Would you define 'the (scientific) intersubjective approach' or link us to a source that explicates it? Thanks.
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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 12
- Thread starter Gene Steinberg
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Would you define 'the (scientific) intersubjective approach' or link us to a source that explicates it? Thanks.
This paper and the next one I'll link might help others here to see where @Pharoah and I are coming from . . . .
"The brain as part of an enactive system"
Gallagher, S., Hutto, D., Slaby, J. and Cole, J. (2013). The brain as part of an enactive system. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36 (4), 421-422.
Abstract: The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational- representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Changes to any of the bodily, environmental, or intersubjective conditions elicit responses from the system as a whole. On this view, rather than representing or computing information, the brain is better conceived as participating in the action.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1927&context=lhapapers
"The brain as part of an enactive system"
Gallagher, S., Hutto, D., Slaby, J. and Cole, J. (2013). The brain as part of an enactive system. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36 (4), 421-422.
Abstract: The notion of an enactive system requires thinking about the brain in a way that is different from the standard computational- representational models. In evolutionary terms, the brain does what it does and is the way that it is, across some scale of variations, because it is part of a living body with hands that can reach and grasp in certain limited ways, eyes structured to focus, an autonomic system, an upright posture, etc. coping with specific kinds of environments, and with other people. Changes to any of the bodily, environmental, or intersubjective conditions elicit responses from the system as a whole. On this view, rather than representing or computing information, the brain is better conceived as participating in the action.
https://ro.uow.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1927&context=lhapapers
I don't think @Pharoah is saying that we or any other animals experience phenomena/phenomenal appearances "sans quality." The issue concerns the location of the qualia experienced in perceiving things, others, and the gestalts presented in the human's or animal's environing situation. To speak only of visual perception is to limit the nature of what living beings sense and feel in their surroundings through many senses including the scents carried in the air at the place where we look upon the local world. A perceived 'blue wheelbarrow' does not itself experience 'blue', but most of us can and do perceive blue and all the other colors visible in the EM spectrum that our visual sense enables us to see and think about. Do we like blue? I love blue and especially blues mixed with greens, the whole spectrum from pale aqua, vivid aqua, teals, and a host of turquoises (the latter a broad range of varieties vividly expressed in mineralized stones). These colors affect me and attract me. The stones do not experience their colors, so far as I can know, but I unmistakably experience their colors, especially in bright sunlight. "Things seen are things as-seen," with and through the natural affordances available to us by which we can indeed see, variously, depending on the quality of the available light and sometimes with effects from adjacent colors, and depending also on whether we have attached ourselves to particular colors and hues because they please us, calm us, interest us, claim our attention aesthetically.
We can look at and see the selfsame blue-green turquoise in a lighted display case at a jeweler's store that someone else is seeing, but we cannot participate in the way another person sees it and feels it -- experiences it. Consult the artists, as MP did, for the exploration and reproduction of colors as seen within the perpetual shifting of light's facticities (particularly by the Impressionists who painted railroad stations and other scenes in a series, at different times of the day, in bright or fading sunlight, in fog, etc.).
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This paper might also be helpful:
Primary Intersubjectivity: Empathy, Affective Reversibility, Self-affection and the Primordial 'we'.
Topoi Special Issue, Vol 33, Issue 1: Embodiment and Empathy: Current Debates in Social Cognition, 2014
Anya Daly
Abstract: The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, just as the three intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/ intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations – pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc,. and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed.
https://www.academia.edu/4741002/Primary_Intersubjectivity_Empathy_Affective_Reversibility_Self-affection_and_the_Primordial_we?email_work_card=view-paper
Primary Intersubjectivity: Empathy, Affective Reversibility, Self-affection and the Primordial 'we'.
Topoi Special Issue, Vol 33, Issue 1: Embodiment and Empathy: Current Debates in Social Cognition, 2014
Anya Daly
Abstract: The arguments advanced in this paper are the following. Firstly, just as the three intersubjective levels, primary, secondary, and tertiary, mapped out different modes of access, so too response is similarly structured, from direct primordial responsiveness, to that informed by shared pragmatic concerns and narrative contexts, to that which demands the distantiation afforded by representation. Secondly, I propose that empathy is an essential mode of intentionality, integral to the primary level of subjectivity/ intersubjectivity, which is crucial to our survival as individuals and as a species. Further to this last point, I argue that empathy is not derived on the basis of intersubjectivity, nor does it merely disclose intersubjectivity, rather it is constitutive of intersubjectivity at the primary level. Empathy is a direct, irreducible intentionality separable in thought from the other primary intentional modes of perception, rationality, memory and imagination, but co-arising with these. In regard to the inter-personal level, the concrete relations with others, primary empathy is both the ground for the possibility of the secondary manifestations – pity, sympathy, perspective taking, etc,. and motivates them. Thirdly, it is the movement in the core of subjectivity initially generated by shifting attention between the ‘I’ and ‘we’ perspectives and later ‘solidified’ through affect to become shifting identification, which opens up the intersubjective domain. So we can affirm that we are not only born into sociality but our sociality goes to the roots of our being as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have claimed.
https://www.academia.edu/4741002/Primary_Intersubjectivity_Empathy_Affective_Reversibility_Self-affection_and_the_Primordial_we?email_work_card=view-paper
Soupie
Paranormal Adept
I think the enactive approach is wonderful, I really do. Of course our emotions, sensations, thoughts, etc involve our entire bodies, and is not done passively, etc.
But people have vivid conscious experiences while sleeping in their dark rooms with their motor systems frozen every night. And people have vivid (indeed more vidid than normal waking consciousness) when under the influence of chemicals like lsd and DMT.
How we are and normal, everyday conscious experience certainly involve the entire body, but ultimately the activity of the entire body is not necessary for conscious experience. Just the brain.
Furthermore, enactive approaches to not solve nor resolve the HP.
But I’m not looking for an argument. I’m not. You and Pharoah are welcome to forge forward with weak/strong emergence. It seems a wild goose chase to me. I am certainly open to findings or new ideas that push the discussion in that direction.
On the other hand, the intrinsic nature approach and indirect realism—while as radical as all get out—resolve a lot of the mysteries for me, and do so while being perfectly in line with QFT.
At this point I don’t expect anyone to consider these radical ideas. It’s enough for me that others understand them as don’t misrepresent them. No dung piles contemplating tea at noon here please. Haha.
smcder
Paranormal Adept
"But people have vivid conscious experiences while sleeping in their dark rooms with their motor systems frozen every night. And people have vivid (indeed more vidid than normal waking consciousness) when under the influence of chemicals like lsd and DMT.
How we are and normal, everyday conscious experience certainly involve the entire body, but ultimately the activity of the entire body is not necessary for conscious experience. Just the brain."
Maybe...
First, there are no "just brains" out there. People without arms and legs (from birth) still have lots of connections to the rest of the body and probably some to the limbs they never had, certainly much of the body has to be present for the brain to survive. Without some inputs, would the brain even develop?
Second, the motor system is frozen I think only for certain periods (REM?) and even if frozen, this doesn't mean there isn't connection to the limbs and brain. Perhaps a brain and some connections to these limbs is sufficient for experience of some kind, but I wouldn't give much for the quality of experience and development of someone who had only these inputs from birth.
Third, "vivid" yes - but fully detailed? There is memory of a lifetime of experiences to draw on in dreams and imagination but even then, there are limits. Even awake, I have had incredible visions of being surrounded by pure light, and vivid scenery, more vivid than I can see with my eyes open and strange imagery (all without psychedelics) but I cannot in my imagination look at a book, then look away and then look back and have any continuity (classic test for lucid dreaming, I can make up words or "see" phrases I have memorized, but look closely, the font changes, the lines aren't straight, etc. So even if only the brain, some connections, rudimentary experiences and memory are sufficient for vivid experience, it doesn't seem that's enough to have the detail of experiences involving the real, external world.
My daughter and I always knew when our Chows were dreaming {especially the male, Miles} while they were sleeping on the floor of the room where we did schoolwork and projects. Miles would move his legs as if running after some prey, eyelids blinking (REM sleep), and often vocalizing. Dogs also have purely aesthetic responses to their natural surroundings, especially outside when the season is changing or the air is moving, carrying scents of plants and flowers or the sea.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
I've recently come to the conclusion that consciousness plays an entirely neutral role in the concept of who we are, and therefore has no bearing on notions such as afterlives and reincarnation: Philosophy, Science, and the Unexplained
smcder
Paranormal Adept
Our dogs do this too - sometimes Lucky seems so upset while dreaming that I wake him - we rescued him near death and I am afraid he is reliving something awful from that time.
It could very well be that his subconscious mind continues to process his helplessness and terror at that time. I think it's good that you wake him from those dreams, reminding him that he's safe now with you. It's certainly likely that dogs and other animals experience PTSD, and that nightmares and night terrors are expressions of this condition in them just as they are in us. Glad to think of this dog in your attentive care. <3
This is because we gather and collect our experiences and store them in memory, the beautiful ones and the traumatic ones. Very harsh experiences in childhood are most often repressed but remain stored in the subconscious mind and cross the fluid barrier into consciousness while we are asleep. I believe this is widely understood in the field of psychology. It applies alike to adults who are victims of violent personal assaults and all the traumas inflicted by war from the air or on the ground. Do you think any survivors of the Holocaust go on to lead happy, chirpy, cheerful, untroubled lives afterward? They very often become recluses, unable to move about in the outside world. This reminds me of the title of one of Wolfgang Giegerich's book titles, The Soul Always Thinks, which we discussed here several years ago. To refresh memory, he is a major Jungian scholar and therapist.
I agree, no need to argue, but a need to comprehend our different perspectives. I understand what you've been saying much better now. I said much earlier in this thread that I find panpsychist and panprotopsychist approaches to be interesting, and there is certainly a quantum substrate beneath the evolution of the universe to the extent that we know the nature of the universe. I still think, as I said long ago, that quantum interaction and entanglement have influenced the habits of interaction and relationship developed during the evolution of stars, planets, galaxies, etc., in what we think of as the universe in which we exist. Most significantly, however, life evolved here and doubtless on countless planets in countless galaxies, and I think it is life, lived experience, that has generated consciousness and mind in a universe that seems not to have hosted these capabilities in the long, deep, past. I think we need to understand life more fully before we can understand the immense changes brought about through protoconsciousness, consciousness, and mind.
I can see why you find this set of ideas to be satisfactory re the MBP. We should agree to disagree on the merits of that group of ideas vis a vis the contributions of psychology, philosophy of mind, biology, and phenomenology to understanding consciousness and its enabling of mind. I do think there has been some success in blending the two approaches and will link a book now available online covering that recent history.
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
The thing is. One of the most tried and true methods of comprehending different perspectives is by understanding each other's argument. Argument is in and of itself not offensive in the least. Rather it is how arguments are conducted that gives them their character.
How To Argue
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smcder
Paranormal Adept
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
A true classicSo...You're starting an argument about whether or not to have an argument?
I just realized I have chairs exactly like those in my kitchen !
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
No.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
It’s not meant as an argument but rather as a criticism. My point is that even if you say qualities are brain or mind independent then you still have to come up with a language and an explanation for those differences that various creatures attribute to things that we would formerly have referred to as qualitative. The smell of dung for me as opposed to a dung beetle is not a qualitative difference (on your account) but a... [!?] difference.
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
No neither.... this is hard!
Pharoah
Paranormal Adept
No I don’t. Re 1 It makes no sense (as I tried to point out re space/ time/quality) to say that quality emerges from space. Think about an impressionist painting and a line draw perspective drawing of a corridor. The colours create spatial imagery in the former but the corridor does not create qualities of colour in the latter.
re 2 that is too simplistic a question
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