns.
The over-rationalization of structure continues today in the so-called "post-structuralist" (or "postmodernist," "deconstructionist") movement inspired by the writings of Jacques Derrida (see e.g., Derrida 1973). It is not our intention here to critique Derrida or post-structuralism in detail, but rather to place this movement in its antithetical methodological position relative to James' notion of pure experience. The popularity of both Derrida and the post-structuralist literature is a clear indication of the distance anthropology has moved from James' vision of a radical empiricism.
In critiquing this movement, it is essential that we always keep in mind that Derrida's background -- indeed, the background of the entire movement -- is essentially non-anthropological. It is largely philosophical. The movement is rarely informed from direct ethnographic fieldwork, or for that matter from the actual practice of any phenomenology. And it is primarily concerned with literary criticism. This lack of either a mature phenomenology or a cross-cultural, ethnographic perspective produces a distinct flavor of ethnocentrism in Derrida's philosophical musings -- and hence in his influence upon various post-structuralist theoretical formulations about symbolism and meaning. His ethnocentrism is obvious in the fact that he is almost entirely concerned with the written word; or as Don Ihde (1993:73-77) put it, he is obsessed with the "book metaphor."
Derrida's entire position denies the existence of anything like James' pure experience, and depends upon the claim that all experience is permeated by meaning, and all meaning derives from "historical" (anthropologists would say "enculturative") processes inextricably requiring language. Every possible object of consciousness is conditioned by meaning encoded in language and thus there is no possibility of experience of any object that is epistemologically prior to, independent of, or transcending language-based meaning. Moreover, pure intuition -- or knowing without the influence of language or culture -- is impossible.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Derrida (1973) found it necessary to argue strenuously against the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, for it has been Husserl more than any other thinker who has inspired many to follow a brand of phenomenology grounded in the ability of skilled meditators to access something like James' pure experience, a level of experience which is epistemologically prior to any taint of language-based meaning, and rich with knowledge gained from direct intuition of the essential properties of language (see e.g., Husserl 1960). Direct meditative access to intuitive knowledge of the essential properties of experience is only possible for Husserl when a meditator learns to drop their culturally and linguistically derived "natural attitude" toward experience. The meditator must learn to isolate and query the absolute "presence" of experience -- a skill the possibility of which Derrida emphatically denies.
For Derrida, distinctions made in experience -- even meditative experience -- must ultimately refer back to distinctions encoded in language, a process Derrida calls "differance." Because there can be no escape from this process of linguistically derived signification, intuition of essential structures of experience independant of language is impossible. So too is it impossible to derive absolute truths, or truths pertaining to universal structures of experience, because Derrida recognizes only one source of "differance," namely language. More to the point, Derrida's philosophy and the post-structuralist movement it spawned cannot accept structure immanent in pure experience, but only structure imposed from outside consciousness and communicated via language and culture. As we shall see, this view flies in the face not only of the evidence of mature contemplation, but also of how we know the human brain works to mediate experience.
Relations, Essences and Neurognosis . . . . ."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.c...m.com/docs/radical_empiricism_aoc_version.rtf
Yes, by default to the givenness of the natural structural affordances of our own being as humans, capable of reflection on our experiences in and of our local environing 'world', we conceptualize 'perception' in our own terms. But as Kafatos, Merleau-Ponty, and Panksepp indicate, the developed contextualizing nature of our perceptive abilities has evolved from more primordial states of 'awareness' and prereflective experience that emerged in the speciation of life itself. Kafatos also postulates that awareness was incipient [if not occurrent] in quantum interactivity and entanglement instantiated at the Big Bang, initiating a germinal subject-object relation that developed in complexity as the universe/cosmos grew in complexity via interacting self-organizing forces and fields. So we inherit a vast history of prereflective awareness beginning in interacting systems at the birth of the universe/cosmos and expanding as an established habit in being from that point on. One of the most interesting questions raised by this cosmology is the extent to which deep memories of interactivity and pre-human awareness might be retained in nature and embedded in our subconscious minds and collective unconscious -- and continue to influence our conscious thinking about our own being in the being/Being of all that is. Perhaps it is this long habit in nature and in our own nature that initiates ontological thinking in our species even before the development of language.
I think we have to ask whether our and other animals' capabilities of 'perception' have been incipient in 'awareness' as already present in the q substrate [in Kafatos's and others' cosmology and ontology], and are thus not a radical departure from persistent habits formed in nature long before the development of consciousness in life. If so, the interdependent subjective-objective poles of experience have been present in being and Being long before human conceptualizations have proposed radical separation between them. Much of contemporary consensual science and philosophy as shaped under the modern materialist/objectivist paradigm is still on the way to comprehending the actual nature of the inter-relationship/interactivity of subjective-objective poles of experience demonstrated in phenomenological philosophy. Those inured to the objectivist paradigm and the dualism at its core remain blinded by reified concepts of subjectivity and objectivity, still thought to be intractable under the long shadow of Descartes' radical dualism.
ETA: So we can observe our own consciousness empirically, provided that we attend to and reflect on our own experience and, moreover, seek fuller understanding of the pre-reflective experience that precedes -- and continues to take place -- after we have attained reflective consciousness.
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Applying the analogy of electromagnetism we find that on a certain level there is a electromagnetic aspect to nearly everything all the way back to somewhere near the beginning of time in our universe. However electromagnetism on a quantum level performs different functions than those on the macro scale, e.g. picking cars up off the ground or propelling them along a highway. Similarly, if we're looking at a fundamental quantum bit for consciousness, we may be looking at the same degree of differentiation between quantum bits of consciousness and consciousness itself. It's like: A single electron is electric, but it isn't electricity.
I don't know of similar words to describe this type of relationship between bits of quantum consciousness and consciousness itself. So I'll just invent some for the sake of discussion. Lets call bits of quantum consciousness "C-Bits" and create the adjective "consciousine", meaning "pertaining to consciousness". So we might say something like C-Bits are consciousine, but they aren't consciousness, and therefore they are not conscious ( in and of themselves at their level ). If anyone gets what I'm saying and is aware of pre-existing lingo, please fill me in.
The point of the above is that even if consciousness is fundamental on a quantum level, it doesn't necessarily follow that the universe itself possesses consciousness other than in localized situations where the conditions are right for it to manifest ( e.g. like in humans ). I realize there are those who like to personify the universe ( including me ), but realistically, I think that such personification has to be understood as being symbolic, rather than literal.
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If you want to critique Kafatos's theory you should read the paper we're discussing in order to understand his theory before you try to respond to it or dismiss it. He does not refer to quantum interaction in terms of 'bits' of consciousness or of 'information'. Here's the link:
http://www.menaskafatos.com/Theise Kafatos FINAL.pdf
William Strathmann
Paranormal Adept
Thanks Constance for linking the paper. I've had a first breeze through and it looks interesting. I would probably find the description mentioned on the PDF page 36 (oops, no page numbers in the paper) close to my approach to things.
Actually for the last few days I've been thinking about how humans can even come up with the idea of infinity and infinitesimal. If we are so "quantized" and finite as regards "atoms" and such -- making up a finite-sized brain of finite numbers of atoms -- then how did human minds ever conceive of "infinity" as a "defined" concept, pun fully intended. That got me to thinking about the atoms themselves with their electron shells S,P,D,F etc. As I understand the explanation, (-)electrons, in their so-called orbits around the (+)protons and neutrons of the nucleus, actually approach protons to the point that the potential energy between them goes to negative infinity, while the kinetic energy goes to positive infinity. This ensures that electron and proton will not actually combine on their own. So, if this is accurate, then this would be a powerful example of actual infinity in continual operation in our very physical makeup. This wouldn't lead to conscious perception of infinity, necessarily, but it could be an indicator of the kinds of infinity of reality that we continually encounter, even when much of our perception relates to the finite.
Could I ask any of you regulars on this thread (especially the Triumvirate) if you know about the following experiment that I was led to believe was actually performed. Supposedly glasses were made that caused the wearer to see everything upside down. The subjects were supposed to wear the glasses for some length of time, and surprisingly, after a certain amount of time, the mind actually inverted what was perceived through the glasses. Later, after the subjects stopped wearing the glasses their "normal" vision was inverted for a while, until, again, the mind reverted it to the proper orientation. This might be one of those urban myths, but I am pretty sure that some long time ago I read about it in a respectable publication, I think. Perhaps I err . . .
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Maybe this will help clarify: According to your quote, Kafatos has referred to consciousness as, "... incipient [if not occurrent] in quantum interactivity and entanglement instantiated at the Big Bang. " ( Bolded mine ). By using the words "quantum" and "entanglement" in relation to consciousness and the formation of the universe ( Big Bang ), Kafatos explicitly posits that consciousness is formed from discrete units ( quanta ), and because there is no name that I know of for "consciousness particles" I dubbed them "C-Bits" for convenience. Whether Kafatos and I use identical terms isn't relevant to this situation.
If this situation isn't what Kaftos means, then he shouldn't be using words like "quantum" and "entanglement" and "Big Bang" to get his idea across because it amounts to quantum woo. On the other hand, if I have interpreted Kafatos correctly, then the point I made about his idea is entirely relevant and worthy of serious consideration. The only problem is that science has not found any consciousness particles. They're not even postulated to exist by actual quantum physicists. So until the eggheads who do the math decide to try to work consciousness particles into QM or string theory, then philosophers are sort of left out in the cold on that concept.
In the meantime, there is still the possibility that consciousness forms from known particles organized so that they behave in a way that we experience as consciousness. This returns us to the idea that consciousness is physically composed of a field of such particles or strings or whatever the case may be.
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Soupie
Paranormal Adept
Ok, but there is very important point not to be missed in this. I sense that—for what it's worth—you and I have found some common ground, so I want to build in that. I'm not suggesting we need to be in agreement, but rather mutual understating.
(I will likely need @smcder to help "translate" these ideas.)
Perception is a special kind of conscious experience. We have emotional, conceptual, and perceptual experiences. Among others.
I agree that we must use radical empericism to investigate consciousness. Radical empericism would seem to include all experiences, perhaps those investigated in phenomenology and meditative practices.
However, the type of empericism that most mainstream scientists use to investigate consciousness centers on perceptual experience: seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, etc.
I would add the stipulation that the boundaries between affect, percept, and concept are not hard boundaries. But generally speaking, science is founded on perceptual experiences.
While our conscious, perceptual experiences are indeed "made of" consciousness, and thus experiencing perceptions is technically experiencing consciousness, what typically, naively happens is that one takes our perceptual experiences of reality to be perceptually identical to reality.
If we hypothesize that the fundamental substrate of reality is consciousness, but agree that there are individual minds that form within this substrate, then these minds still must have a means of perceiving and interacting with one another. I contend that each of these minds will have evolved a perceptual system which allows them to perceive other minds and systems that have evolved/differentiated within the substrate.
But each perceptual system and its corresponding perceptions will be mind-specific (individual- and species-specific).
These perceptions allow us to interact with and within reality, but these perceptions shouldn't be mistaken as veridical (naive realism). Such thinking leads to the Hard Problem.
Yes, I too think we are finding some common ground and mutual understanding regarding the nature of consciousness, which I find a relief and a pleasure. I think this progress is entirely due to your taking our discussions of consciousness beyond physics and computational neuroscience into metaphysics.
So will I. I also wish we could lure @Pharoah back into the thread. Let's try. I'll email him today. Why don't we all do that? Also we're lucky to have @William Strathmann contributing and participating here now.
Indeed. Which is why both phenomenology and systems thinking as well as Eastern philosophies of consciousness challenge the materialist/objectivist paradigm that also underwrites classical cognitive neuroscience and computational hypotheses concerning consciousness.
I agree with your first statement. Those 'boundaries' between affect, percept, and concept are not hard boundaries but fluid, permeable, ones. You might remember a poem by Wallace Stevens entitled "Walking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly," which I've posted two or three times at earlier points in this two-year discussion and which I'll post again today since it thinks through the metaphysical issues raised in the paper you posted by Kafatos and Thiese. Another paper of theirs is linked below, which I think you'll also find {we'll all find} enlightening and informative.[/quote]
Yes, that's 'the natural attitude' that Husserl attempted to overcome at the outset of phenomenological philosophy and which phenomenological insights overcome.
The second paper by Theise-Kafatos that I link below explores the biological developments in evolving species [systems] of life in terms of 'sensing' and 'sentience' rather than 'perception'. I'll cite one paragraph here:
"These evolutionary paths can be traced backwards not only into less densely aggregated and less complexly organized nervous systems, but the components of neurons themselves predate the evolution of neurons and thus functional aspects of nervous system-like activity predate the rise of neurons. As in all evolutionary development, the pieces often precede the structures that eventually arise with new functions, not by creating new structures, but by reorganizing existent structures in novel fashion. Thus, the specialized cellular structures that we commonly deem essential to neuronal signaling, the ionic channels that conduct electrical signals along the neuron and the synaptic structures that convey signals between cells, are found as independent entities in simpler life forms (Miller, 2009; Meech, 2008). In particular, the ionic channels in cell membranes (e.g. calcium, sodium, potassium channels) are found in virtually all cells. Thus, some of the simplest elements of nervous systems that support or even create the complex elements of consciousness are present throughout the evolutionary tree, no matter how simple the organisms are, down to the single cell level. Could these simpler structures, not yet evolved into complex nervous systems, give rise to simpler forms of consciousness? It is precisely this question, when broached by Maturana and Varela, that yielded the equation “mind = life”."
Yes, each living organism senses its environing 'world' as its species-specific affordances enable it to do, as we've observed in earlier parts of this thread. And each animal learns more as its natal and native environments expand through its own movements from one place to another in its environment, in the consequent adventures of each individual animal meeting changing circumstances in its existence {for change is continuous in the 'World', globally and locally}. I am now finally understanding and appreciating the contributions made by @Pharoah's Hierarchical Construct Theory through its first three stages. I wonder if he has completed his exposition of the next stage concerning deliberative consciousness and mind. Come back, @Pharoah !!!
This is where we need to do some further work. Each living organism/animal senses the constraints and affordances of its actual environment and finds what it needs to survive in that environment based on enabling 'instincts' and the sentience and particular senses afforded it by nature. Thiese-Kafatos see the evolution of 'senses' as arising from the ontological primitive of 'awareness' as stimulated and conditioned by 'interactivity' all the way up from the q substrate to the development of interacting physical forces and fields to evolving levels of self-organizing complex dissipative systems in life/living beings in which awareness gradually developes into consciousness and mind as we know them in ourselves, in our being].
Here is a link to that second paper by Theise and Kafatos I mentioned above:
Theise, N. D. & Kafatos, M. C., "Sentience Everywhere: Complexity Theory, Panpsychism & the Role of Sentience in Self-Organization of the Universe
Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research| April 2013 | Volume 4 | Issue 4 | pp. 378-390
ABSTRACT Philosophical understandings of consciousness divide into emergentist positions (when the universe is sufficiently organized and complex it gives rise to consciousness) vs. panpsychism (consciousness pervades the universe). A leading emergentist position derives from autopoietic theory of Maturana and Varela: to be alive is to have cognition, one component of which is sentience. Here, reflecting autopoietic theory, we define sentience as: sensing of the surrounding environment, complex processing of information that has been sensed, (i.e. processing mechanisms defined by characteristics of a complex system), and generation of a response. Further, complexity theory points to all aspects of the universe comprising “systems of systems.” Bringing these themes together, we find that sentience is not limited to the living, but present throughout existence. Thus, a complexity approach shifts autopoietic theory from an emergentist to a panpsychist position and shows that sentience must be inherent in all structures of existence across all levels of scale.
Key Words: sentience, complexity theory, panpsychism, self-organization, Universe, autopoiesis.
https://www.upaya.org/uploads/pdfs/TheiseSentienceEverywhere.pdf
Coming back to your last statement: "
I agree for the most part but want to add phenomenological footnotes to the three statements contained there.
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
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