• 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 7


Status
Not open for further replies.
Steve, your link to the "Fewer Lacunae" page is another remarkable discovery by you. I've read the first half of that page so far and find the author's thinking and citations most relevant to our recent discussion in Part 6.

Also helpful is this text in your succeeding post:

"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 Merleau-Ponty’s empirical phenomenology, and modern embodied cognition theorists like Noe and Regan, to be a helpful inspiration for future research."

We need the link to that text, unless it's linked somewhere in "Fewer Lacunae" and I haven't come across it yet. Or is the extract from a link Soupie provided in his post just preceding yours?

Somewhere in one of the first parts of this thread I linked Noe and Regan's extensive paper on sensorimotor contingences as one of the paths. I'll repost the link, and the discussion of it here if I can locate that through the search function. The link itself is easily found at philpapers.org and I'll post it next.
 
Also helpful is this text in your succeeding post: "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 Merleau-Ponty’s empirical phenomenology, and modern embodied cognition theorists like Noe and Regan, to be a helpful inspiration for future research."
I replied:We need the link to that text . . .

I've found the link to that text elsewhere on Binz's "Inner Lacunae" site. Here it is, including Binz's chapter-by-chapter summaries of "Jaworski's brand of hylomorphism":

Jaworski: Philosophy Of Mind
 
Extracted samples from the Jaworski book can be read at the following Google Books link. Once there place the title of ch. 10 -- The Hylomorphic World View -- in the search box to go directly to sampled pages within that chapter and subsequently to ch. 11, The Hylomorphic Mind.

Philosophy of Mind

Note: scroll up a page or two for the introductory overview of chapter 10 if you land at 10.1 or 10.2. Google Books provides 36 direct links to sections of chapter 10, likely too for chapter 11.

All praise (and endless gratitude) to Google for Google Books.
 
Last edited:
Re the Noe and O'Ragan paper on sensorimotor contingencies, I did find the following post in which I probably first mentioned their research.

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2

I've been reading beyond that post in part 2 and found that we laid some groundwork there for the issues we've been discussing in part 6, particularly concerning Whitehead's process philosophy and later ideas in process physics.
 
Merleau-Ponty: "Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any thematization."

Elaboration in eight stanzas extracted from Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," at this link to a post in Part 2:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2
 
@Pharoah:
Strawson here articulates Risselian Monism

1. Science only gives us the structure not the intrinsic nature of things

2. Experience is direct contact with the intrinsic nature of things

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
 
I'm working on a post about Farnham Street blog - one of the main points is to understand a few simple concepts deeply - not to first try and stay on the cutting ege (red queen effect)

Hylomorphism is an example being quite an old and fundamental idea.

It's funny, the link above references a recent return to Greek philosophy ... but I can't find a period in the history of philosophy when there hasn't been a return, resurgence or "whooshing up" of Greek philosophy ... :)

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
 
I'm particularly interested in hearing @Pharoah's response to this Strawson paper since, if I'm remembering correctly, he wrote in opposition to Strawson's thinking in an earlier part of this thread.
 
Another post of Steve's that I want to bring forward from Part 2 into our present discussion:

"I vote this as "shiny object of the day" - a quantum mechanic who says Idealism is just good physics:

Henry asserts that physics strongly supports metaphysical idealism (these speculations were published in Nature) he argues that the mainstream wants to reconcile QM with a 19th century vision of physics. He says this is wrong.

Quantum Mechanics, he says, deals with nothing but observations, observations have the courage of numbers, numbers are nothing but mental, thus all things are mental and the universe does not exist at all except as mind.


"Mind is fundamental, matter is merely an illusion and that is physics, not philosophy or religion."

Richard Conn Henry | Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics & Astronomy | Johns Hopkins University

And I think this has been posted on the thread (part 1) before:

http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.Universe.pdf

"The 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics solved the problem of the Universe’s nature. Bright physicists were again led to believe the unbelievable — this time,t hat the Universe is mental. According to Sir James Jeans: “the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” But physicists have not yet followed Galileo’s example, and convinced everyone of the wonders of quantum mechanics. As Sir Arthur Eddington explained: “It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character.”

"Discussing the play, John H. Marburger III, President George W. Bush’s science adviser, observes that “in the Copenhagen interpretation of microscopic nature, there are neither waves nor particles”, but then frames his remarks in terms of a non-existent“ underlying stuff ”. He points out that it is not true that matter “sometimes behaves like a wave and sometimes like a particle... The wave is not in the underlying stuff; it is in the spatial pattern of detector clicks... We cannot help but think of the clicks as caused by little localized pieces of stuff that we might as well call particles. This is where the particle language comes from. It does not come from the underlying stuff, but from our psychological predisposition to associate localized phenomena with particles.”

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 2


@Pharoah suggested we turn to metaphysics and now we are in the thick of it -- a good thing, metaphysics, a necessary place to visit in the effort to ground our philosophy and our science in what we do learn through lived experience in the world and what we can learn through experimentation. In discussing metaphysics we can confront the yet-unanswerable question of "the underlying stuff" Henry refers to and -- realizing that we don't yet comprehend the stages in and of the physical evolution of nature -- at least recognize that what we have learned about nature requires consciousness and mind.

I don't think as Richard Conn Henry does, or seems to, in the first quotation from him above, that "Mind is fundamental, matter is merely an illusion and that is physics, not philosophy or religion." It's possible that I might agree with him if I read the whole of the paper Steve cites above. {I didn't read it at the time Steve posted it, should have, and will do so tonight.} Based on my own reading in philosophy and science and on our two years of discussions here, my view is that what we need to understand in concrete detail is the evolution of nature as we experience it before we can account for the emergence of consciousness and mind in the course of that evolution. Neither radical dualism a la Descartes nor declarations that either 'mind' or 'matter' is fundamental have withstood developments in modern philosophy and science. We are in the middle of a process of attempting to understand the evolution of consciousness and mind that links us to what I take to be the undeniable actuality of physical and mental phenomena realized in our experience of being-in-the-world. The world we exist in is actual (see MP's writing regarding 'the perceptual faith' in the world's actuality developed out of our species' experience and thought).

Modern science (physics, biology, chemistry, biochemistry, and biophysics) has recognized in our time the evolution of innumerable physical 'systems' in nature, their interrelations and interactions, and their complexity. Whether ontologically developed quantum mechanics can provide us with insight into the origin, the grounding. of all evolving physical systems in nature is still a question awaiting an agreed-upon theory of qm and q field theory based in extended experimentation. Some of the founder's of qm attempted to think through to the ontology of the quantum substrate, but over the last hundred years most experimentation in qm has been satisfied with only epistemological claims that result from standard and limited measurement experiments. Regarding "the underlying stuff" that Henry refers to, many quantum theorists recognize that a deeper substrate of physical processes might underlie what we understand as the quantum substrate. The main point I'm trying to make is that we don't know enough about physical nature itself to do more than speculate about the origins of consciousness in nature.
 
Last edited:
Getting into hylomorphism. Below is a ramifying quotation from the overview to chapter 10 of the Jaworski book linked above in this post:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

“Different kinds of organisms engage in different kinds of activities. Because each kind of organism has its own distinctive activities, each kind of organism comprises its own hierarchy of levels, subactivities, and subsystems or parts. According to hylomorphism, then, levels in nature are not to be understood in a global, kind-generic way, but in a local, kind-specific way with only the lower level or levels cutting across kind-specific boundaries.”
 
It's also the case that the assumed quantum-classical boundary in descriptions of physical nature has been crossed in several research discoveries in recent years, especially in the recognition of quantum processes in photosynthesis in plants and q processes in crystals. We've probably referenced here but I don't think we've discussed in detail the Hameroff-Penrose arguments concerning quantum processes in microtubules in the brain. Some additional physicists such as Stapp and Tiller pursue research into quantum processes in the brain, consciousness, and mind.
 
Last edited:
Is Hylomorphism a Neglected Option in Philosophy of Mind?*

Sent from my LGLS991 using Tapatalk
 
Jaworski has several posts now at the Philosophy of Brains blog. I'm not yet groking how Hylomorphism resolves the mind-body problem.

Here are two recent posts:

Hylomorphism and the Problem of Mental Causation (Part 1)

Hylomorphism and the Problem of Mental Causation (Part 2)

The following post lays a basic outline:

Hylomorphism and Mind-Body Problems

"The key to understanding the hylomorphic approach to mind-body problems is the notion of an activity-making structure. The structures mentioned above are structures that make individuals the unified wholes they are; they are individual-making structures, the kinds of things traditional hylomorphists called ‘substantial forms’. But individual-making structures are not the only structures that exist. The activities in which structured individuals engage have structures as well; these are activity-making structures.

The idea that there are activity-making structures is based on the observation that the activities of structured individuals involve coordinated manifestations of the powers of their parts. When we walk, talk, sing, dance, reach, grasp, and engage in the various other activities we do, we are imposing an order on the ways our parts manifest their powers. On the hylomorphic view, these structured manifestations of powers include thinking, feeling, and perceiving. These activities, like the ones just mentioned, are essentially embodied in the physiological mechanisms that compose us, yet it is not possible to reduce descriptions and explanations of them to descriptions and explanations of physiological mechanisms. The reason is that there is more to these activities on the hylomorphic view than the operations of physiological mechanisms; there is also the way those operations are coordinated or structured, and structure in general is something different from things that are structured. Structure is what unifies simpler lower-level entities and occurrences into more complex ones. Higher-level biological, psychological, and other structures are what delineate the subject-matters of special sciences such as biology and psychology, and what secure the autonomy those sciences enjoy."

I'm intrigued by the idea that mental phenomena and physical phenomena share the property of structure, but I'm struggling with the idea that thinking and perceiving are of the same kind as singing and walking.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top