• NEW! LOWEST RATES EVER -- SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE VERY BEST PREMIUM PARACAST EXPERIENCE! Welcome to The Paracast+, eight years young! For a low subscription fee, you can download the ad-free version of The Paracast and the exclusive, member-only, After The Paracast bonus podcast, featuring color commentary, exclusive interviews, the continuation of interviews that began on the main episode of The Paracast. We also offer lifetime memberships! Flash! Take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! You can sign up right here!

    Subscribe to The Paracast Newsletter!

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 6

Free episodes:

Status
Not open for further replies.
You must be intimate with flesh till you know its very essence. And its very essence is after all a spirit, an attitude, an adventurousness toward it knows not what, and a delighted discovery of the world, and a tireless creativeness. This (I would affirm) is its essence, and not that mechanical and tyrannous routine of pleasure and pain in which it has become entangled, that vast back-water in which so much of life’s torrent is forever trapped.
 
While at amazon.com I received a notice of a new book by Alva Noe, entitled Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature.

Book description:

“In his new book, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë raises a number of profound questions: What is art? Why do we value art as we do? What does art reveal about our nature? Drawing on philosophy, art history, and cognitive science, and making provocative use of examples from all three of these fields, Noë offers new answers to such questions. He also shows why recent efforts to frame questions about art in terms of neuroscience and evolutionary biology alone have been and will continue to be unsuccessful.”

REVIEW COMMENTS:

With incisive arguments and in crisp and engaging prose, Strange Tools brings the discourse on the function of art and beauty to a different level. (Giovanni Frazzetto Science)

A stimulating and wide-ranging investigation of the meaning of art . . . A searching and learned response to vexing, long-debated questions. (Kirkus Reviews)

Noë offers a unique analysis on the role of art, and also philosophy, in our lives. Readers with an interest in philosophy, aesthetics, or art will find this an accessible and engaging read. (Scott Duimstra,
Library Journal)

As a neurologist, confronted every day by questions of mind, self, consciousness, and their basis, I find Alva Noë's concepts both astounding and convincing. (Oliver Sacks)

Alva Noë's Strange Tools challenges some of our preconceptions not only about art and human nature, but also about philosophy and science. The book shows how bad ideas about each of these subjects support bad ideas about the others. It is passionately argued, and readers will want to argue back at various points; that is true too of the best philosophy and the best writing about art. (Hilary Putnam, Cogan University Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Harvard University)

As Alva Noë gracefully dispatches one reductionist account after another (the neurological, the sociobiological, the evolutionary, and so forth), his subject--the very nature and provenance of art--just keeps expanding outward. And every page seems to open onto fresh vantages, crisp aperçus evocative of how art endlessly affords us all new ways not just of seeing, but of being (Lawrence Weschler, author of Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees)

In his new book, Alva Noë spiritedly suggests that, at their best, art and philosophy are practices of inquiry into the human condition. He defends, convincingly, the idea that the value of those practices derives from the questions they pose and the pleasure we experience when we glean a workable, reorganizing answer. Along the way he argues, advisedly, against reductive accounts of aesthetics. A stimulating read. (Antonio Damasio, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience and director of the USC College Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California)

The projects of philosophy and of art-making cross over in this remarkable book. Read it, and whatever you thought about both will be radically challenged. (Alexander Nagel, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)

Organisms organize their interaction with their environments. Human beings can consciously organize and reorganize that interaction. Making, appreciating, and talking about art are among the ways that human beings do this, and thus are characteristic of human life itself. On these simple but undeniable truths, Alva Noë builds a devastating critique of contemporary 'neuroaesthetics' and an illuminating account of the role of art in the human conversation. This is a work in the grand tradition of John Dewey's Art as Experience, and one of the most important books in that tradition since Dewey's own. (Paul Guyer, Jonathan Nelson Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Brown University)

Inspiring as well as useful. (Deborah Hay, director of the Deborah Hay Dance Company)

Many have told us, passionately, that art shapes human nature in ways science alone cannot explain, but Noë doesn't just tell; he shows how many insights flow from an open-minded understanding of both art and science combined. He walks the tightrope between reductionism and mysterianism with panache, and part of the fun of reading this book is watching him recover from his narrow escapes, almost abandoning naturalism in favor of a romanticized vision of science as poetry, and almost giving some ideologues more respect than they deserve. (Daniel Dennett, author of Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking)

About the Author
Alva Noë is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also serves as a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. A graduate of Columbia College, he holds a BPhil from the University of Oxford and a PhD from Harvard University. The focus of his work in recent years has been on the nature of mind and human experience, with particular emphasis on perception and consciousness. In addition, he is a weekly contributor to National Public Radio's science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture.
 
You must be intimate with flesh till you know its very essence. And its very essence is after all a spirit, an attitude, an adventurousness toward it knows not what, and a delighted discovery of the world, and a tireless creativeness. This (I would affirm) is its essence, and not that mechanical and tyrannous routine of pleasure and pain in which it has become entangled, that vast back-water in which so much of life’s torrent is forever trapped.

Is this from Stapledon?
 
Does Hans go splat when push comes to shove do you think?

Harrison is an excellent dialogerateur ... so he probably won't push Hans too hard, I mean why push over Wittgenstein anyway? ... so we may never know.
 
The philosophy of illness - Havi Carel

This is an interview with a philosopher diagnosed in 2006 with a chronic, incurable illness:

Alan Saunders: Well let's start with this approach to the subject, let's start with what is in fact the dominant way of thinking about the body and the illness, particularly in the medical field. It's what's known as the naturalist approach; can you explain that?
Havi Carel: Yes, absolutely. So naturalism, as applied to medicine, the naturalistic approach in medicine is, roughly speaking, the idea that what happens in disease is a natural process that can be comprehensively understood simply by looking at biological processes in the body. There's one particular philosopher of science called Bourse, who came up with a definition of disease as 'the biological dysfunction in a body part or body system', and this has a connection to a big discussion in philosophy of biology which is about function. What is the function of a particular organ? What is the function of say the heart, or the eyes, or the human skin, for example? Now the issue I take with the naturalistic approach is I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it, I mean I'm a naturalist myself on many issues, but the problem is that this type of explanation is I think, too narrow, doesn't capture a lot of the social, emotional, psychological dimensions of illness that are so important to people.
Alan Saunders: Well you suggest that what we're lacking is a phenomenological account of illness. Can you tell us about this approach, what such an account might look like?
Havi Carel: Yes. So a phenomenological account is one that starts out by asking what is the experience like for a particular person, and a particular type of phenomenology I'm interested in, which is as you mention, that of Merleau-Ponty is an embodied phenomenology.
 
Havi Carel
Illness: The Cry of the Flesh

focus on the present

... if you go back to the Stoics, this is a thought developed by them. Something along the lines of, If you manage to delineate a place in the present where you're not plagued by regrets about the past, and anxieties about the future, then you can be happy in that place.

.... for me was a very long struggle to find peace of mind without holding on to the thought that my future is secure in some way.
Alan Saunders: Well that is what I was about to ask you, because I find it extremely difficult not to be future-directed, and for me, learning to think of my life in the way that you have apparently managed to think of yours, would be an enormous mental and spiritual discipline.
Havi Carel: Well I think the actual practical steps one has to take, I mean it obviously differs from one person to another, but there's very simple and minimal things that people can sort of get used to doing when incorporated into the daily routine. The idea of trying to carry out your day-to-day actions whilst being mindful, so really tasting the coffee you're drinking, really enjoying the music you're listening to, really taking pleasure and paying attention to even trivial things like washing the dishes, I think that's one relatively easy thing to incorporate into one's routine.
So I think we live in a culture that's very future-projected, right, you're always thinking about the next thing you need to do and always concerned about all your obligations and commitments that are coming up, and deadlines and so on. But the thing that happens when you don't know how long you're going to live is that you stop placing such tremendous importance on ticking the boxes and pleasing other people and carrying out all your commitments and you start thinking more about what might give you pleasure now. And I think that if you do that enough, not in a particularly selfish way, but if you learn to take care of yourself, if you learn to put yourself first in some respects, then that can really lead to big changes in how you experience your everyday.
 
@Constance - have you read Todes?

Samuel Todes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

According to philosopher Piotr Hoffman, "Had [Todes' dissertation] been published at the time it was written, it would have been recognized as one of the most valuable contributions to philosophy in the postwar period and as the most significant contribution to the field of existential phenomenology since the work of Merleau-Ponty."[1]


Body and World also makes a notable contribution to contemporary interdisciplinary research in the field of embodied cognitive science.
 
Samuel Todes Blog

Why Read Samuel Todes?
Todes was an American philosopher whose 1963 doctoral dissertation is the most significant contribution to epistemology in the postwar period. His dissertation, republished as Body and World, investigates the relation of thought to perception and carries interesting implications for Artificial Intelligence research, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.

Todes builds on the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty while presciently addressing issues that have only recently become central to Anglo-American analytic philosophy (e.g. nonconceptual content).

Secondary literature on Todes is virtually non-existent. That's why I run this blog.
 
http://www.samueltodes.blogspot.com/search/label/Background
http://www.samueltodes.blogspot.com/2012/02/what-to-read-before-todes.html
What to Read Before Todes


Todes's Body and World is first and foremost a study in epistemology. Much of the book can be loosely seen as dealing with the implications, consequences, and problems arising out of Kant's reformulation of the fundamental epistemological question.

Prior to Kant, that question was: (1) How do we come to know initially knowable objects? This question left open the possibility of there being more than one form of knowing since it was understood as the problem of “how we relate our perceptual kind of information about the object to our quite different conceptual kind of information about it.” (Todes, p. 92)

By positing that experience is a single synthesis of sensible intuition and conceptual understanding, Kant changed the problem to: (2) How do we make objects knowable? This form of the question makes the knowability of an object dependent on our [one] way of knowing (more on this transformation later) - in this case, through mentally subjective concepts (a.k.a. the information processing model of intelligibility, whereby concepts - and therefore, meanings - are superimposed onto raw sensible data). Hence, we are led to believe we can never know things-in-themselves.

Todes's treatment of the topic argues that question (2) is the result of an improper understanding of practical perception. One of his main theses is that Kant imaginizes perception - that is, Kant makes perception too mental.

In order to make sense of Todes's analysis, a background in Kant and phenomenology is invaluable. Husserl, Heidegger, and [especially] Merleau-Ponty are all important for getting the most out of Todes. For those looking to get a strong introduction into these subjects, here is a list of accessible readings:
 
Samuel Todes Blog

Why Read Samuel Todes?
Todes was an American philosopher whose 1963 doctoral dissertation is the most significant contribution to epistemology in the postwar period. His dissertation, republished as Body and World, investigates the relation of thought to perception and carries interesting implications for Artificial Intelligence research, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.

Todes builds on the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty while presciently addressing issues that have only recently become central to Anglo-American analytic philosophy (e.g. nonconceptual content).

Secondary literature on Todes is virtually non-existent. That's why I run this blog.

No, I haven't read or even heard of Todes but am now interested to follow your lead to his work. I followed your embedded link to the SEP article on "nonceptual content," and at the bottom of the bibliography there also followed a further link provided to an extensive list of papers at Philpapers responding to the SEP entry here:

Linked bibliography for the SEP article

This philpapers list indicates that this is a rich vein of discourse to mine concerning both preconscious affectivity and protoconsciousness in the evolution of Earth species and also prereflective conscious content in humans. Likely the Philpapers list at the link is mostly concerned with the latter at present.

'Nonceptual content' is a most interesting direction for us to take now.
 
Samuel Todes Blog

Why Read Samuel Todes?
Todes was an American philosopher whose 1963 doctoral dissertation is the most significant contribution to epistemology in the postwar period. His dissertation, republished as Body and World, investigates the relation of thought to perception and carries interesting implications for Artificial Intelligence research, anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science.

Todes builds on the work of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty while presciently addressing issues that have only recently become central to Anglo-American analytic philosophy (e.g. nonconceptual content).

Secondary literature on Todes is virtually non-existent. That's why I run this blog.

This blog entry is excellent and I hope followed by further developments of the blogger's insights. I especially like this last paragraph from the second comment by 'RW':

"So it seems despite himself Dreyfus is offering the most appealing and unassailable philosophical refutation of nihilism today; drawing the best from the existentialist tradition and imbuing it with the re-enchanted world and variety of Homeric phenomenology. If I could point to an example of this – to “existentialize” the philosophy, a la Dreyfus – it would be Henry Miller as he is in his work and spirit; his travelogue of Greece not least among many examples."

And the blogger's response:

"Daniel AriasFebruary 24, 2013 at 9:58 PM
I don't disagree that Dreyfus has the strongest refutation of nihilism to date, although there's still more of the project that needs to be developed (ethical expertise comes to mind), which is why I'm glad there's a planned sequel with the subtitle being something like "Finding Meaning in a Scientific Age."
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top