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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6


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Still reading in Part 1; found and appreciated seeing a post by Steve quoting Radin re Hansen's trickster-theory-based response to psi experiments.

Extract from the Radin source Steve cited:

"While I think the trickster concept and lore are interesting, and that Hansen's own book on the trickster is an excellent exposition on that topic, I disagree that psi is forever doomed to a marginal existence.

The reason I don't agree is because similar pessimistic complaints have been voiced throughout history whenever we've been faced with seemingly incomprehensible effects in medicine, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, etc. In other words, whenever imagination fails, someone will invariably assert that we'll never be able to understand [fill in the blank], and so they come up with trickster-like theories to allow us to place our ignorance into a mysterious netherworld lying somewhere beyond our understanding. Failures of imagination are common, but promoting theories based on those failures is tantamount to glorifying an anti-scientific position."

Consciousness and the Paranormal
 
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Steve wrote another post in Part 1 posing a question that I'd like to respond to now:

"What I was trying to get at above is why research in psychology, although subject to many of the same critiques as research in parapsychology, is generally considered a science, whereas parapsychology generally isn't. Or is it that there is a critical, objective difference - something or things we can clearly point to that differentiates every psi experiment from every experiment in psychology? Can we clearly put psychology on one side of the science line and parapsychology on the other? If not, then I think George P. Hansen's Trickster theory explains why not . . .

I don't know if it's even possible to do some kind of blind test, so that apart from subject matter - critics could reliably determine which was a peer reviewed published paper in psychology and which was a paper in parapsychology? I'm wondering if someone has done this . . . clearly, such an experiment would be subjected to the exact same criticisms!"

Consciousness and the Paranormal

I just want to say, regarding the underscored lines in blue above, that I've never thought of human psychology as a 'science', and I don't think it can be defended as one. And that before human psychology could become a science it would need to be constructed on the basis of a comprehensive scientific theory of consciousness that accounts for all aspects and aptitudes of consciousness, including paranormal ones.
 
Here's a post I made to Part 1 of this thread recommending that we read two short books by Erwin Schrodinger:

Consciousness and the Paranormal

I'll look for online copies of Schrodinger's What is Life? and Mind and Matter and post the links if I find them.


Here is a link to an online text of Schrodinger's What is Life?:
http://whatislife.stanford.edu/LoCo_files/What-is-Life.pdf

I have not yet located an online copy of Mind and Matter, but here is a review essay on these two works, published in Contemporary Physics in 2012.

ESSAY REVIEW What is life? Peter V. E. McClintock Department of Physics, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YB, UK (v3.0 released 27 July 2009)
A review of What is Life? by Erwin Schr¨odinger, together with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches by the same author, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2012, pp. x + 184. Scope: monograph. ISBN 978 1 107 60566 7

http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/61482/1/lifePostPrint.pdf
 
Here is another post by Steve from Part 1 that provides reorientation back to the question of the meaning(s) of anomalous consciousness -- i.e., what has been and might be learned about these forms and aspects of consciousness through research:

Consciousness and the Paranormal

Here is a print-out of Steve's post (linked just above) and the post by @Burnt State to which he was responding. I think this exchange provides a good jumping off place for our shift into discussion of metaphysical aspects of consciousness:


@Burnt State wrote:

"Re: intuition, precognition, paradigm shifts and the mechanism of the ouija board

. . . It's very tempting to select grey areas of reality, perceive their own rare ordering of things and call it 'paranormal'. But to qualify it further it was Russell who said, "The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper." We simply have not yet comprehended all the mechanisms."

Steve responded:

"I think that's a point - as far as it goes . . . Russell takes it to one level by claiming that there are mysteries that can be solved by us, but then you take it a step further by involving "all the mechanisms" . . . and it might be so, but I have sympathy for Colin McGinn's New Mysterianism- for him this is that some philosophical problems will never be solved by humans, because of our human limitations - I think he would say that we simply don't have the right brains for certain problems - he imagines other kinds of brains might exist that could, for example, look right through the "hard problem" of consciousness or for whom there might not be a "hard problem" at all. (you can see how this ties into the gender questions above . . ."


As I re-read this exchange today, this sentence in Steve's statement (which I have bolded) jumped out at me: "I think [McGinn] would say that we simply don't have the right brains for certain problems." A cognitively oriented analytical philosopher like McGinn would indeed make the claim that we don't have the "right" brains -- 'right' in the sense of 'appropriate, or adequate, kinds of brains' -- to solve the hard problem of consciousness, forgetting that there are significant differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brains with which nature has endowed us and that their workings provide us with differing perspectives on our experiences in the world. Steve has read much more of McGinn than I have and can answer the question I have as to whether McGinn has ever investigated and written about the differences between left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking. This is a subject we took up in earlier parts of this thread and I think we might want to return to those discussions and explore this subject further.

The general notion that our brains are cognitive 'mechanisms' has permeated neuroscience, analytical philosophy of mind, computer science/AI, and the life sciences {until the development of Panksepp's biologically based theory of Affective Neuroscience}. The cognitive-mechanistic approach to experience and thinking about experience has seeped down to the general culture to such an extent over the last 50 years that people as widely-read as @Burnt State now automatically refer to the brain as constituted of 'mechanisms', a presupposition that we need to examine in the philosophers and scientists we read and in our own thinking in this thread.


Steve continued:

"But I think the whole idea of limits is culturally not in vogue and I think the idea of unlimited progress ties in deeply to our practice of science and technology (not to mention economics!) from the very beginnings of the The Enlightenment."

We could well examine the history of the mechanization of our concepts of ourselves/our species during the industrial revolution and the rise of the dominant interpretation of Darwin's theory of evolution. I'm interested in hearing Steve discuss the contribution of Enlightenment thinking in this context. As I've understood Enlightenment thought, the central concept was the natural rights of humankind, based in 'natural law'. If natural law is taken to mean 'the law of the jungle' as expressed in laissez faire capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation of the people and resources of the third world, we get one kind of world -- the one we're currently living in. If natural law is, on the other hand, taken to refer to the naturally given rights of all men and women to their lives, liberties, and pursuit of happiness, we get another kind of world, the kind Bernie Sanders is describing, the kind of world we as a species need.
 
I'm still in the archives, currently reading early in Part 6 of this thread. Here is a well-met [re-met] post by Steve concerning a work of philosophy by Samuel Todes and entitled Body and World, a dissertation written mid-20th century, published in 2001, and immensely significant for philosophy of mind and consciousness. Here's the link to Steve's first post re Todes; the following posts include the table of contents of Body and World (note: see instead the much more detailed T of C in the online pdf Steve found, linked in my next post). I'd meant to follow up the citation to this book months ago when Steve posted about it, but failed to and will do so now.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

In discussing this work Steve quotes a commentator who refers to "nonceptual mental content" and links the SEP article under that heading. This I think we all need to read in our shared effort to understand what consciousness is:

Nonconceptual Mental Content (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Here is a brief extract from the SEP article:

"Second, it has been argued that the content of perception is analog in nature, unlike the conceptual content of propositional attitudes which is more plausibly seen as digital. The distinction between analog and digital representations has (for our purposes) been most perspicuously put by Fred Dretske (Dretske 1981, Ch.6). Let us take a particular fact or state of affairs, say the fact or state of affairs that some object s has property F. A representation carries the information that s is F in digital form if and only if it carries no further information about s other than that it is F (and whatever further facts about it are entailed by the fact that it is F). But whenever a representation carries the information that s is F in analog form it always carries additional information about s. Nonconceptualists argue that, while propositional attitudes represent the world in digital form, perceptual states represent the world in analog form. Beck (2012) argues that analogue magnitude states (primitive representations of spatial, temporal, numerical, and other magnitudes) are nonconceptual because they lack the recombinability necessary for concepts (as articulated, for example, in Evans’s Generality Constraint).[7]"
 
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The Todes book is one to get from the library unless you are independently wealthy. Used paperback copies are available from $27 and up, new at about $40. Check out the detailed table of contents at amazon to see the scope of history of philosophy covered by Todes. Here is the description of the book at amazon:

"Body and World is the definitive edition of a book that should now take its place as a major contribution to contemporary existential phenomenology. Samuel Todes goes beyond Martin Heidegger and MauriceMerleau-Ponty in his description of how independent physical nature and experience are united in our bodily action. His account allows him to preserve the authority of experience while avoiding the tendency toward idealism that threatens both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes emphasizes the complex structure of the human body; front/back asymmetry, the need to balance in a gravitational field, and so forth; and the role that structure plays in producing the spatiotemporal field of experience and in making possible objective knowledge of the objects in it. He shows that perception involves nonconceptual, but nonetheless objective forms of judgment. One can think of Body and World as fleshing out Merleau-Ponty's project while presciently relating it to the current interest in embodiment, not only in philosophy but also in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and anthropology. Todes's work opens new ways of thinking about problems such as the relation of perception to thought and the possibility of knowing an independent reality, problems that have occupied philosophers since Kant and still concern analytic and continental philosophy."

SCRATCH the first paragraph above. Steve has found and linked the entire book in pdf on Google Drive:

Todes - Body and world - Unknown - 2001.pdf

{Steve -- the ultimate librarian for the internet age}
 
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We have not so far in this six-part discussion taken up the discussions and debates concerning cognitive phenomenology. I've linked the paper below by Galen Strawson, but as I recall we did not read it together and discuss it. The last few days I've been exploring the current attention to cognitive phenomenology and the debates concerning it in two recent books entitled Cognitive Phenomenology -- one written by Elijah Chudoff, the other a collection of papers edited by Tim Bayne and Michelle Montague. The introduction to the latter is available in part in amazon.com's sample from the book and provides orientation to the issues in the history of the philosophy of mind leading to the concept of cognitive phenomenology, a term that Strawson introduced. So his paper "Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life" is a key work in this subject matter. It's available at academia.edu in whole, and I quote an extract from the first several pages below. I do wish that the four of us would all read this paper for the clarity it brings in critiqueing the ways in which presuppositional thinking and poorly defined terms afforded by our language (such as it is) have blocked our attempts here to understand one another. I've complained several times in the past about how Chalmers's phrase 'what it feels like' has been used again and again by philosophers of the analytic persuasion and also by most neuroscientific researchers in consciousness studies to short-circuit our understanding of the phenomenology of human experience. Here goes:


"Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life"
Galen Strawson
[FINAL DRAFT (minus Appendix) forthcoming in
Cognitive Phenomenology, ed. T. Bayne & M. Montague (Oxford University Press, 2011)


"I will now utter certain words which form a sentence: these words, for instance: Twice two are four. Now,when I say these words, you not only hear them--the words--you also understand what they mean. That is to say, something happens in your minds--some act of consciousness--over and above the hearing of the words, some act of consciousness which may be called the understanding of their meaning." G. E. Moore (1910-11: 57)

"… let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard Street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so as I can get up early Ill go to Lambes there beside Findlaters and get them to send us some flowers to put about the place in case he brings him home tomorrow today I mean no no Fridays an unlucky day first I want to do the place up someway the dust grows in it I think while Im asleep then we can have music and cigarettes I can accompany him first I must clean the keys of the piano with milk whatll I wear a white rose or those fairy cakes in Liptons at 712d a lb or the other ones with the cherries in them and the pinky sugar 11d a couple of lbs of those a nice plant for the middle of the table Id get that cheaper in wait wheres this I saw them not long ago I loveflowers …" James Joyce
(1922: 642)

"It is sometimes necessary to repeat what we all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality." Saul Bellow (1970: 228)


1 Introduction

In recent analytic philosophy, as opposed to the Phenomenological tradition in philosophy initiated by Brentano and Husserl,1 phenomenology has standardly been taken to be restricted to the study of sensory experiences, including mental images of certain sorts, and feelings, including mood feelings and emotional feelings. I’ll say that phenomenology so understood is confined to sense/feeling experience, or sense/feeling phenomenology, bringing under this heading all sensation-mood-emotion-image-feeling phenomena considered (so far as they can be) entirely independently of any cognitive mental phenomena. There’s a lot more to experience than sense/feeling experience. There’s also what I’ll call cognitive experience, or cognitive phenomenology. There’s meaning-experience,thought-experience, understanding-experience. There is, most generally, everything about experience that isn’t just a matter of sense/feeling experience as just defined. In this paper I’ll take ‘sense/feeling experience’ and ‘cognitive experience’ to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive terms (some think that there’s experience that falls under neither head). It may be that there are no pure cases of sense/feeling alone, or cognitive experience alone, but the distinction may be valid and useful for all that. In analytic philosophy there is considerable resistance to the idea that anything rightly called ‘cognitive experience’ or ‘cognitive phenomenology’ exists. This is remarkable for many reasons, one of which is that it’s doubtful that sense/feeling experience ever occurs without cognitive experience in the experience of an ordinary adult human being. Nor do the two things simply co-occur. They’re profoundly interwoven, although we can for purposes of philosophical analysis distinguish sense/feeling elements of experience sharply from cognitive elements of experience. I’m going to argue for the existence of cognitive experience or cognitive phenomenology, beginning with some assumptions and a few terminological remarks. The main action begins in §6.

2 Terminological preliminaries

In origin and full propriety, ‘phenomenology’ is the name of a theoretical discipline. Phenomenology is the general study, the -ology, of appearances, of the experiential character of experiences—the experiential or qualitative or what-it’s-likeness character that experiences have for those who have them as they have them. Recently the term has come to be used for its own subject matter, so that one can now say that phenomenology (original sense) is the study of phenomenology (new sense). This is less than ideal, but the innovation doesn’t do any great harm. (Something similar happened with ‘ontological’, which is standardly used where ‘ontic’ or ‘ontical’ is more appropriate.)2 I assume that experiences (perceptual experiences, conscious thoughts, and so on) are spatially located events, neural electrochemical goings-on that have as such—in having mass, charge, shape, size, and so on—a certain non-experiential character.3 This non-experiential character is of no concern to phenomenology, which restricts itself to the study of the experiential character of experiences considered just as such: considered without any reference to any part or aspect of the reality of the experiences other than the part or aspect of reality which consists in the existence of their experiential character. Phenomenology also puts aside ‘the world’, considered as that which experiences are typically experiences of.4

In this respect, Husserl’s slogan ‘Zu den Sachen selbst !’—‘Back to the things themselves!’— is very misleading. I’ll use the plural-lacking mass term ‘experience’ to refer to: that part or aspect of reality that consists in the existence of experiential character considered just as such and nothing else; and I’ll use the plural-accepting count-noun ‘experience(s)’ as I already have, to talk of experiences (plural) as things that we ordinarily take to have properties other than experiential-character properties, e.g. properties attributed by physics and neurophysiology. Experience, then, is the (experiential) what-it’s-likeness of experiences.5

Examples of experience? Basic examples will do—the experiential character of pain, tasting potatoes, seeing the colour blue, finding something funny. What are these things like? You know what they’re like from your own case. This answer, condemned by Wittgensteinians, is exactly right. It doesn’t matter if what it is like for you is qualitatively different from what it is like for me, just so long as it is like something for you, as of course it is.6

3 Real realism about experience

Phenomenology incorporates all-out realism about experience (experience is its whole subject matter). But by ‘realism about experience’ I mean real realism about experience. The pleonasm would be unnecessary if a number of analytic philosophers hadn’t in the last eighty years or so tried, more or less covertly, to ‘reduce’ the experiential to the non-experiential, continuing to speak of the experiential in a seemingly realist way while holding that, really, only the non-experiential exists. A good way to convey what it is to be a real realist about experience is to say that it’s to continue to take colour experience or taste experience, say, or experience of pain, or of an itch, to be what one took it to be wholly unreflectively—what one knew it to be in having it—before one did any philosophy, e.g. when one was five. However many new and surprising facts7 they learn about experience from scientists, real realists’ basic grasp—knowledge—of what experience is remains exactly the same as it was before they did any philosophy. It remains, in other words, entirely correct, grounded in the fact that to have experience at all is already to know what experience is, however little one reflects about it. I think this way of specifying what I mean by ‘experience’ is helpful because it guarantees that anyone who claims not to know what I mean is being disingenuous.8 When I say that experiences are neural goings-on, I’m not in any way denying the reality of experience as just defined. I’m assuming that materialism is true, for the purposes of this paper. I am, though, a real materialist, a realistic materialist, and a real materialist is someone who is fully realist (real-realist, five-year-old realist) about the thing whose reality is more certain than the reality of anything else—experience. I’m an ‘adductive’ materialist, not a reductive materialist. Adductive materialists don’t claim that experience is, in being wholly physical, anything less than we ordinarily conceive it to be. They claim, rather, that the physical must be something more than we ordinarily conceive it to be, if only because many of the wholly physical goings-on in the wholly
physical brain are experience, experience as defined above (experiential) what-it’s-likeness.


Many philosophers think that there’s a major puzzle in the existence of experience. But the appearance of a puzzle arises only given an assumption there is no reason to make. This is the assumption that we know something about the intrinsic nature of the physical that gives us reason to think that it cannot itself be experiential. It’s not just that this assumption is false. There is in fact zero evidence for the existence of anything non-experiential in the universe. There never has been any evidence, and never will be. What we have instead is a wholly unsupported assumption about our capacity to know the nature of things (in particular the physical) which must be put severely in doubt by the fact that it seems to create this puzzle if by nothing else. One of the most important—revelatory—experiences a philosopher brought up in the Western tradition can have is to realize that this assumption has no respectable foundation. This experience is life-changing, philosophically, but it comes only to some—although the point is elementary. The fact that physics has no terms specifically for experiential phenomena (I’m putting aside the view that reference to conscious observers is essential in quantum mechanics) is not evidence in support of the view that experience doesn’t exist. It isn’t even evidence in support of the view that something non-experiential exists.9

4 Cognitive experience (cognitive phenomenology)

The fact that experience has irreducibly cognitive aspects in addition to sense/feeling aspects was perhaps never questioned throughout the history of philosophy until the advent of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century.10 It was only that curious and in many respects admirable academic culture (to which I belong) which gave rise to the view I want to dispute,

The Remarkable View

that the subject matter of phenomenology (the completely general study of the experiential character of experience) is nothing more than sense/feeling experience as characterized above. This view achieved such dominance that the phrase ‘qualitative character’, used to refer quite generally to the experiential character of experience, came to many to sound synonymous with ‘sense/feeling’. In this way the mistake was built into the words with which the question was discussed.11 We can put aside here the remarkable fact that the Remarkable View grew up alongside

The Astonishing View

that there’s actually no such thing as the experiential character of experience (no such thing as conscious experience, experiential what-it’s-likeness, as real realists understand it), from which it follows that there’s really no such thing as the discipline of phenomenology. And we can put aside

The Astonishing Fact

that the Astonishing View was for a considerable period of time the dominant view among a significant number who considered themselves, and were by some others considered, to be at the forefront of their subject, along with its bedfellow

The Truly Incredible Fact

that this was part of a movement one of whose openly stated aims— under various names, such as ‘behaviourism’ and ‘functionalism, and now, it seems, ‘strong representationalism’ — was to reduce the experiential to the non-experiential, i.e. to show that the experiential was, in some way, really wholly non-experiential.12

We can put aside the Astonishing and Truly Incredible Facts in order to focus on the Remarkable View: the view that the subject matter of phenomenology is nothing more than sense/feeling experience; the view, in other words, that one can in principle give an exhaustive account of all aspects of human experience, all aspects of the actual character that experience has for us as we have it from moment to moment and from day to day—everything about human lived experience, everything that our lives are to us and for us—purely by reference to sense/feeling experience.

It was because the Remarkable View was prevalent at the end of the last century that I adopted the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’, rather than simply ‘phenomenology’, when trying to describe what it is to experience oneself as a free agent, or as a ‘self’ in the sense of an inner mental presence distinct from the whole human being (Strawson 1986, 1997). The discussion of free will was ‘centrally concerned with what one might call the “general cognitive phenomenology” of freedom … with our beliefs, feelings, attitudes, practices, and ways of conceiving or thinking about the world, in so far as these involve the notion of freedom’ (1986: p. v, new edn. p. vi); the aspects of the sense of the self that were under consideration were ‘conceptual rather than affective: it is the cognitive phenomenology of the sense of the self that is fundamentally in question, i.e. the conceptual structure of the sense of the self, the structure of the sense of the self considered (as far as possible) independently of any emotional aspects that it may have’.13

These are wide uses of the term ‘cognitive phenomenology’ or ‘cognitive experience’. I want now to consider something more specific: the experience one has— one could call it ‘understanding-experience’ or ‘meaning-experience’14 — when (for example) one hears someone speak in a language one understands. I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive (or semantic) experience understood in this narrow sense.

5 Definition of ‘content’, ‘internal content’, ‘external content’

I say I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive experience. I could equally well say that I’m going to argue for the reality of cognitive-experiential content as something that exists over above sense/feeling content. It may seem unwise to introduce another term at this stage, especially one as troublesome as ‘content’, but I think it will be helpful. The content of an experience, as I take the term, is absolutely everything that is experienced in the having of the experience, everything that is experientially registered in any way.15 It’s everything that the experience is an experience of, where ‘of’ is understood in the widest possible manner, and, in particular, in such a way that it covers everything that it is like to have the experience, experientially, in addition to whatever external objects the experience may have. So all experience, what-it’s-likeness, considered just as such, is mental content. When I look at a tree, the whole experiential being of my experience of the tree is a matter of the content of the experience, just as much as the tree is in being the thing in the world that my experience is an experience of. Suppose (temporarily and for purposes of argument) that sensation isn’t in itself intentional or representational in any way. It certainly doesn’t follow that sensation isn’t a matter of mental content. It is of course a matter of mental content: it’s ‘sensory content’. Mental content doesn’t have to be of anything other than itself in order to be mental content. All experiential what-it’s-likeness is phenomenological content, quite independently of whether or not it can be said to be intentional in any way.16

Consider a few of my philosophical ‘Twins’, my ‘Instant Twin’, my ‘Brain in a Vat Twin’, and my ‘Perfect Twin Earth Twin’.17 Our four courses of experience are very different, when it comes to the question what they are of, non-experientially speaking; they have in that sense very different contents. But there’s a no less fundamental sense in which they have identical content, simply because they are by hypothesis experientially-qualitatively identical: they’re of the same phenomenological-content type, although they are of course numerically distinct occurrences of content. May we say that they have different external content and identical internal content?Perhaps—but the internal/external content (or narrow/wide broad content) distinction is very unclear.18 This is partly because philosophers have thought too much about trees, mountains, natural kinds, and so on, when characterizing external content, and not enough about other equally concrete, equally worldly items like other people’s pains and colour experiences (or indeed their own pains and colour experiences). We can certainly distinguish between phenomenological content and non-phenomenological content, but this distinction doesn’t line up neatly with the distinction between internal and external content. In this situation of unclarity, I propose to define ‘internal content’ as follows.

Internal content is concretely occurring phenomenological content. It’s concretely occurring experiential what-it’s-likeness considered just as such. The internal content of an experience is if you like the actual intrinsic phenomenological being of that experience.

What about external content? External content is every other sort of mental content. It not only includes trees, and so on; it can also include mental states, including phenomenological states. Internal (phenomenological) content can itself be external content, for it is part of the world, and can be an object of thought. I can think about concretely occurring phenomenological content, yours or mine, for I can think about anything real.19

So we can consider internal content, as defined, both as internal content and as external content. We consider it simply as internal content when we consider it as immediately phenomenologically given. When it’s thought about (say), it’s also external content. The internal/external distinction remains in place; it’s robust as defined. For although external content can include internal content (although internal content can be external content), still the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having external content is never the phenomenon of a mental episode’s having internal content. . . . ."

. . . continues at Cognitive Phenomenology: Real Life

Best to read the whole paper at that link so that you can also read Strawson's footnotes, which are heavily substantive.
 
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ps, it was reading Samuel Todes that led me back to pursue contemporary discussions of cognitive phenomenology. Todes made great progress a half-century ago in recognizing the cognitive-experiential nature of what consciousness brings into the world.
 
An aid to thinking about what-is-real from Wallace Stevens's poetry . . .

This Solitude of Cataracts

He never felt twice the same about the flecked river,
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing

Through many places, as if it stood still in one,
Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered,

Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks.
There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken.

There was so much that was real that was not real at all.
He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way,
To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast.
He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks
Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction,
To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass,
Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time.
 
Another, which I've posted before and which now might make more sense . . .

LANDSCAPE WITH BOAT

"An anti-master-man, floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turqouise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the ominous element,
The single colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.

It was his nature to suppose,
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.

He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer's track
And say, "The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime."

--Wallace Stevens
 
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Strawson's footnote 4 succinctly states his premise: “experiences are of course part of the world, and can, furthermore, be about themselves.”

The following extract from MP's "The Intertwining -- the Chiasm" expresses the unfolding of the grounded passageway from prereflective experience to reflective experience that is understood and further clarified in Strawson's seminal paper:

"What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. How does it happen that I give to my hands, in particular, that degree, that rate, and that direction of movement that are capable of making me feel the textures of the sleek and the rough? Between the exploration and what it will teach me, between my movements and what I touch, there must exist some relationship by principle, some kinship, according to which they are not only, like the pseudopods of the amoeba, vague and ephemeral deformations of the corporeal space, but the initiation to and the opening upon a tactile world. This can happen only if my hand, while it is felt from within, is also accessible from without, itself tangible . . . takes its place among the things it touches, is in a sense one of them, opens finally upon a tangible being of which it is also a part."
 
Strawson's footnote 11 is also clarifying in this extract:

"The Remarkable View

that the subject matter of phenomenology (the completely general study of the experiential character of experience) is nothing more than sense/feeling experience as characterized above.

This view achieved such dominance that the phrase ‘qualitative character’, used to refer quite generally to the experiential character of experience, came to many to sound synonymous with ‘sense/feeling’. In this way the mistake was built into the words with which the question was discussed.11"

[11 "The word ‘phenomenal’ also plays a role, in so far as it’s taken to be interchangeable with ‘phenomenological’, for ‘phenomenal’ is naturally taken to refer only to sense/feeling phenomena, whereas ‘phenomenological’ must be taken more widely if it is to have a general use."]
 
@Pharoah

Re your exploration of emergentism, downward causation, and the nature of matter.

The Hylomorphic Mind (Part 1)

"A hylomorphic approach to mind-body problems is both naturalistic and antireductive. It claims that we are physical beings with physical components, and that our distinctive powers to think, feel, and perceive are essentially embodied in the physical materials that compose us. On the other hand, it denies that descriptions and explanations of those powers and their manifestations are reducible to the descriptions and explanations provided by physics, chemistry, or neuroscience. ...

What explains these differences in the contents of the bag pre- and post-squashing? The physical materials remain the same—none of them leaked out. Intuitively we want to say that what changed was the way those materials were organized or structured. That structure was responsible for there being a human before the squashing, and for that human having the capacities it had. Once that structure was destroyed, there no longer was a human with those capacities. Structure is thus a basic ontological principle: it concerns what things there are. It is also a basic explanatory principle: it concerns what things can do—the distinctive powers they have."

I'm pretty certain we've discussed hylomorphism in this discussion before.

I recall you saying, Pharoah, that objective objects and subjective experiences are both real, and being real can therefore interact with one another. The exact nature of psychophysical nexus eludes is however.

I'm probably doing it wrong, but the notion of the movement of the body as a nexus of mind and matter brought to us by phenomenology and embodied cognition approaches is helpful.

But as to a "common medium" through which mind and body can interact, this hylomorphic notion that "structure" is ontologically basic is interesting, and I think something that HCT and its constructs recognizes?

If nothing else, both mind and body have structure, and perhaps structure is the bridge between mind and body.

So what are the principles underlying structure?

I recall reading a paper several months ago that suggested that since both matter and mind have structure, math can be used to describe both and therefore constitute a common language for describing them.
 
If nothing else, both mind and body have structure, and perhaps structure is the bridge between mind and body.

So what are the principles underlying structure?

I recall reading a paper several months ago that suggested that since both matter and mind have structure, math can be used to describe both and therefore constitute a common language for describing them.

An interesting addition to this current discussion, Soupie. I think we should explore this hylomorphic theory along with the thinking developed in the cognitive phenomenology debate, the issues first expressed in Strawson's originating paper. It seems to me that we have often looked here in this thread for a 'structure' in nature that could account for/enable us to understand the open-endedness of our temporally experienced 'lived reality' as we know it, recognize it, in ourselves. We've cited several times the interactive, integrated, nature of quantum behavior as a possible grounding source for what we experience in our interactions with that which we encounter phenomenally and phenomenologically in the environing world. The hylomorphic theory might enable us to take such speculation as far as we can.

I hope you can link us to the paper you refer to in your last paragraph quoted above. My first reaction to its suggestion that 'math can be used to describe a common structure of both matter and mind' is scepticism, but I'd like to see what that author has to say.
 
Chapters 10-11
Jaworski’s brand of hylomorphism is presented, along with a related hylomorphic theory of mind. While Aristotelean approaches are becoming more popular within philosophy – notably philosophy of biology – there exists an uncomfortable lack of exposition into its tenets which these chapters help to fill. I found the connections with Morleau-Ponty’s empirical phenomenology, and modern embodied cognition theorists like Noe and Regan, to be a helpful inspiration for future research.

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