Tyger
Paranormal Adept
Continuation of 'Consciousness and the Paranormal Part I'
LINK: Consciousness and the Paranormal | Page 124 | The Paracast Community Forums
LINK: Consciousness and the Paranormal | Page 124 | The Paracast Community Forums
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http://consc.net/neh/papers/neh/strawson1.doc
What is the relation between an experience, the subject of the experience, and the content of the experience?
Galen Strawson Unfinisheddraft
________________________________________________________
‘Eventually meditators…come to see that the perceiver is only the subject side of a momentary experience, an aspect of the perception or thought itself’.
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1 Introduction
2 Subjects of experience—thick, traditional, thin
3 Terms and assumptions
4 ‘[E = S:C]’
5 The Subject thesis: polarity
6 ‘[E = S = C]’?
7 ‘The thoughts themselves are the thinkers’
8 Pause
9 Object and property
10 [E = S = C]
11 Conclusion
...
Thanks for the link, Soupie. Strawson is an excellent philosopher. I like his note 4, on the first page:
"[4] ‘Representationists’ deny it (they sometimes deny their denial). They are the principal remaining representatives of an extraordinary sect (now slowly expiring) whose members single-handedly made the twentieth century the silliest in the history of philosophy. Members of the sect typically pursue the project of trying to define the mental reductively in non-mental terms. In order to do so they have to deny the existence of experiential qualitative character—however evasive they are about this. (The idealist project of defining the physical in non-physical terms is far less mad—infinitely less mad, strictly, because the reductionist project involves the denial of a certainty.)"
We should have been there:
PANPSYCHISM, RUSSELLIAN MONISM AND THE NATURE OF THE PHYSICAL
August 23rd-24th 2013, University of Oslo, Georg Morgenstiernes hus [map], Room 652 (on the top floor)
It seems that physics can only tell us about the relational or dispositional structure of the physical. Fundamental physical properties such as spin, mass and charge can be exhaustively characterized in terms of their relations to other fundamental properties. But there is reason to think that relations need relata with intrinsic properties, and dispositions need categorical grounds. What can we say about this aspect of the physical, if physics is silent about it? Some hope that a scientific revolution could eventually give us access to physical intrinsic properties; others think we will always remain ignorant about them. But some suggest that we should consider the fact that mental properties are intrinsic and categorical, and are in fact the only such properties we know with certainty to exist. Could mental properties be the intrinsic ground of everything physical? This is what Russellian monist panpsychism affirms. This conference will explore the details and motivations of this radical metaphysical view.
Conference: Panpsychism, Russellian monism and the nature of thephysical
But there are or will be papers from it, and according to google Chalmers and Goff have been involved in dialogue. Finding the papers available online is another problem.
Here's a promising article on the topic "subject of experience."
Okay, I'm working my way through this article, and while I'm not finished, several of the authors concepts resonate deeply, very deeply, with me. I'm anxious to read where he goes with it.Here's a promising article on the topic "subject of experience."
After I finish this article, I'd like to find one by Chalmers (and others) addressing the same topic.Thin subjects certainly exist, then, and are to be counted among the objects, on the present scheme of things; although objects are processes, wholly constituted out of time-matter, process-stuff, and although ‘subjectivity’ may turn out to be helpful alternative to ‘subject’, in certain contexts, by the time I have finished. I take it, as a materialist, that that all thin subjects are entirely constituted out of process-stuff in the brain. Cerebral process-stuff is constantly being recruited or corralled into one transient subject-constituting (and, equally, experience-constituting) piece or synergy of process-stuff after another. This, I propose, is what the conscious life of a human being consists in. ...
Okay, I'm working my way through this article, and while I'm not finished, several of the authors concepts resonate deeply, very deeply, with me. I'm anxious to read where he goes with it.
I see that the author identifies as materialist and apparently is a monist... Interesting.
Anyhow, this partially summative paragraph captures many of the ideas I've clumsily tried to share here:
After I finish this article, I'd like to find one by Chalmers (and others) addressing the same topic.
At the end Strawson says he's a "naive" moral realist and compares moral truths to mathematical truths - noting that the physicalist who denies consciousness denies these moral truths but then also will have a problem with mathematics.