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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

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http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf

1. Human beings are rational to a significant (though highly imperfect) degree.
2. If human beings are rational, there is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
3. There is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
4. If conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant, there is no explanation for the fact that human beings are rational. (Argued for above.)
5. Conscious experience is explanatorily relevant.
6. If the physical realm is causally closed, conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant.

7. The physical realm is not causally closed.

Why are we happy to be rid of causal closure?

1. Mind-body supervenience does not obtain: it will now be the case that the physical properties of an organism develop differently, when accompanied by conscious experience, than they would in the absence of such experience

2. Major objections to mind-body dualism no longer apply: for example the objection to a conscious state, the entertaining of an idea, having any effects on the physical state of the brain no longer applies or Lycan's objection:

“In any case it does not seem that immaterial entities could cause motion consistently with any of the conservation laws of physics, such as that regarding matter-energy; physical energy would have to vanish and reappear inside human brains”

3. There is no empirical evidence for determinism.
 
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf

This last part of the article is the most forthright as to any agenda (Hasker is associated with ISCID) and may or may not put Nagel fully in context, thought I understand Nagel's most recent work Mind and Cosmos has been attacked because it received some support from intelligent design supporters.

At any rate, I think this whole section brings up a real point and that is that it's difficult to not be a reductivist while remaining naturalistic ... but I think that would characterize your position @Constance correct?

Nagle and the cosmic authority problem
Thomas Nagel The Last Word
“Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.”

"My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. (p. 131)

Nagel himself, even though he shares in the “cosmic authority problem,” strenuously resists this facile appeal to Darwinism."

Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.

Nagel, however, wishes to resist any move in the direction of a religious interpretation.

He suggests that “the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe is itself somehow a fundamental feature of the universe,” and while admitting that this “has a quasi-religious ‘ring’ to it, something vaguely Spinozistic,” maintains that “one can admit such an enrichment of the fundamental elements of the natural order without going over to anything that should count literally as a religious belief” (p. 132).

Still, he is forced to admit (with an acknowledgment to Mark Johnson) that “if one asks, ‘Why is the natural order such as to make the appearance of rational beings likely?’ it is very difficult to imagine any answer to the question that is not teleological” (p. 138 n.). I think it is fair to say that for Nagel, not being a reductivist while remaining naturalistic has proved very difficult indeed.
 
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International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ISCID also hosted an online forum called Brainstorms and maintains a copyrighted online user-written Internet encyclopedia called the ISCID Encyclopedia of Science and Philosophy.

The society featured online chats with intelligent-design proponents and others sympathetic to the movement or interested in aspects of complex systems. Past chats included people such as Ray Kurzweil, David Chalmers, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Michael Langan and Robert Wright.
 
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf

This last part of the article is the most forthright as to any agenda (Hasker is associated with ISCID) and may or may not put Nagel fully in context, thought I understand Nagel's most recent work Mind and Cosmos has been attacked because it received some support from intelligent design supporters.

At any rate, I think this whole section brings up a real point and that is that it's difficult to not be a reductivist while remaining naturalistic ... but I think that would characterize your position @Constance correct?

Nagle and the cosmic authority problem
Thomas Nagel The Last Word
“Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion.”

"My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed. (p. 131)

Nagel himself, even though he shares in the “cosmic authority problem,” strenuously resists this facile appeal to Darwinism."

Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.

Nagel, however, wishes to resist any move in the direction of a religious interpretation.

He suggests that “the capacity of the universe to generate organisms with minds capable of understanding the universe is itself somehow a fundamental feature of the universe,” and while admitting that this “has a quasi-religious ‘ring’ to it, something vaguely Spinozistic,” maintains that “one can admit such an enrichment of the fundamental elements of the natural order without going over to anything that should count literally as a religious belief” (p. 132).

Still, he is forced to admit (with an acknowledgment to Mark Johnson) that “if one asks, ‘Why is the natural order such as to make the appearance of rational beings likely?’ it is very difficult to imagine any answer to the question that is not teleological” (p. 138 n.). I think it is fair to say that for Nagel, not being a reductivist while remaining naturalistic has proved very difficult indeed.

Steve, this post of yours on Hasker, Nagel, and Langan has motivated me to read some of Langan, where I found this compact expression of his theory (worth reading) at the first link below. The idea of a 'block universe' in which time is not real is just an idea, one perspective among others taken on the ontological question that motivates us and has done so going back into our species' ancient history and late prehistory. From another perspective, our own individually and collectively, we approach this question from the vantage point, the innumerable successive vantage points, of 'lived reality' -- what we know from within our situation in the world through our interrogations of the world. As we see in our own time, sufficient interrogation of the world {of the nature of 'reality'} brings us to the point of recognizing and interrogating ourselves, our consciousness and its origin in the natural world. Finally in late 20th c. many perspectives on the relationship of mind to world, consciousness to reality, have come together in the fascinating field of consciousness studies, where the temporality of our existence and thinking can itself become the subject of our inquiry. Of course, Wallace Stevens had a poem for this, actually hundreds of poems written in the light of this inquiry, but the one I'll copy following the link to the short paper by Langan is a major example of the foregrounding of temporality in Stevens's phenomenological thought and art. I should add a note for readers of Stevens: he wrote that in his view "the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." So his poems require many readings, sometimes over many years, for one to recognize the intricate layering of his concepts and images in his poetry as a whole. Just realized that in this aspect too his poetry is like life, accumulating perspectives on experience, returning to the past, sensing the deep harmonics in conscious and subconscious existence.

A Very Brief History of Time - Christopher Michael Langan

THE PURE GOOD OF THEORY

I

ALL THE PRELUDES TO FELICITY

It is time that beats in the breast and it is time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud,
The mind that knows it is destroyed by time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of Time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.

II

DESCRIPTION OF A PLATONIC PERSON

Then came Brazil to nourish the emaciated
Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois, green glade
Of serpents like z rivers simmering,

Green glade and holiday hotel and world
Of the future, in which the memory had gone
From everything, flying the flag of the nude,

The flag of the nude above the holiday hotel.
But there was one invalid in that green glade
And beneath that handkerchief drapeau, severe,

Signal, a character out of solitude,
Who was what people had been and still were,
Who lay in bed on the west wall of the sea,

Ill of a question like a malady,
Ill of a constant question in his thought,
Unhappy about the sense of happiness.

Was it that, a sense and beyond intelligence?
Could the future rest on a sense and be beyond
Intelligence? On what does the present rest?
This platonic person discovered a soul in the world
And studied it in his holiday hotel.
He was a Jew from Europe or might have been.

III

FIRE-MONSTERS IN THE MILKY BRAIN

Man, that is not born of woman but of air,
That comes here in the solar chariot,
Like rhetoric in a narration of the eye—

We knew one parent must have been divine,
Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia,
Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning,
As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was
A metamorphosis of paradise,

Malformed, the world was paradise malformed . . .
Now, closely the ear attends the varying
Of this precarious music, the change of key

Not quite detected at the moment of change
And, now, it attends the difficult difference.
To say the solar chariot is junk

Is not a variation but an end.
Yet to speak of the whole world as metaphor
Is still to stick to the contents of the mind

And the desire to believe in a metaphor.
It is to stick to the nicer knowledge of
Belief, that what it believes in is not true.

IV

DRY BIRDS ARE FLUTTERING IN BLUE LEAVES—

It is never the thing but the version of the thing:
The fragrance of the woman not her self,
Her self in her manner not the solid block,

The day in its color not perpending time,
Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord,
The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.

These devastations are the divertissements
Of a destroying spiritual that digs-a-dog,
Whines in its hole for puppies to come see,

Springs outward, being large, and, in the dust,
Being small, inscribes ferocious alphabets,
Flies like a bat expanding as it flies,

Until its wings bear off night's middle witch;
and yet remains the same, the beast of light,
Groaning in half-exploited gutturals

The need of its element, the final need
Of final access to its element;
Of access like the page of a wiggy book,

Touched suddenly by the universal flare
For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat
The eloquence of light's faculties.

--Wallace Stevens
 
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@Constance

I remember the Langan essay from a while back, the encounter with a garden slug opening ... I'll re-read it. Stevens is so opaque to me, but I know from reading Nietzsche and Melville what an investment an author can require and I'm getting bits and pieces ... I'm slumming philosophically today with Dreyfus and Kierkegaard and then I am also going back over posts on the thread, so much there left along the way to pick up ... but a lot that surfaces and re-surfaces ... an enormous topic and I wind my way around and around a contemplative maze in a contemplative haze.

I'm tempted to pull strands together from recent posts that might not strictly fit together but have made associations in my mind, doing a little clean up I guess:

This question (from Nagel):

Even without God, the idea of a natural sympathy between the deepest truths of nature and the deepest layers of the human mind, which can be exploited to allow gradual development of a truer and truer conception of reality, makes us more at home in the universe than is secularly comfortable.
seems to be answered by this:

Intentionality expresses the fundamental feature of consciousness: it is always consciousness about something. Consciousness is not an abstract mechanism that processes raw data; its core structure correlates with and, therefore, depends on grasped phenomena. This ensures the impossibility of a description of consciousness which is separate from perceived objects.

and then taken a step further from man at home in the universe to man as (c)reator:

One of the most interesting questions being pursued by some contemporary philosophers and scientists is the question of how consciousness and mind participate with matter or energy in the production of ‘reality’, a question opened up by the major developments in physics following the discovery of the quantum substrate of reality that generates macroscopic processes in physical nature and, it follows, generates processes in embodied consciousness (given that the latter has likewise evolved out of nature).

... and then this:

Yes, but 'meaning' not in terms of a final, fixed meaning laid upon us from outside the world we live in. We don't 'generate' consciousness and mind, but we can't avoid generating meaning in our words, behaviors, and actions insofar as these affect others. We have innate obligations to others, and our behaviors and actions (even our total failure to respond to others) are subject to interpretation by those others, even by all others. This is why Sartre said in the late 1930s that "hell is other people." We possess a radical freedom assessed in detail by Sartre in Being and Nothingness and in later works, a "situated freedom" within which we can always behave authentically, sometimes at great cost. As Sartre put it, we are "condemned" to this existential freedom.

Makes me think both of the 360 vision and life review of NDEs (the bolded part)

and also Dreyfus:

Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, that goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is through our involved action. The way things show up for a detached thinker is a partial and distorted version of the way things show up to a committed individual.

Which is an interesting epistemology - one's intentions and actions begin to shape one's world ... and that's why some of the more literally deterministic and materialist conceptions of the world feel bloodless and passive.

A thought that came from this article on why Kierkegaard would have hated the internet (and did hate the press in his day):

Professor Hubert Dreyfus

People in the ethical sphere could use the Internet to make and keep track of commitments but would be brought to the despair of possibility by the ease of making and unmaking commitments on the Net. Only in the religious sphere is nihilism overcome by making a risky, unconditional commitment. The Internet, however, which offers a risk-free simulated world, would tend to undermine rather than support any such ultimate concern.
 
Of vast relevance to our theories in this thread is a landmark research report and photograph linked by Chris today at

Proof of Alien Life Announced–––Here's the PROOF! | The Paracast Community Forums

Extracts:

“Diatoms are coming in from space all the time, raining down on Earth, these findings are about to blow all theories of biology and evolution out of the water, they will have to start re-writing text books."

“This is the tipping point towards science proving that life is continually coming to Earth from space, and that it did so in the first instance.”

Another researcher involved in the study, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, said algae-like organisms have previously been found on meteorites which have fallen to Earth.

He said: “We are starting to find diatoms in space, mixed up in debris in the stratosphere.

“The evidence points towards theories that complex living organisms are falling from the skies to Earth.

“The space station is orbiting the earth in a total vacuum, there is no air, so it is a total defiance of the laws of physics to say these organisms were blown into space from Earth.

“The only explanation is that they have come from elsewhere in space, and this supports long-held theories that plankton, and therefore all life on Earth including humans, originated from organisms in space.”

He said particles of DNA from extraterrestrial life are also being picked up by organisms on earth and built into their genetic make up.

He said: “We have evidence that even in the human genome, 40 per cent of our DNA is viral, and it has been incorporated during our evolution.

“There is growing evidence that says this DNA comes from space and it is carried into our atmosphere on micro-meteorites before dissipating.

“It is then taken up by bacteria and viruses.

“Everything that we have on the Earth is derived from space, including humans.”

Proof aliens exist: Does this picture prove life exists on other planets | World | News | Daily Express
 
Of vast relevance to our theories in this thread is a landmark research report and photograph linked by Chris today at

Proof of Alien Life Announced–––Here's the PROOF! | The Paracast Community Forums

Extracts:

“Diatoms are coming in from space all the time, raining down on Earth, these findings are about to blow all theories of biology and evolution out of the water, they will have to start re-writing text books."

“This is the tipping point towards science proving that life is continually coming to Earth from space, and that it did so in the first instance.”

Another researcher involved in the study, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, said algae-like organisms have previously been found on meteorites which have fallen to Earth.

He said: “We are starting to find diatoms in space, mixed up in debris in the stratosphere.

“The evidence points towards theories that complex living organisms are falling from the skies to Earth.

“The space station is orbiting the earth in a total vacuum, there is no air, so it is a total defiance of the laws of physics to say these organisms were blown into space from Earth.

“The only explanation is that they have come from elsewhere in space, and this supports long-held theories that plankton, and therefore all life on Earth including humans, originated from organisms in space.”

He said particles of DNA from extraterrestrial life are also being picked up by organisms on earth and built into their genetic make up.

He said: “We have evidence that even in the human genome, 40 per cent of our DNA is viral, and it has been incorporated during our evolution.

“There is growing evidence that says this DNA comes from space and it is carried into our atmosphere on micro-meteorites before dissipating.

“It is then taken up by bacteria and viruses.

“Everything that we have on the Earth is derived from space, including humans.”

Proof aliens exist: Does this picture prove life exists on other planets | World | News | Daily Express

It makes sense to me ... and might quell some of the urgency to get off the planet and go out there if we did know that some part of us, in the form of a genome were already out there, came from out there ... of course it might make some folk feel the other way and I'd be the last person to stop anyone from leaving ... I would rather they pick the place up a bit before they go, but I figure they'll be time enough to do that once they are gone. ;-)
 
You seem to be adding an extra "layer" to consciousness. The phenomenal experience of touching a silky fur coat is one thing, but you seem to be suggesting that the phenomenal experience (consciousness) of soft fur has yet an additional feel to it.

Information itself doesn't have a feel to it, it is the "feel." The feel is constituted of information.

Consciousness doesn't have a feel to it, it is the feel.


We don't receive information through phenomenal experience. Phenomenal experience is information. The physical body receives physical energy from within and from the surrounding environment. The physical body, environment, and energy all simultaneously have an informational state. It is this informational state (or pattern of information) that constitutes what we know as "consciousness."

Another reason I love the IPoM is that information is the universal language, right? There is all kinds of matter and energy out there, so how does it all come together? It comes together as information: phenomenal experience and cognition.


And as I've answered several times, my affinity for IIT has more to do with the concept that information = mental. That's it. I can't vouch for the specifics of his theory, as I don't know the specifics. Do I think living organisms do something "special" with information? Yes, I do.

As I've noted, I believe:

Physical structures = Proto-Mind

Living physical structures = Mind


I would prefer if you could articulate your views in your own words. However, nothing I have read of those thinkers indicates that consciousness cannot be constituted of information. Even the Spread Mind model could work with the concept of consciousness as information. (However, I do think there are issues with the model.) As smcder noted, otherwise it doesn't address the hard problem.


No. But until a conscious, self-aware, non-organic being exists, the Luddites would never be convinced, even if it turned out to be true. And they still wouldn't be convinced until it was unequivocally demonstrated for them (as it should be). (For the record, I do believe there are already some non-organic structures/systems that are generating phenomenal experience. It's possible that video cameras, audio records, etc. are generating some very basic, low-fidelity phenomenal experiences. Of course, these structures are not consciously aware of these experiences and have no way of reporting them.)

@Constance, let's imagine that consciousness is one day discovered to be constituted of a fundamental property or substance known as Phen. Will this discovering in any way change how your consciousness currently "feels?"

I'm still not convinced that conscious, self-aware, organic beings exist! (other than myself) ... so in addition to being a Luddite ... I'm a Solipsist. (I always put that down on forms that ask for my religious preference.)

Here is a poem written by a video camera, a 1995 Magnavox, I think? You may be able to tell from the style.

The cloud endures like a dead tuna.
O, endurance!
The mainland waves like a stormy cloud.
Life, death, and endurance.


All rains fight old, dead sidewalks.
Girls grow like fast workers.
All sidewalks love big, fast streets.
Stop quietly like a faceless hood.
Where is the rainy hood?
Adventure, courage, and death.
The old mast quietly pulls the sailor.
God, endurance!
Where is the rainy sea?
 
Of vast relevance to our theories in this thread is a landmark research report and photograph linked by Chris today at

Proof of Alien Life Announced–––Here's the PROOF! | The Paracast Community Forums

Extracts:

“Diatoms are coming in from space all the time, raining down on Earth, these findings are about to blow all theories of biology and evolution out of the water, they will have to start re-writing text books."

“This is the tipping point towards science proving that life is continually coming to Earth from space, and that it did so in the first instance.”

Another researcher involved in the study, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, said algae-like organisms have previously been found on meteorites which have fallen to Earth.

He said: “We are starting to find diatoms in space, mixed up in debris in the stratosphere.

“The evidence points towards theories that complex living organisms are falling from the skies to Earth.

“The space station is orbiting the earth in a total vacuum, there is no air, so it is a total defiance of the laws of physics to say these organisms were blown into space from Earth.

“The only explanation is that they have come from elsewhere in space, and this supports long-held theories that plankton, and therefore all life on Earth including humans, originated from organisms in space.”

He said particles of DNA from extraterrestrial life are also being picked up by organisms on earth and built into their genetic make up.

He said: “We have evidence that even in the human genome, 40 per cent of our DNA is viral, and it has been incorporated during our evolution.

“There is growing evidence that says this DNA comes from space and it is carried into our atmosphere on micro-meteorites before dissipating.

“It is then taken up by bacteria and viruses.

“Everything that we have on the Earth is derived from space, including humans.”

Proof aliens exist: Does this picture prove life exists on other planets | World | News | Daily Express

I remember reading some of Fred Hoyle's books on panspermia:

Fred Hoyle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In his later years, Hoyle became a staunch critic of theories of abiogenesis used to explain the origin of life on Earth. With Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle promoted the hypothesis that the first life on Earth began in space, spreading through the universe via panspermia, and that evolution on earth is influenced by a steady influx of viruses arriving via comets. His belief that comets had a significant percentage of organic molecules was well ahead of his time, as the dominant views in the 1970s and 1980s were that comets largely consisted of water-ice, and the presence of organic matter was then considered highly controversial. Wickramasinghe wrote in 2003 "In the highly polarized polemic between Darwinism and creationism, our position is unique. Although we do not align ourselves with either side, both sides treat us as opponents. Thus we are outsiders with an unusual perspective—and our suggestion for a way out of the crisis has not yet been considered".[23]
 
@Constance
"the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully"

I would say the poem resists my intelligence most successfully! As does Langan's writing ... but I semi-grok it, I remember reading that essay some time back ... he retains the kind of playfulness characteristic of the gifted adolescent, a playfulness which belies the ponderous IQ he bears ... at least in that short essay, some of his longer writing is a ponderal match for his quotient.

re: Stevens - I searched for the poem above and came across this list of resources:

Wallace Stevens Online Resources | BIG OTHER

including this collection of Stevens reading his poems, about 60 recordings:

Wallace Stevens
 
miscellanea from Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death by FWH Myers
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Human Personality, by Frederic W. H. Myers.

First, a definition of consciousness in terms of memory, that might be helpful:

This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious if it is potentially memorable;—if it can be recollected, under any{30} circumstances, by the subject concerned. ...

... Certain hypnotic subjects, indeed, who can be made to remember their dreams by suggestion, apparently remember dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams previously remembered. And we shall have various other examples of the unexpected recollection of experiences supposed to have been entirely devoid of consciousness.

Secondly, some notes on multiple personalities:

Here are three cases [the one just given, that of another patient of his own, and that of Félida X.] in which a second personality—perfectly sane, thoroughly practical, and perfectly in touch and harmony with its surroundings—came to the surface, so to speak, and assumed absolute control of the physical organisation for long periods of time together.{51}

During the stay of the second personality the primary or original self was entirely blotted out, and the time so occupied was a blank. In neither of the cases described had the primary self any knowledge of the second personality, except from the report of others or letters from the second self, left where they could be found on the return of the primary self to consciousness.

The second personality, on the other hand, in each case, knew of the primary self, but only as another person—never as forming a part of, or in any way belonging to their own personalities.

This next part I find really interesting ... I've heard that in cases of multiple personality, one may be left handed and another right, one may wear glasses and the other exhibit perfect vision and in one case "gender" was changed from female to an intimidating male presence that terrified the others.

In the case of both Félida X. and Alma Z., there was always immediate and marked improvement in the physical condition when the second personality made its appearance.
 
I'm tempted to say something about jumping the shark, but I won't even mention it.

A Very Brief History of Time - Christopher Michael Langan

Fascinating. Not sure if I had read that before or not.

Because time is defined in terms of transformations among spatial arrangements of objects, it is conceptually entwined with space. Thus, it is actually part of a linguistic complex called spacetime. Spatiotemporal relations exist on many levels; if level one consists of simple relationships of objects in space and time, then level two consists of relationships of such relationships, and so on. ...

Unfortunately, the conveniences of analytic geometry came at the price of mind-body dualism. This was Descartes’ idea that the self, or "mind", was a nonphysical substance that could be left out of physical reasoning with impunity. For some purposes, this was true. But as we saw in the next-to-last paragraph, the relationship of mind to reality is not that simple. While the temporal grammar of physics determines the neural laws of cognition, cognitive grammar projects itself onto physical reality in such a way as to determine the form that physical grammar must assume. Because the form of physical grammar limits the content of physical grammar, this makes cognition a potential factor in determining the laws of nature. In principle, cognitive and physical grammars may influence each other symmetrically. ...

The symmetric influence of cognitive and physical grammars implies a directional symmetry of time. ...

The idea that the universe created itself brings a whole new meaning to bidirectional time, and thus to the idea that cognition may play a role in the creation of reality. As a self-creative mechanism for the universe is sought, it becomes apparent that cognition is the only process lending itself to plausible interpretation as a means of temporal feedback from present to past. Were cognition to play such a role, then in a literal sense, its most universal models of temporal reality would become identical to the reality being modeled. Time would become cognition, and space would become a system of geometric relations that evolves by distributed cognitive processing. ...
If I'm understanding him correctly, which I'm probably not, @Constance may need not look any further for a deep, philosophical model of consciousness as information, i.e., the transformations among spatial arrangements of objects.

This is certainly a dual-aspect theory very, very similar to the Jung-Pauli model.

Langan: Unbound Telesis < Cognitive & Physical properties

Jung/Pauli: Unus Mundus < Mind & Matter properties

I am very fascinated by Jung's and Langan's ideas about the nature of this most primitive substance. Both models postulate that there are both mental and material archetypal (Platonic) forms that arise from this primitive substance.

From the point of view of physics this "background domain" refers to the holistic state of a system prior to the transition to a measured state. From the point of view of psychology it refers to the mentally unconscious prior to the transition to a conscious state. Both transitions can be described as transitions from a non-Boolean domain to domains with Boolean classications based on binary alternatives (cf. Primas 2007). In physics these appear as classical states actualized due to measurements; in psychology they appear as actualized distinct mental representations. The simple but radical idea proposed by Pauli and Jung suggests a non-Boolean background domain from which the mental and the material are supposed to emerge as epistemically distinguishable. Although physics and psychology point to their common basis in different ways, the basis itself is assumed to be of unitary nature: a psychophysically neutral domain that is neither material nor mental and describable by a non-Boolean neutral language. Of course, this should be understood as a "caricature" of a much more complicated scheme, with many unexplored details left open. ...

Already in 1948, Pauli expressed his predilection for such a psychophysically neutral domain beneath (or beyond) the mental and the material in a letter to Fierz:16

The ordering and regulating factors must be placed beyond the distinction of "physical" and "psychic" as Plato's "ideas" share the notion of a concept and of a force of nature (they create actions out of themselves). I am very much in favor of referring to the "ordering" and "regulating" factors in terms of "archetypes"; but then it would be inadmissible to define them as contents of the psyche.

Among Jungians there is agreement that the shadow and the anima/animus complex are the first, and therefore least deep-seated archetypes with whose manifestations individuals typically become acquainted. Candidates for more fundamental archetypes are the self, as the goal of the individuation process, and maybe most basic the archetype of number, expressing qualitative principles like unity, duality, trinity, quaternity, and so forth.

The notion proposed for the ontic, psychophysically neutral domain is the unus mundus [Unbound Telesis], the one world, a notion that Jung adopted from the physician and alchemist Gerardus Dorneus (late 16th century). ...
Recall my earlier comparison of the mind to the concept (archetype) of three. I've also conjectured that quale are archetypal (the post is here somewhere).

(As a sidenote, although I'm not talking to @Constance until she answers my question about jellyfish :p, this does clarify for a me a difference in our thinking (among many). Namely, that she believes consciousness to be truly fundamental and thus phenomenology capable of revealing fundamental truths; whereas I believe consciousness to co-arise with energy-matter from a yet more fundamental substance, and thus believe that phenomenological introspection can't penetrate the most fundamental level of reality.
 
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I'm tempted to say something about jumping the shark, but I won't even mention it.

A Very Brief History of Time - Christopher Michael Langan

Fascinating. Not sure if I had read that before or not.


If I'm understanding him correctly, which I'm probably not, @Constance may need not look any further for a deep, philosophical model of consciousness as information, i.e., the transformations among spatial arrangements of objects.

This is certainly a dual-aspect theory very, very similar to the Jung-Pauli model.

Langan: Unbound Telesis < Cognitive & Physical properties

Jung/Pauli: Unus Mundus < Mind & Matter properties

I am very fascinated by Jung's and Langan's ideas about the nature of this most primitive substance. Both models postulate that there are both mental and material archetypal (Platonic) forms that arise from this primitive substance.


Recall my earlier comparison of the mind to the concept (archetype) of three. I've also conjectured that quale are archetypal (the post is here somewhere).

(As a sidenote, although I'm not talking to @Constance until she answers my question about jellyfish :p, this does clarify for a me a difference in our thinking (among many). Namely, that she believes consciousness to be truly fundamental and thus phenomenology capable of revealing fundamental truths; whereas I believe consciousness to co-arise with matter from a yet more fundamental substance, and thus believe that phenomenological introspection can't penetrate the the most fundamental level of reality. The level where everything and nothing is.

I am very fascinated by Jung's and Langan's ideas about the nature of this most primitive substance. Both models postulate that there are both mental and material archetypal (Platonic) forms that arise from this primitive substance.

Primal substance is a fascinating idea ... and we seem to have two other possibilities that can equally fascinate and which one we fasten-ate onto may depend on arbitrary factors such as where we are born:

1.) creation ex nihilo although this presupposed a kind of primal substance in the form of God, I think we can distinguish the ideas, if not the fascination they hold

2) co-dependent arising which is very much like the picture you posted of a circle of people, their laps serving as chair each for one another ... and it is a very different sort of idea because it doesn't talk about beginnings and endings, so it has a circular idea of history ... whereas the Western tradition is built on Hebrew philosophy which is linear in its view of history.

(Would we view quarks differently and would we have come across other equations to support that view if our underlying assumptions were different? I can at least well imagine though it's heretical to question the objectivity of science, I really hope we're no longer so naïve.)

Namely, that she believes consciousness to be truly fundamental and thus phenomenology capable of revealing fundamental truths; whereas I believe consciousness to co-arise with energy-matter from a yet more fundamental substance, and thus believe that phenomenological introspection can't penetrate the most fundamental level of reality.

I'm not sure one follows from the other ... but I'll let @Constance speak to that ... I'll post an article by Dreyfus on Heidegger and AI which does show how phenomenology predicted the failure of the first and second wave of AI as instantiations of substance ontology and how these insights were subsequently paid attention to by some of the pioneers in AI.

But in terms of insights into the most fundamental level of reality, I don't think so - although Lord Russell says something along these lines in terms of the intrinsic properties of matter.

If I understand you, this primal substance is not composed or divisible by any physical or metaphysical means. Simplicity of the primal substance refers to the fact that it has no parts, correct? This can be extended to the entire nature of the primal substance; substance, nature, and very being is utter simplicity ... right?
 
re: Stevens - I searched for the poem above and came across this list of resources:

Wallace Stevens Online Resources | BIG OTHER

Thanks for that excellent resource for internet reading about Stevens. I read several reviews posted there of books on Stevens's poetry, one of which led me via several searches to a reference to another poet whom I hadn't heard of before, a Canadian named Christopher Dewdney, whose poetry and prose ranges even further and more deeply into consciousness and mind than Stevens's did. Here are some extracts from a paper concerning this poet/thinker:

“Are not "novel configurations," as linguistic formulations, always already marked by the duplicities and governmental prohibitions of all language? Must the poems always dismantle themselves in order to prevent any single, targetable centre of meaning from appearing, in order to escape the governmental regimentation of language? When Lecker traces the binary opposition of Parasite-Governor through various poems, he decreases their charge of multiple meaning, and encloses them within a conceptual box, which unwittingly maintains the efficient operation of the Governor.”



“…That the twin cortices of speech and interpretation insidiously distort reality tacitly implies that two realities exist: an internal one and an external one. Dewdney also insists that the act of articulation transforms the world through language. Similarly, the elaborate analogy between a parabolic antenna and the induction of information into the mind that Dewdney constructs in "Parasite Maintenance", suggests that sensory data passes through the language cortex before reaching the mind. According to this model, language mediates between mind and world: "Metaphorical objects & models are precipitated by synesthesia into mimics of the very adjuncts to reality out of which the human perception arranges itself" (p. 137). We do not know reality but adjuncts to it that are conditioned by perception, language, and its corollary, interpretation. The external world then is a perceptually, linguistically and hermeneutically determined reality when it appears to human consciousness. The mind, hinged to the external world, exists at a liminal interface with the world of objects, and interprets the world through language. In Spring Trances,"the secret harmony of life unfolds in silence and without witness" (p. 59), but "there can be no highlights if there is no point of view" (p. 141) in The Cenozoic Asylum.The presence of a human consciousness always involves a point of view. The world might exist without human presence, but the world exists for us only as we construe it. Dewdney assumes a phenomenological via media between object and subject by delineating the interaction of perceptual consciousness with landscape, neither of which seems entirely autonomous.

Perhaps one should backtrack to A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario in order to pursue some of the implications of the statements made in "Parasite Maintenance", and to "see" how some of those formulations devolve. The verb "to see" is used designedly here, for we use the verb of vision almost synonymously with the verb of comprehension, "to know". Although the empirical equation between seeing and understanding generally holds in A Palaeozoic Geology,Dewdney increasingly tests the validity of equating the two, most noticeably in Alter Sublime,just as he questions the tendency to correlate "sense" (one of the five senses), and "sense" (having meaning). Dewdney makes the ambiguity of the term explicit in "October" with a typographical joke: "I do not consider the waves empty/in your sense.(s)" (p. 115). The poem, "Glass", adumbrates an empirical stance, in which the senses attempt to make sense of the world:

GLASS

What is beneath benthos
is only hinted at.
Winter develops a pump in a forest clearing.
Each shadow is accounted for, the
fossil of a lady with
indefinite articles in her purse.
We cannot see around
the way through ourselves.
Every man finds his shaft
articulated, indefinite.

The mind is a cavity in which
sensitive plates, exposed to
unimaginable radiation
dance over blind flowers.

There is a cold hexagonal fire
in the insect's eye. (p. 27)



"Glass" is, I believe, a poem about the limits of object knowability as that knowledge is regulated by perception. What is beneath or beyond the surface perception of an object is only hinted at, because we apprehend only one surface, or visual horizon, at a time in our scanning of the world. The isolated position of "benthos" at the end of the first line reinforces the dichotomy of two dimensional surface perception, and the intuited three dimensionality of objects. Benthos, the flora and fauna that live at the bottom of the sea, hovers remotely beyond the reach of the eye. The spatial detachment of "benthos" from the line exaggerates the distance between percipient and the thing perceived. Benthos hints at its submarine presence, but because one cannot see it clearly, it is not readily understood. In this instance, seeing is believing. Similarly, the articles in the lady's purse insinuate their existence, but remain indefinite because they are not visually apprehended. "Each shadow is accounted for" by the objects that cast those shadows; however, a shadow, like a fossil, is a substanceless form. The image of a woman strikes the retina only as a two dimensional "fossil", as an image with a distinguishable shape, but not invested with the solidity of an object.

In "Fovea Centralis I", Dewdney uses a comparable metaphor, a tube, to define the two dimensional impression of visual data on consciousness: "Take the concept of linear time. Each three dimensional object projected along this linear axis would describe a kind of tube, its outline in some way exactly corresponding to the shape of the object" (p. 31). Fovea centralis — "that part of the retina with which we look at things. The point of attention on the retina itself' (p. 186) — witnesses the three dimensional object as a hollow shape, having form but no substance. Within "linear time", in the single act of observation, we see a two dimensional plane, possessing height and width. The image implies depth, but we do not see depth in the isolated moment of perception. The effect is photographic or filmic; one visually records the contours of the object, not the object in its three dimensional entirety. Our intuition of depth results from previous experience, by regarding the object from alternate perspectives, and summoning our memory of those alternative perspectives. The act of "recognition" is the act of knowing something again, of substantiating knowledge, of "re-cognizing". In Spring Trances, Dewdney claims that in linear time, only one image at a time strikes the eye: "Events occur linearly so densely they are viewed as simultaneous" (p. 60). In fact, vision articulates only one event or visual plane at a time to consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that a "human gaze never posits more than one facet of the object, even though by means of horizons it is directed towards all others."23 That is, at one moment of time, we perceive only that plane which appears before us; we apprehend the object as "real" when "it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which it is given exhaustively."24 It requires the presence of a synthesizing consciousness to assimilate these perspectives, and to confirm to itself the authenticity of the object. The lady in "Glass" is therefore both a fossil and a lady, a substanceless form when perceived synchronically, that is, in linear time, yet also an identifiable entity when perceived diachronically, through the lens of memory. One presumes there are articles in her purse, because memory, the repository of perceptual experience, dictates that there should be articles there. The articles remain indefinite, however, because they are not perceived. On the other hand, given Dewdney's sense of humour, one should perhaps not absolutely discount the possibility that "indefinite articles" also signifies a grammatical part of speech.

The subject-dependent enterprise of perception preoccupies Dewdney in "Glass", but he also asserts that the outside world does in fact exist. The precise division between subject and object may oscillate, but the position that Dewdney adopts is not a Berkeleian one, in which matter has existence only when it is reconstructed in the mind of the viewer. "We cannot see around/the way through ourselves", because the corporal self exists as a spatial object. The phrase juggles the cliché of "seeing through someone", which presumes a corporeal transparency, and a visibility of the mind and its intentions. In this case, the mind obstructs sightlines: either we cannot see around our ways of seeing/understanding, which assumes a tangibility of mind, or we cannot penetrate through the amorphous, invisible shape of our mental constructs, precisely because of their lack of substance, and unlocatability.

The "articulated, indefinite" memory shaft of every man resonates with Dewdney's formulation of experiential memory as "fractionally communicable and chronologically ephemeral." The "articulated, indefinite" shaft also remembers the "indefinite articles" in the lady's purse, and "the shafts / by which we remember" in "The Memory Table I" (p. 19). The shaft, cutting vertically through sedimentary limestone strata, recurs in Dewdney's poetry as a metaphor for the accumulation and stratification of memory. This may partially explain the cryptic presence of a pump developed by winter in a forest clearing in the first stanza of "Glass." {my comment: it is Heidegger’s Lichtung, but extended backward in time through aeons of experience prior to our own but which ours must somehow retain and whose phenomenological meaning becomes pronounced in our evolved consciousness and mind: life and perhaps non-living systems deep in natural evolution have always been aware of and have expressed the interaction of subjective and objective properties in being.}

The second stanza of the poem arrests the mind in the moment of apprehension, by detailing the interaction of mind with world. The mind, though reliant on and interconnected with the brain, exists as a "cavity." Like a fossil, it has no tangible substance, yet is confined to the cranium.25 Almost painfully, the mind exposes itself to the perceptual encoding of experience; the "unimaginable radiation" of sensory data indelibly imprints itself on the mind, as the atomic metaphor suggests. If the focus of the second stanza is steadfastly fixed to a perceptual and mnemonic interior, and the flowers in the external world are "blind," implying a lack of perceptivity, the third stanza abruptly enlarges perceptual horizons by calling attention to the "cold hexagonal fire / in the insect's eye." This eye, endowed with life, presumably has its own, and different, experience of the world. The insect's eye counters the human eye, and opens up another perspectival range within "Glass." The recognition of alternative, non human ways of seeing unbalances the privileging of human perception and consciousness implicit throughout the poem.

"Glass" revolves around the problematics of object knowability as that cognition is regulated by perception. Only the sensory can conduct us to an apprehension of the world; what is beneath is only hinted at because the unassisted eye cannot penetrate to the bottom of the sea, nor, for that matter, can it pierce indefinitely into the cosmos. The limits of perception circumscribe the frontiers of understanding. The glass (an eye? a telescope? a microscope? the mind?) through which we glimpse the world permits cognizance, but that glass also divides us from the objects of our scrutiny, and carefully curbs understanding. . . ."


The Dream of Self: Perception and Consciousness in Dewdney's Poetry

 
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. . . . (As a sidenote, although I'm not talking to @Constance until she answers my question about jellyfish :p, this does clarify for a me a difference in our thinking (among many). Namely, that she believes consciousness to be truly fundamental and thus phenomenology capable of revealing fundamental truths; whereas I believe consciousness to co-arise with energy-matter from a yet more fundamental substance, and thus believe that phenomenological introspection can't penetrate the most fundamental level of reality.

Soupie, the differences between your and my approach to consciousness and mind have been more than obvious for a long time. So I don't get why in recent posts you are apparently trying to needle me with presumptuous messages to me and references to me in the third person, accompanied increasingly by facial icons showing surly facial expressions). You want to get in my face? Do it with argument and persuasion, not these flippant (and innocuous) maneuvres. I'll be happy to reply to your 'jellyfish' and also your 'fruitfly' questions and assertions and then we will see who is 'jumping the shark'. ;) Remind me where you lay out your illuminations based on the jellyfish and Drosophila Melanogaster, would you? Embedded links to those posts will best serve the purpose for me and others in pursuing this discussion.
 
Thanks for that excellent resource for internet reading about Stevens. I read several reviews posted there of books on Stevens's poetry, one of which led me via several searches to a reference to another poet whom I hadn't heard of before, a Canadian named Christopher Dewdney, whose poetry and prose ranges even further and more deeply into consciousness and mind than Stevens's did. Here are some extracts from a paper concerning this poet/thinker:

“Are not "novel configurations," as linguistic formulations, always already marked by the duplicities and governmental prohibitions of all language? Must the poems always dismantle themselves in order to prevent any single, targetable centre of meaning from appearing, in order to escape the governmental regimentation of language? When Lecker traces the binary opposition of Parasite-Governor through various poems, he decreases their charge of multiple meaning, and encloses them within a conceptual box, which unwittingly maintains the efficient operation of the Governor.”



“…That the twin cortices of speech and interpretation insidiously distort reality tacitly implies that two realities exist: an internal one and an external one. Dewdney also insists that the act of articulation transforms the world through language. Similarly, the elaborate analogy between a parabolic antenna and the induction of information into the mind that Dewdney constructs in "Parasite Maintenance", suggests that sensory data passes through the language cortex before reaching the mind. According to this model, language mediates between mind and world: "Metaphorical objects & models are precipitated by synesthesia into mimics of the very adjuncts to reality out of which the human perception arranges itself" (p. 137). We do not know reality but adjuncts to it that are conditioned by perception, language, and its corollary, interpretation. The external world then is a perceptually, linguistically and hermeneutically determined reality when it appears to human consciousness. The mind, hinged to the external world, exists at a liminal interface with the world of objects, and interprets the world through language. In Spring Trances,"the secret harmony of life unfolds in silence and without witness" (p. 59), but "there can be no highlights if there is no point of view" (p. 141) in The Cenozoic Asylum.The presence of a human consciousness always involves a point of view. The world might exist without human presence, but the world exists for us only as we construe it. Dewdney assumes a phenomenological via media between object and subject by delineating the interaction of perceptual consciousness with landscape, neither of which seems entirely autonomous.

Perhaps one should backtrack to A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario in order to pursue some of the implications of the statements made in "Parasite Maintenance", and to "see" how some of those formulations devolve. The verb "to see" is used designedly here, for we use the verb of vision almost synonymously with the verb of comprehension, "to know". Although the empirical equation between seeing and understanding generally holds in A Palaeozoic Geology,Dewdney increasingly tests the validity of equating the two, most noticeably in Alter Sublime,just as he questions the tendency to correlate "sense" (one of the five senses), and "sense" (having meaning). Dewdney makes the ambiguity of the term explicit in "October" with a typographical joke: "I do not consider the waves empty/in your sense.(s)" (p. 115). The poem, "Glass", adumbrates an empirical stance, in which the senses attempt to make sense of the world:

GLASS

What is beneath benthos
is only hinted at.
Winter develops a pump in a forest clearing.
Each shadow is accounted for, the
fossil of a lady with
indefinite articles in her purse.
We cannot see around
the way through ourselves.
Every man finds his shaft
articulated, indefinite.

The mind is a cavity in which
sensitive plates, exposed to
unimaginable radiation
dance over blind flowers.

There is a cold hexagonal fire
in the insect's eye. (p. 27)



"Glass" is, I believe, a poem about the limits of object knowability as that knowledge is regulated by perception. What is beneath or beyond the surface perception of an object is only hinted at, because we apprehend only one surface, or visual horizon, at a time in our scanning of the world. The isolated position of "benthos" at the end of the first line reinforces the dichotomy of two dimensional surface perception, and the intuited three dimensionality of objects. Benthos, the flora and fauna that live at the bottom of the sea, hovers remotely beyond the reach of the eye. The spatial detachment of "benthos" from the line exaggerates the distance between percipient and the thing perceived. Benthos hints at its submarine presence, but because one cannot see it clearly, it is not readily understood. In this instance, seeing is believing. Similarly, the articles in the lady's purse insinuate their existence, but remain indefinite because they are not visually apprehended. "Each shadow is accounted for" by the objects that cast those shadows; however, a shadow, like a fossil, is a substanceless form. The image of a woman strikes the retina only as a two dimensional "fossil", as an image with a distinguishable shape, but not invested with the solidity of an object.

In "Fovea Centralis I", Dewdney uses a comparable metaphor, a tube, to define the two dimensional impression of visual data on consciousness: "Take the concept of linear time. Each three dimensional object projected along this linear axis would describe a kind of tube, its outline in some way exactly corresponding to the shape of the object" (p. 31). Fovea centralis — "that part of the retina with which we look at things. The point of attention on the retina itself' (p. 186) — witnesses the three dimensional object as a hollow shape, having form but no substance. Within "linear time", in the single act of observation, we see a two dimensional plane, possessing height and width. The image implies depth, but we do not see depth in the isolated moment of perception. The effect is photographic or filmic; one visually records the contours of the object, not the object in its three dimensional entirety. Our intuition of depth results from previous experience, by regarding the object from alternate perspectives, and summoning our memory of those alternative perspectives. The act of "recognition" is the act of knowing something again, of substantiating knowledge, of "re-cognizing". In Spring Trances, Dewdney claims that in linear time, only one image at a time strikes the eye: "Events occur linearly so densely they are viewed as simultaneous" (p. 60). In fact, vision articulates only one event or visual plane at a time to consciousness. In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that a "human gaze never posits more than one facet of the object, even though by means of horizons it is directed towards all others."23 That is, at one moment of time, we perceive only that plane which appears before us; we apprehend the object as "real" when "it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which it is given exhaustively."24 It requires the presence of a synthesizing consciousness to assimilate these perspectives, and to confirm to itself the authenticity of the object. The lady in "Glass" is therefore both a fossil and a lady, a substanceless form when perceived synchronically, that is, in linear time, yet also an identifiable entity when perceived diachronically, through the lens of memory. One presumes there are articles in her purse, because memory, the repository of perceptual experience, dictates that there should be articles there. The articles remain indefinite, however, because they are not perceived. On the other hand, given Dewdney's sense of humour, one should perhaps not absolutely discount the possibility that "indefinite articles" also signifies a grammatical part of speech.

The subject-dependent enterprise of perception preoccupies Dewdney in "Glass", but he also asserts that the outside world does in fact exist. The precise division between subject and object may oscillate, but the position that Dewdney adopts is not a Berkeleian one, in which matter has existence only when it is reconstructed in the mind of the viewer. "We cannot see around/the way through ourselves", because the corporal self exists as a spatial object. The phrase juggles the cliché of "seeing through someone", which presumes a corporeal transparency, and a visibility of the mind and its intentions. In this case, the mind obstructs sightlines: either we cannot see around our ways of seeing/understanding, which assumes a tangibility of mind, or we cannot penetrate through the amorphous, invisible shape of our mental constructs, precisely because of their lack of substance, and unlocatability.

The "articulated, indefinite" memory shaft of every man resonates with Dewdney's formulation of experiential memory as "fractionally communicable and chronologically ephemeral." The "articulated, indefinite" shaft also remembers the "indefinite articles" in the lady's purse, and "the shafts / by which we remember" in "The Memory Table I" (p. 19). The shaft, cutting vertically through sedimentary limestone strata, recurs in Dewdney's poetry as a metaphor for the accumulation and stratification of memory. This may partially explain the cryptic presence of a pump developed by winter in a forest clearing in the first stanza of "Glass." {my comment: it is Heidegger’s Lichtung, but extended backward in time through aeons of experience prior to our own but which ours must somehow retain and whose phenomenological meaning becomes pronounced in our evolved consciousness and mind: life and perhaps non-living systems deep in natural evolution have always been aware of and have expressed the interaction of subjective and objective properties in being.}

The second stanza of the poem arrests the mind in the moment of apprehension, by detailing the interaction of mind with world. The mind, though reliant on and interconnected with the brain, exists as a "cavity." Like a fossil, it has no tangible substance, yet is confined to the cranium.25 Almost painfully, the mind exposes itself to the perceptual encoding of experience; the "unimaginable radiation" of sensory data indelibly imprints itself on the mind, as the atomic metaphor suggests. If the focus of the second stanza is steadfastly fixed to a perceptual and mnemonic interior, and the flowers in the external world are "blind," implying a lack of perceptivity, the third stanza abruptly enlarges perceptual horizons by calling attention to the "cold hexagonal fire / in the insect's eye." This eye, endowed with life, presumably has its own, and different, experience of the world. The insect's eye counters the human eye, and opens up another perspectival range within "Glass." The recognition of alternative, non human ways of seeing unbalances the privileging of human perception and consciousness implicit throughout the poem.

"Glass" revolves around the problematics of object knowability as that cognition is regulated by perception. Only the sensory can conduct us to an apprehension of the world; what is beneath is only hinted at because the unassisted eye cannot penetrate to the bottom of the sea, nor, for that matter, can it pierce indefinitely into the cosmos. The limits of perception circumscribe the frontiers of understanding. The glass (an eye? a telescope? a microscope? the mind?) through which we glimpse the world permits cognizance, but that glass also divides us from the objects of our scrutiny, and carefully curbs understanding. . . ."


The Dream of Self: Perception and Consciousness in Dewdney's Poetry

Here is a synchronicity, I heard this phrase today:

it's not science minus, it's poetry plus

seems to fit Dewdney
 
I'll just leave this right here for everyone's perusal:
'How do we know where we are? How can we find the way from one place to another? And how can we store this information in such a way that we can immediately find the way the next time we trace the same path? This year´s Nobel Laureates have discovered a positioning system, an “inner GPS” in the brain that makes it possible to orient ourselves in space, demonstrating a cellular basis for higher cognitive function.' (emphasis mine)

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine - Press Release
 
Interesting, thanks.

Criticism of Penrose's theory of quantum microtubules giving rise to consciousness fall along similar lines of mine: the brain is just too hot and active to make QM much of a force.

I'm open to it if it can be tested, though.

He seems to have encountered some fundamental problems with Godel's theorems though.

Orchestrated objective reduction - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
http://www.iscid.org/papers/Hasker_NonReductivism_103103.pdf

1. Human beings are rational to a significant (though highly imperfect) degree.
2. If human beings are rational, there is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
3. There is an explanation for the fact that human beings are rational.
4. If conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant, there is no explanation for the fact that human beings are rational. (Argued for above.)
5. Conscious experience is explanatorily relevant.
6. If the physical realm is causally closed, conscious experience is explanatorily irrelevant.

7. The physical realm is not causally closed.

Why are we happy to be rid of causal closure?

1. Mind-body supervenience does not obtain: it will now be the case that the physical properties of an organism develop differently, when accompanied by conscious experience, than they would in the absence of such experience

2. Major objections to mind-body dualism no longer apply: for example the objection to a conscious state, the entertaining of an idea, having any effects on the physical state of the brain no longer applies or Lycan's objection:

“In any case it does not seem that immaterial entities could cause motion consistently with any of the conservation laws of physics, such as that regarding matter-energy; physical energy would have to vanish and reappear inside human brains”

3. There is no empirical evidence for determinism.

I like where you're going, but not sure about steps 4 and 5. Seems a bit of a stretch, sure there's no confusion between the "there exists" and "for all" kind of logical statements?
 
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