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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10


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@Soupie, I've been thinking about your statement above that "while phenomenology has many strengths, it alone cannot be used to resolve the MBP." What would it be or mean, in your view, to 'resolve' the MPB? Do you mean that such a 'resolution' of the mind/body problem would overcome and dissolve the inescapable interacting poles of subjectivity and objectivity recognized in phenomenological philosophy to ground and enable human experience of being in a world? Is it possible for us to escape the tension arising in reflective consciousness between the ontological primitives of mind and world?

A while back I linked a paper on Bataille by Ben Brewer entitled "Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing" and want to call attention to it again for its clarification of Bataille's contributions to our understanding of human consciousness. Here is a significant extract, but the whole of the paper should be read for a full appreciation of what Bataille has to offer us in our attempt here to develop an understanding of consciousness and mind:

". . . Despite the insistence that inner experience cannot tolerate the structures of utility, project, or rationality, Bataille also insists that inner experience must emerge “from the realm of project through project” (Inner Experience 46). Literally just paragraphs after demonstrating the impossibility of the coexistence of discursive reason and inner experience, Bataille claims that, “inner experience is lead by discursive reason. Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up….Natural exaltation or intoxication have a certain ‘flash in the pan’ quality. Without the support of reason, we don’t reach ‘dark incandescence’” (46).

The critique of asceticism is instructive here again. Bataille describes asceticism as “that…anemic, taciturn particle of life, showing reluctance before the excess of joy, lacking freedom.” Whereas in the context of the critique of project, asceticism retains the structures it tries to overcome, here it suffers from renouncing the very principle it should be lauding: life. While ascetics have their hearts in the right place—to be rid of desire—they misunderstand what it would mean to actually live without desire or ego. The destruction of desire is a Dionysian embracing of life, not a dry renouncing of its pleasures. The loss of the self and the destruction of desire are instead “possible from a movement of drunken revelry; in no way is it possible without emotion. Being without emotion on the contrary is necessary for ascesis. One must choose” (23). This is not merely a critique of ascesis: the two-sided critique of ascetics demonstrates the impossibility of either renouncing or retaining the structures of project and everyday experience. One feels the openings for inner experience closing off.

Having shown that project is fundamentally incompatible with inner experience, Bataille now argues, “nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what” (22). Insofar as inner experience is the complete continuity of subject and object such that both are abolished, such conclusions are only possible through language. Human subjectivity, which is the precondition of inner experience, is “entirely so through language, [and] in essence…is project” (22). Language is both the condition of the possibility of human subjectivity (and therefore of inner experience) and the condition of the impossibility of overcoming that subjectivity. The very thing that allows for inner experience to emerge, also blocks any full access to it.

This aporia at the heart of inner experience illustrates precisely why it is not a return to animality. Animality, as described in Theory of Religion, exists prior to the discontinuity introduced by language—as far as Bataille is concerned, the goshawk does not think or communicate linguistically. Inner experience, however, arises along the edges of the discontinuity of project. Inner experience, though similar in description, must be a fundamentally different experience from animality.

Experience of Aporia

The concurrent logical necessity and incompatibility of these arguments about the relation of project and inner experience is the determining factor in the movement of Bataille’s philosophical project: engagement with aporia. In forcing the reader to confront the ultimately aporetic nature of inner experience, Bataille asserts the sovereignty of experience and fundamentally rewrites what it means to do ethics.

An aporia, in contrast to a paradox, is an ontological blockage. The word comes from the Greek “poros,” meaning “passage.” An aporia, then, is “without passage.” A proper aporia has no solution, logical or otherwise.
The insistence on and revelation of aporetic experience asserts the sovereignty of experience itself. Most basically, this deployment of aporia refutes the possibility of replacing experience with argumentation or rational summary. Rather than summarizing arguments about inner experience, Bataille’s writings bring the reader through “L’tourment”—the torturous process of grasping at inner experience, finding the continuity of immanence in fits and spurts, all the while being pulled back into project and durational time. Bataille presents aporias not in order to prove or demonstrate, but rather to force the reader to undergo them.

Bataille and Kant

Though Bataille certainly situated himself in the lineage of mysticism, he also situated himself in the more canonical lineage of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, this resistance of the singularity of experience to conceptual or rational explanation appears quite vividly in Kant’s third Critique. For Kant, the beauty necessarily cannot be a concept. Judgments of beauty are not “logical but…aesthetic, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective” (204). Specifically, this means that a judgment of taste has nothing to do with applying a pre-given concept of “beauty” to an object or measuring an object against a conceptual standard of “beauty.” Furthermore, this judgment “does not contribute anything to cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious when it feels its own state” (Kant 204). Kant unequivocally claims that beauty is not a concept in which an object participates or which it represents. Rather, beauty is the experience of the play of our cognitive faculties. The experience of the beauty is neither replaceable with nor reducible to rational description. Beauty cannot be described; it must be undergone. Consequently, the power of the beautiful must be in the subject rather than the object, since an object can be beautiful when from one angle, while wholly unremarkable when viewed from another.

Of course, Kant’s other famous assertion of the singularity of experience in the Critique of Judgment is the Kantian sublime. For Kant, the experience of the sublime is experience of a “formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness” (Kant 245). The experience of the sublime, as opposed to the experience of beauty, consists in a mental state of “agitation” (247). Standing on a cliff before a “gloomy raging sea,” for example, one feels overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite dynamism of nature (254). The key move for Kant, however, comes when the experiencing subject then realizes that she has a (bounded) concept for this very unboundedness: the idea of “totality” (113). Human reason saves the day and transforms awe of our own finitude into “respect for our own vocation…[that] makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility” (257).

Is Bataille’s “inner experience” not, then, a surrender to the Kantian sublime? The difference that makes a difference between Kant and Bataille is that Kant’s experience of the sublime is ultimately a victory of the human intellect through the application of the concept of infinity. For Bataille, the confrontation with the subliminality of inner experience is always a wholesale annihilation of concepts and the subject as such. Whereas Kant reasserts the power of human reason, Bataille leaps without abandon into this moment of the death of reason: “I am open, yawning gap, to the unintelligible sky and everything in me rushes forth, is reconciled in a final irreconciliation” (Inner Experience 59). With this important modification, Bataille carries Kant’s legacy of asserting the necessity of the particularity of experience. The Kantian sublime, despite the descriptions from Kant, the great systemizer, cannot be merely described—it must be experienced, and, for Bataille, surrendered to. Said otherwise, one must approach the sublime with the comportment of the beautiful. The Kantian experience of the beautiful must be “disinterested”—it is an experience of an object of “a liking…devoid of all interest” (Kant 211). We must approach the beautiful as something perfectly superfluous, something in which we find no nourishment or victory. In Oscar Wilde’s words, “beautiful things mean only beauty” (Wilde 3). In contrast, the sublime, for Kant, must always be experienced as that which reinforces the unbounded power of the human intellect; we are quite interested in the sublime. If we approach the sublime, however, without an eye towards the reassertion of human reason, if we approach the sublime as an experience to undergo for no reason other than itself, we find Bataille’s inner experience lurking already in the Kantian system. . . . ."

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans
 
@Soupie, I've been thinking about your statement above that "while phenomenology has many strengths, it alone cannot be used to resolve the MBP." What would it be or mean, in your view, to 'resolve' the MPB? Do you mean that such a 'resolution' of the mind/body problem would overcome and dissolve the inescapable interacting poles of subjectivity and objectivity recognized in phenomenological philosophy to ground and enable human experience of being in a world? Is it possible for us to escape the tension arising in reflective consciousness between the ontological primitives of mind and world?
I understand the MBP to be resolved when we can explain how phenomenal consciousness and the physical world relate to one another. A question of metaphysics, which I know is not the most interesting question about consciousness for all nor the only aspect of consciousness worthy of discussion.

As it stands, there are a number of "hypotheses" as to what the relationship might be—many of which we've discussed in this thread.

Monism: idealism, physicalism, materialism, dual-aspectisms, etc. Dualism.

My point above is just to say that introspection alone will not get us to a resolution; but is rather a perhaps underutilized tool that must be used among others.

(And thank you for the extended excerpt but I have to confess that I was unable to follow.)
 
Two notes from the Bataille paper that are significant for interpretation of his thought:

"3 This is almost directly contrary to Heidegger analysis of tools as ready-to-hand in Being and Time. Though an extended discussion of this difference is outside the scope of this essay, it should be noted that Bataille actively wrote about his disagreements with Heidegger and was aware of the break he was making with phenomenology.

4 The term “maieutic” comes from Socrates’ claim in the Theatetus to practice a pedagogical “midwifery” through the Socratic method (Plato 149A). In the case of Bataille, the bringing-out of knowledge is not accomplished through dialectical questioning, but performative writing. The term, however, is strikingly appropriate to describe the role of immanence in Bataille’s writing."
 
It's good to see everyone back and activity on the thread! I am doing a clinical study in a couple of months, so I am working around the place getting it ready for winter before that starts, I may be in and out and out and in - but I am reading everything!

S-
 
Here is another paper concerning Bataille's insights into the passage of prereflective consciousness into reflective consciousness in our species of life on this planet. The paper's author, like Bataille himself, compares B's interpretations of what is expressed in prehistoric art with the interpretations of other thinkers and scholars who have pursued this subject in Bataille's time and after. The link at the bottom of my post goes to this fascinating paper:

Brett Buchanan, Painting the Prehuman: Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, and the Aesthetic Origins of Humanity

Extract:

"Bataille repeatedly refers to prehistoric depictions of humans as formless, whether with the bird-man in Lascaux (to which I‘ll return in a moment), or the Venus of Willendorf, or the Lespugne Venus. Often these images are called ―grotesque,‖ ―featureless‖ (112), ―unfinished‖ (79), the ―stupefying negation of man‖ (46), or more consistently, simply ―deformed‖ (which carries a more pejorative sense, as in ―loss of form,‖ than the slightly more neutral ―formless‖). Of the few images of deformed humanity, there is one in particular that captures Bataille‘s attention, just as it has captured the attention of many both before and since. It is the image of a bird-man found in the ―Shaft‖ section of Lascaux, the deepest and most inaccessible part, where, in child-like form, the bird-man lies (wounded? dead? resting? in a trance? erect?) beside an impaled bison and a small bird. Concerning this scene, which Bataille calls ―the holiest of holies,‖ we discover ―a measure of this world; it is even the measure of this world‖ (137).

When the art critics Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois looked to offer a substantially new interpretation of modernist art in the twentieth century, they found their guiding principle in Bataille‘s notion of the formless inasmuch as it provided an avenue to counteract the entrenched binary between content and form. Bois explains in the ―Introduction‖ to Formless: A User’s Guide, ―It is not so much a stable motif to which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a given quality, as it is a term allowing one to operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder. Nothing in-and-of-itself, the formless has only an operational existence…The formless is an operation‖ (1997: 18). Just as the cave paintings have been interpreted as rendering the animal present in the act of painting (where the final product is secondary to the apparition itself), the images of the formless prehumans can be read as active operations of self-negation, albeit where the images themselves enact the declassification operative in the act of painting. It is in this sense that Adorno, for instance, views the paintings as ―a protest against reification‖ (327), almost as if the prehuman wished to mark a trace before vanishing back into the universe. In the end, this is what Blanchot took to be the bird-man‘s simplicity: ―it seems to me,‖ he writes, ―that the meaning of this obscure drawing is nonetheless clear: it is the first signature of the first painting‖ (11), as if pronouncing ―here I am,‖ even if the ‗I‘ in question is more than indeterminate. A signature of whom, then? Might we not take this to be the sublimity of ―the holiest of the holies,‖ the transgression at the heart of humanity‘s birth? Consider, for instance, how Kant (2007) describes the sublime as, by definition, formless. Compared to the form of beauty, ―the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a
super-added thought of totality‖ (244).8 Aren‘t these formless prehumans, lacking the frockcoats of an ordering mind, just such a representation of limitlessness? Isn‘t the sublimity of these prehuman images precisely to be found in the mind‘s recognition of the impossibility of its own finished humanity?

A Vibration of Appearances

The limitlessness entailed by the absence of form is, from another perspective, the perpetual rebirth of humanity as accomplished through the simple act of vision. To perceive is none other than to give birth to oneself in the reciprocity of the world. Perceptual experience, as Merleau-Ponty will often note, is the precondition of humanity as a ―nascent logos,‖ as the birth of knowledge making the sensible sensible (Merleau-Ponty, 1964:25). This rebirth of the human condition is accomplished, in an extraordinary way, through the act of painting, which works to render the invisible visible. At roughly the same time, then, that Bataille was composing his thoughts on prehistoric art, Merleau-Ponty formulated some of his most influential writings on art and nature, and in which, perhaps unsurprisingly, Lascaux emerges. In his 1952 essay on ―Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,‖ an essay dedicated to Jean-Paul Sartre but largely devoted to André Malraux (who had just published a large treatise on art entitled The Voices of Silence), Merleau-Ponty remarks that ―The first sketches on the walls of caves set forth the world as ‗to be painted‘ or ‗to be sketched‘ and called for an indefinite future of painting, so that they speak to us and we answer them by metamorphoses in which they collaborate with us‖ (1964c: 60). Most intriguing in this passage is the reference to a ―metamorphosis‖ through which we respond to the paintings. It is not entirely clear what Merleau-Ponty means here, other than that our relations with this archaic past calls for a continuous exchange wherein both past and present are hermeneutically revived and, through the exchange, ultimately transformed. But a metamorphosis also suggests something far more interesting and surreal. One imagines modern humanity emerging transformed from out of the atemporal cocoon of its prehuman larval stage, much like a butterfly that emerges

8 Kant precedes this passage by stating that ―the beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object‖ (75)

triumphant through its pupal transformation. In a later essay, ―Eye and Mind,‖ Merleau-Ponty will similarly speak of the ―metamorphosis of Being‖ by which objects (e.g., an animal, a mountain) make themselves visible to the eye. Either way, we have a reciprocal transition of form inaugurated by the primacy of perception.

Throughout his aesthetic writings, Merleau-Ponty will often indicate that artworks are evocative not only of metamorphoses, but also of magic, delirium, ghosts, strange possessions, hauntings, and oneiric universes, all in the name of the visible itself.9 It is through the act of perception that the perceiving subject is continuously reborn, and inasmuch as the painter plays directly with the realm of the visible, she brings a world to life. But it is not any old world, since the painted world is, by all accounts, a spectral one, lending shadows, light, reflections, and the like, a ghostly presence. A visual existence that is neither real nor unreal, neither nature itself nor its imitation, it holds a strange possession all of its own. It is in this sense that painting can be said to give ―visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible‖ (1964b: 166). Compared with the profanity of perception, the painted image is always already haunted with the sacred and magical such that, for Merleau-Ponty, the very act of painting is congruent with a passage back and forth between the prehuman and the human. The indefinite future of painting plays upon this very transition, for without this process the act of painting may be at its end.

This is a departure, then, from Bataille‘s thesis concerning the birth of humanity as discovered in prehistoric art. By contrast, the birth of humanity is for Merleau-Ponty omnipresent in every painting, be it 40,000 years ago or just last week. It is in this way that he can contend ―In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it—and even when it appears devoted to something else—from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility‖ (165-66). While the emergence of being human carries for Bataille a quasi-evolutionary index, as evidenced in the rupture of the Lascaux paintings that mark past from present,

9 Merleau-Ponty writes (1964b), in his essay ―Eye and Mind‖: ―Light, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all the objects of his quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence‖ (166).

animal from human, with Merleau-Ponty there is an abrupt abandonment of any historical register, inasmuch as the very accomplishment of painting itself is the ontological metamorphosis. It is the testament to perception, the sacred act of witnessing the invisible, the continuous rebirth of the human.10 ―It can be said,‖ Merleau-Ponty writes in his essay ―Eye and Mind,‖ ―that a human is born at the instant when something that was only virtually visible…becomes at one and the same time visible for itself and for us. The painter‘s vision is a continued birth. …This prehuman way of seeing things is the painter‘s way‖ (167-68).11

If we follow Merleau-Ponty here, this would suggest that the paintings in Lascaux— including but not solely the therianthropic humans—can only ever be prehuman visions that are actualized as human. The passage between prehuman and human is accomplished in the act of painting. This would accord with the formless selfdepictions, wherein the invisible is rendered visible, the prehuman made human, and yet the act is always unfinished due to the indeterminacy of the originating perception. Whereas the prehistoric caves hold for Bataille the mysteries that he calls the cradle of humanity, for Merleau-Ponty any and all paintings address ―the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things‖ (1964a: 18). To express the vibration of appearance is perhaps the best way to account for how these prehistoric paintings foretell and question humanity‘s place in the world. Though they may elude full comprehension, there is little doubt they do so necessarily, since the figure of the prehuman haunts our existence with every dogged perception we have.12

10 We might think of this as analogous to the biological theory that maintains—we now know incorrectly—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. As analogy it holds a certain resonance within the aesthetic domain. In bringing to expression the ―inarticulate cry,‖ the painter renders visible the prehuman world in a similar way that, if the analogy holds, the prehistoric prehumans graduated to humanity.

11 To push this analogy further, we might look to how this metamorphosis is enacted within the art of children, as written on by both Merleau-Ponty and Bataille. ―Besides,‖ Bataille notes, ―what are children if not animals becoming human‖ (1991: 65).


12 This paper was originally delivered at the University of Alberta and DePaul University during the fall of 2010. I would like to thank Chlöe Taylor and Will McNeill for their generous invitations, and those in attendance for their warm and thoughtful feedback.

http://www.criticalanimalstudies.or...1-Issue-1-2Painting-the-Prehuman-pp-14-31.pdf
 
I understand the MBP to be resolved when we can explain how phenomenal consciousness and the physical world relate to one another. . . .
My point above is just to say that introspection alone will not get us to a resolution; but is rather a perhaps underutilized tool that must be used among others.

Have you had the impression that phenomenology holds that introspection alone can "get us to a resolution" of the MBP?
 
No. My statements that you have been responding to were made in response to comments made by @Swamp Gas .

I've tracked back in the thread to find what I think is the statement by @Swamp Gas that you've been responding to. It's in this post:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 10

SG makes no reference to phenomenology (or to introspection, which it sometimes seems you think of as a synonym for phenomenomenal consciousness). My impression of what SG is referring to there is awareness, which Panksepp recognized as implicit in the affectivity of even primordial living organisms. We should probably work through these terms in discussion to be sure that we all share common understandings of their references.
 
@Constance

You say SG makes no reference to introspection or phenomenology. And yet you quote him as asking:

"What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?"

If I need to, I'll post the general descriptions of introspection and phenomenology, but I hope I don't need to.

Regarding your suspicion that I regularly confuse "introspection" and "phenomenal consciousness" (which makes very little sense)—could you post some examples of times when you feel I have done so?

While clearing up confusions is important, it's my opinion that at this point in the discussion, the disagreements regarding consciousness do not seem to be due to confusion of terms; in my opinion, it's down to a disagreement about which approach is most likely, based on what we know. (With the possible exception of @Pharaoh not understanding the HP, as he doesn't address it in his HCT.)

You and @Usual Suspect , who both appear to favor emergent, biological approaches to consciousness seeem to understand that this would seem to entail strong emergence.

In other words, our disagreements at this point are based on preferences, not confusion.
 
thoughts in progress ...


Rorty's analysis goes like this:

1) contemporary philosophy follows the early modern philosophical project (Cartesianism) in two fundamentally different ways:

1. continental
2. analytical

2) the approaches appear to have little in common but they do have this in common: Rorty claims they completely collapse under the weight of an internal critique, completely collapse in terms of the project of finding a transcendental or absolute ground for truth. Wittggenstein did the critique for Analytical and Heidegger, Derrida et al for Continental. Rorty says we just need to stop trying to do this (provide a philosophical grounding for truth).

3) Rorty notes a third strand which is American (Jamesian) pragmatism. Rorty doesn't think we don't have truth - he thinks we do, in everyday life and in science - but what we don't have is a philosophical argument to ground truth in - this is what the internal critiques of Analytical and Continental philosophy show.

4) Rorty argues all truths are bound up in our culture and language - again we have truth, but not an ultimate grounding of truth in some philosophy. Again, this does not undercut the truth of everyday life or of science.

5) The neo-pragmatism of Rorty says "truth is what works" what he means is literally that, what we mean by truth is whatever works - and this and #4 lead to the political outcome of Rorty's thought which amounts to (not in these words exactly!) 'I'm from a liberal-democratic culture and that works pretty well and we have science and that works pretty well and I think this is the best way to do things and press me as you may, I can't provide any better argument for why this is truth.' And that's what he told the world and why he is so controversial.

Now, how does this apply? Well, I don't know - except it may provide some contrast to metaphysical approaches to "what is" or to a true solution to the hard problem. A solution might mean different things in different contexts:

1. a machine that appears to be conscious may, pragmatically, have to be treated as conscious for ethical and legal purposes (we might have to grant it the same rights as we do sentient or sapient biological beings) and that would be one solution to the hard problem - although note it might not help at all in figuring out how humans achieve consciousness - as in biology where problems are solved in different ways, so there may be different ways to achieve conscious states - I don't think we've looked at that - but we have been, I think, assuming that consciousness is arrived at in only one way - will have to ponder that one.

2. identity theories of the mind-brain can already be said to be "true" for certain purposes - medical for example, determining a patient's level of consciousness is a pragmatic, not a philosophical affair - if identity theory provides good tools for this purpose, then it is "true"

I don't think Rorty means to say stop looking for answers to the hard problem, but he does say stop looking for the one true answer.

On the continental side, this meant the end of Husserl's transcendental grounding of philosophy, "first philosophy" in Phenomenology.

So for now, I think Rorty isn't just saying this is the truth for now, but rather concluding there is no philosophical ground for absolute truth - and Heidegger would agree to some extent but this was a more apocalyptic than matter-of-fact conclusion for him ... i.e. "Only a god can save us" - for Rorty this is a pragmatic conclusion and allows us to get on with it. Agree or not, I think you have to grapple with this critique if you want to keep doing metaphysics.

In short, my strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into which "the Relativist" keeps getting himself is to move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics into cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try.
 
David Pearce followed me on Quora. I don't have any content and he seems to folly thousands, so I think it's just something he does. In any case it does indicate that he is active. He doesn't seem to have replied to your question.

I'm going to reach out to him regarding cosmopyschism and also predictive processing.

well ... let us know ...
 
@smcder

One of my thoughts regarding the mind brain relationship has been that 1. they appear/seem to be distinct due to the nature of perception but also 2. we will probably never be able to conclusively establish their ontological identity for that very same reason: we don't have direct access to the extrinsic interactions of what-is, but only inferential access via perception.

As it is, there is a plethora of evidence that the brain and mind are intimately related, but taking the next step to prove that they are one and the same is unpossible in practice and perhaps in principle.

I'm not seeing how Pearce's test can overcome this.

I think the evidence is what we have to work with - we might should ask if there are other kinds of evidence we should look for or if we already have evidence that we haven't recognized is relevant ... but we can certainly work with the small "t" truth that we do have.
 
@Soupie, I've been thinking about your statement above that "while phenomenology has many strengths, it alone cannot be used to resolve the MBP." What would it be or mean, in your view, to 'resolve' the MPB? Do you mean that such a 'resolution' of the mind/body problem would overcome and dissolve the inescapable interacting poles of subjectivity and objectivity recognized in phenomenological philosophy to ground and enable human experience of being in a world? Is it possible for us to escape the tension arising in reflective consciousness between the ontological primitives of mind and world?

A while back I linked a paper on Bataille by Ben Brewer entitled "Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing" and want to call attention to it again for its clarification of Bataille's contributions to our understanding of human consciousness. Here is a significant extract, but the whole of the paper should be read for a full appreciation of what Bataille has to offer us in our attempt here to develop an understanding of consciousness and mind:

". . . Despite the insistence that inner experience cannot tolerate the structures of utility, project, or rationality, Bataille also insists that inner experience must emerge “from the realm of project through project” (Inner Experience 46). Literally just paragraphs after demonstrating the impossibility of the coexistence of discursive reason and inner experience, Bataille claims that, “inner experience is lead by discursive reason. Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up….Natural exaltation or intoxication have a certain ‘flash in the pan’ quality. Without the support of reason, we don’t reach ‘dark incandescence’” (46).

The critique of asceticism is instructive here again. Bataille describes asceticism as “that…anemic, taciturn particle of life, showing reluctance before the excess of joy, lacking freedom.” Whereas in the context of the critique of project, asceticism retains the structures it tries to overcome, here it suffers from renouncing the very principle it should be lauding: life. While ascetics have their hearts in the right place—to be rid of desire—they misunderstand what it would mean to actually live without desire or ego. The destruction of desire is a Dionysian embracing of life, not a dry renouncing of its pleasures. The loss of the self and the destruction of desire are instead “possible from a movement of drunken revelry; in no way is it possible without emotion. Being without emotion on the contrary is necessary for ascesis. One must choose” (23). This is not merely a critique of ascesis: the two-sided critique of ascetics demonstrates the impossibility of either renouncing or retaining the structures of project and everyday experience. One feels the openings for inner experience closing off.

Having shown that project is fundamentally incompatible with inner experience, Bataille now argues, “nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what” (22). Insofar as inner experience is the complete continuity of subject and object such that both are abolished, such conclusions are only possible through language. Human subjectivity, which is the precondition of inner experience, is “entirely so through language, [and] in essence…is project” (22). Language is both the condition of the possibility of human subjectivity (and therefore of inner experience) and the condition of the impossibility of overcoming that subjectivity. The very thing that allows for inner experience to emerge, also blocks any full access to it.

This aporia at the heart of inner experience illustrates precisely why it is not a return to animality. Animality, as described in Theory of Religion, exists prior to the discontinuity introduced by language—as far as Bataille is concerned, the goshawk does not think or communicate linguistically. Inner experience, however, arises along the edges of the discontinuity of project. Inner experience, though similar in description, must be a fundamentally different experience from animality.

Experience of Aporia

The concurrent logical necessity and incompatibility of these arguments about the relation of project and inner experience is the determining factor in the movement of Bataille’s philosophical project: engagement with aporia. In forcing the reader to confront the ultimately aporetic nature of inner experience, Bataille asserts the sovereignty of experience and fundamentally rewrites what it means to do ethics.

An aporia, in contrast to a paradox, is an ontological blockage. The word comes from the Greek “poros,” meaning “passage.” An aporia, then, is “without passage.” A proper aporia has no solution, logical or otherwise.
The insistence on and revelation of aporetic experience asserts the sovereignty of experience itself. Most basically, this deployment of aporia refutes the possibility of replacing experience with argumentation or rational summary. Rather than summarizing arguments about inner experience, Bataille’s writings bring the reader through “L’tourment”—the torturous process of grasping at inner experience, finding the continuity of immanence in fits and spurts, all the while being pulled back into project and durational time. Bataille presents aporias not in order to prove or demonstrate, but rather to force the reader to undergo them.

Bataille and Kant

Though Bataille certainly situated himself in the lineage of mysticism, he also situated himself in the more canonical lineage of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, this resistance of the singularity of experience to conceptual or rational explanation appears quite vividly in Kant’s third Critique. For Kant, the beauty necessarily cannot be a concept. Judgments of beauty are not “logical but…aesthetic, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective” (204). Specifically, this means that a judgment of taste has nothing to do with applying a pre-given concept of “beauty” to an object or measuring an object against a conceptual standard of “beauty.” Furthermore, this judgment “does not contribute anything to cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious when it feels its own state” (Kant 204). Kant unequivocally claims that beauty is not a concept in which an object participates or which it represents. Rather, beauty is the experience of the play of our cognitive faculties. The experience of the beauty is neither replaceable with nor reducible to rational description. Beauty cannot be described; it must be undergone. Consequently, the power of the beautiful must be in the subject rather than the object, since an object can be beautiful when from one angle, while wholly unremarkable when viewed from another.

Of course, Kant’s other famous assertion of the singularity of experience in the Critique of Judgment is the Kantian sublime. For Kant, the experience of the sublime is experience of a “formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness” (Kant 245). The experience of the sublime, as opposed to the experience of beauty, consists in a mental state of “agitation” (247). Standing on a cliff before a “gloomy raging sea,” for example, one feels overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite dynamism of nature (254). The key move for Kant, however, comes when the experiencing subject then realizes that she has a (bounded) concept for this very unboundedness: the idea of “totality” (113). Human reason saves the day and transforms awe of our own finitude into “respect for our own vocation…[that] makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility” (257).

Is Bataille’s “inner experience” not, then, a surrender to the Kantian sublime? The difference that makes a difference between Kant and Bataille is that Kant’s experience of the sublime is ultimately a victory of the human intellect through the application of the concept of infinity. For Bataille, the confrontation with the subliminality of inner experience is always a wholesale annihilation of concepts and the subject as such. Whereas Kant reasserts the power of human reason, Bataille leaps without abandon into this moment of the death of reason: “I am open, yawning gap, to the unintelligible sky and everything in me rushes forth, is reconciled in a final irreconciliation” (Inner Experience 59). With this important modification, Bataille carries Kant’s legacy of asserting the necessity of the particularity of experience. The Kantian sublime, despite the descriptions from Kant, the great systemizer, cannot be merely described—it must be experienced, and, for Bataille, surrendered to. Said otherwise, one must approach the sublime with the comportment of the beautiful. The Kantian experience of the beautiful must be “disinterested”—it is an experience of an object of “a liking…devoid of all interest” (Kant 211). We must approach the beautiful as something perfectly superfluous, something in which we find no nourishment or victory. In Oscar Wilde’s words, “beautiful things mean only beauty” (Wilde 3). In contrast, the sublime, for Kant, must always be experienced as that which reinforces the unbounded power of the human intellect; we are quite interested in the sublime. If we approach the sublime, however, without an eye towards the reassertion of human reason, if we approach the sublime as an experience to undergo for no reason other than itself, we find Bataille’s inner experience lurking already in the Kantian system. . . . ."

http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans

fascinating ... I'll post again the link to Bataille's writings on line:

Georges Bataille Electronic Library
 
@Constance

You say SG makes no reference to introspection or phenomenology. And yet you quote him as asking:

"What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?"

If I need to, I'll post the general descriptions of introspection and phenomenology, but I hope I don't need to.

Regarding your suspicion that I regularly confuse "introspection" and "phenomenal consciousness" (which makes very little sense)—could you post some examples of times when you feel I have done so?

While clearing up confusions is important, it's my opinion that at this point in the discussion, the disagreements regarding consciousness do not seem to be due to confusion of terms; in my opinion, it's down to a disagreement about which approach is most likely, based on what we know. (With the possible exception of @Pharaoh not understanding the HP, as he doesn't address it in his HCT.)

You and @Usual Suspect , who both appear to favor emergent, biological approaches to consciousness seeem to understand that this would seem to entail strong emergence.

In other words, our disagreements at this point are based on preferences, not confusion.

Swampy's comments did remind me a bit of phenomenology - in that I thought if he weren't aware of it - the questions he posed might mean he would find it interesting ,,, but we can distinguish this:

"What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?"

at least from "bracketing" Einklammerung in phenomenology which is to suspend our judgements (and pre-judices) about the natural world and to turn to an analysis of experience - Husserl saw this as a science (and a rigorous one!) and as "first philosophy" - so that seems to me different from first-hand experience devoid of all thoughts and beliefs about it ... if such a thing is even unpossible? ;-)
 
Swampy's comments did remind me a bit of phenomenology - in that I thought if he weren't aware of it - the questions he posed might mean he would find it interesting ,,, but we can distinguish this:

"What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?"

at least from "bracketing" Einklammerung in phenomenology which is to suspend our judgements (and pre-judices) about the natural world and to turn to an analysis of experience - Husserl saw this as a science (and a rigorous one!) and as "first philosophy" - so that seems to me different from first-hand experience devoid of all thoughts and beliefs about it ... if such a thing is even unpossible? ;-)

I too thought that SG's comments suggested a background in phenomenology since he points directly to the critical and organic passage between prereflective and reflective consciousness with his excellent question: "What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?" Whether he's read phenomenological philosophy or not, it seems to me he's thought along the same lines developed in that philosophy. The same was true, by the way, for Wallace Stevens.

I want to add something about Husserl's phenomenological methodology and the ways in which the later phenomenologists moved beyond it, but also to note that Husserl himself thought beyond his early methodological work into a later understanding that 'phenomenologically lived reality' can't be understood from the reductions themselves and does not ground a transcendental reality, as both Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur have made clear. But it's now time for me to go to sleep, as usual just as most of the world around me is waking up.

Also want to note how relevant and helpful it is for you to have brought Rorty's pragmatism into the discussion at this point. Later. ;)
 
fascinating ... I'll post again the link to Bataille's writings on line:

Georges Bataille Electronic Library

Thanks for reposting this link to some of Bataille's publications. I especially appreciate the potential value of this one --

"Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography
This excellent biography depicts the man behind the repellent ideas, and also helps to illumine the ideas themselves. The French edition was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt."

-- though I'm not ready to invest time in reading it. I find Bataille's ideas helpful in turning our thinking about human consciousness toward the organic, biological, development of innumerable species of life whose evolution on earth has influenced and continues to influence our own species' struggles in experiencing reflective consciousness and mind at the nexus of our worldly experience, but I also find many of the apparent excesses and extremes of his compounded ideas to be repellent. It seems that it would take a considerable investment of time to read all of Bataille's published work to find any balance, or existential faith in our ability to make our collective, socially minded existence rational and ethical, which is for me the great demand before us as a species bearing power over and responsibility for one another and for the other sentient animals that exist in this historical epoch. Basically, at this point I think some of his insights are useful and significant but not sufficiently balanced to help us survive our worst instincts or most self-destructive ideas. I'll still be very interested in reading any comments others here have on Bataille's writings.

I've come across a paper on the sociopolitical/ethical aspects of Merleau-Ponty's contributions to phenomenology that might be helpful in evaluating the pragmatic values achievable in the closely aligned philosophy of existentialism. These schools of thought are so closely aligned that they are often referred to as either phenomenological existentialism or existential phenomenology. I've only read the first quarter of this paper, but I recommend it anyway because I think it might well help us to recognize in human consciousness and mind the integration of the origins of knowledge and insight arising from both the inherited emotional and the humanly developed intellectual streams of our human experience and the resulting contradictions in contemporary human thinking. Here is an extract from the paper that concerns Bataille's thought and MP's responses to it:

". . . Second, with regard to Merleau-Ponty’s trope of Nietzschean heroism, one might be tempted to think of Georges Bataille, with whom Merleau-Ponty was likewise personally acquainted. Bataille was a major proponent of Nietzschean ideas in France—yet this was primarily because he accepted Kojeve’s thesis that human society was entering a terminal stage of universal homogeneity in which human negativity had nothing to do. In his terms, this gave rise to the problem of ‘‘unemployed negativity,’’ and in particular to the problem of securing recognition for it as such.29

For Bataille, however, the end of History was rolled together with the death of God in a way that at once opened up and radically undermined the possibility for genuine subjectivity. This yielded the paradoxical or ‘‘impossible’’ situation of ‘‘sovereignty’’ that was central to Bataille’s thinking. In this sense, he was not so much a follower of Nietzsche as someone who aspired to imitate Nietzsche. He took up Nietzsche as a sacred ‘‘hero’’ of non-conformism, but this precisely in his tragic, mad solitude—it was a matter, so to speak, of an imitatio anti-Christi. This is why, in his works from the war years, Bataille stated that his aim is ‘‘to invent a new way to crucify myself.’’30 He made of his existence a ‘‘combat’’ [bataille] that incarnated sacrifice by trying to mimic the sacrifice of God.

This effort on the part of Bataille was the result of his having accepted—and having tried to live out the consequences of—the basic premises of both the Hegelian and Nietzschean tropes of heroism. This made Bataille himself the focal point of their underlying conflict. Thus, while his uptake of Nietzsche was infused with the themes of war and violence, it was primarily directed inwards in a selfdestructive way that does not conform to the model of self-assertive mastery sketched by Merleau-Ponty. So although Bataille was one of Merleau-Ponty’s covert interlocutors, (he will resurface below), he does not, as we might be tempted to think, represent the trope of Nietzschean heroism. . . ."

http://www.memphis.edu/philosophy/people/pdfs/smyth--heroism_and_history_cpr_2010.pdf
 
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@Constance

You say SG makes no reference to introspection or phenomenology. And yet you quote him as asking:

"What is our first-hand experience void of all thoughts and beliefs about it?"

I do think SG points to phenomenology's insight into the nature of prereflective consciousness as grounded in preconscious/prethetic experience (the territory that, imo, most needs investigation in consciousness studies), but recognition of prereflective experience and the kinds of apprehesions and knowledge it bodies forth in the evolution of animals and humans does not constitute the whole of phenomenology's discoveries concerning reflective consciousness and mind and the consequent moral and ethical nature of human feeling and thought. Phenomenology has encompassed the investigation of many layers and dimensions of human experience, a range of inquiry that cannot be appreciated without one's reading the major texts of this school of modern philosophy.

If I need to, I'll post the general descriptions of introspection and phenomenology, but I hope I don't need to.

? Perhaps you should go ahead and do that. I am interested in what source(s) you consider authoritative for defining and/or describing these topics.

Regarding your suspicion that I regularly confuse "introspection" and "phenomenal consciousness" (which makes very little sense)—could you post some examples of times when you feel I have done so?

I wish you would not react so defensively. What I said was not a criticism of 'you' but of the ambiguity I've sometimes noted in your usage [and the usages of theorists you've cited] of key terms concerning experience and consciousness whenever phenomenology is proposed as distinctly useful for the understanding of consciousness. I've objected several times over our last two years here to the ambiguity concerning the hard problem perpetuated by Chalmers's influential description of qualia as "what it feels like." It seems to me that Chalmers's catch phrase has opened the way for misunderstandings of forms of knowledge born through feelings, emotions, protoconscious senses of situated being, of inchoate selfhood and otherness, in animals as well as in humans from birth forward. One of the misunderstandings, most prominent in materialist sciences, is that experience consists of 'raw feels' {whatever those are meant, intended, to mean}. Another misunderstanding, also dominant among materialists in science and philosophy, is that phenomenology deals only with unreliable ideas derived from individual 'introspection', generally understood to be a capacity developed only at the level of reflective consciousness in our species. There is no spectrum of evolution and species development recognized in these notions. It is as if consciousness remains a complete mystery in terms of life itself, of lived experience and what is understood in it -- a light that suddenly, inexplicably, turns on in our species somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 years ago. Phenomenology recognizes that we can't understand ourselves and our capacities without understanding the history of biological evolution of our species and our cultural evolution in historical times. MP might have been the first phenomenological philosopher to call for an archaeology of consciousness, but I think Heidegger clearly attempted to take the same direction (though not as far back into the evolutionary past as MP has been willing to go). Bataille, too, has been willing to explore the animal aspects of our psychology and behaviors, but limited by a layer of theological and mythological ideation that seems to have blocked his own openness to the recognition of values and meaning felt already in the lived experiences of our animal forebears.

While clearing up confusions is important, it's my opinion that at this point in the discussion, the disagreements regarding consciousness do not seem to be due to confusion of terms; in my opinion, it's down to a disagreement about "which approach is most likely", based on what we know. (With the possible exception of @Pharaoh not understanding the HP, as he doesn't address it in his HCT.)

What 'we' {which 'we'?} consider to be the approach most likely to yield understanding of consciousness and mind is, as you say, "based on what we know." And we all know different things, different subject matters and disciplines, and possess varying degrees of access to/understanding of the many disciplines involved in the contemporary project of consciousness studies. In such a situation I think its incumbent on us all to attempt to explain and justify how we use the handful of words we casually trade back and forth in this contentious interdisciplinary field. It's appalling to me how little most scientists, including cognitive neuroscientists, understand about the exploration of the complexity of consciousness undertaken in phenomenology and affective neuroscience led by Panksepp, foregrounded in the thought of three or four of his forebears in theoretical biology.

You and @Usual Suspect , who both appear to favor emergent, biological approaches to consciousness seeem to understand that this would seem to entail strong emergence.

In other words, our disagreements at this point are based on preferences, not confusion.

Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference' to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence, especially in an age in which we know that we do not know the nature of Nature.
 
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Possibly the best quote in the entire thread ...

"Call me a strong emergentist if that's what it takes to provoke
deeper explorations of the nature of the emergence of consciousness
in the evolution of life. But surely it requires more than a 'preference'
to justify adhering to either strong or weak emergence,
especially in an age in which we know that
we do not know the nature of Nature."

- Constance Oct 05 2017


Bloody frame it and put in on your wall !

 
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