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Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

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@Constance - re(re)-reading Being and Time ... and starting to make some headway ... it leads of course back to Husserl and from there Brentano on intentionality (as well as Medieval concepts of intentionality and being) - Heidegger's absorbed coping vs Husserl's transendental phenomenology, Heidegger rejecting the reduction/epoche - B&T and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations keep coming up as the philosophical texts of the 20th century ... Heidegger's turn after reading Nietzsche (parallels?) to Wittgenstein's own change after the Tractatus.
 
I toss another pebble into these deep waters. Hopefully a ripple will rock a leaf or two.

Heinlein quipped that anything not proven by math is opinion, not fact. I think this is at least partially true. A long held personal criticism of biological evolution by virtue of random mutation and natural selection has nothing to do with religious belief, but rather a seeming lack of functional algorithms demonstrating statistical feasibility. (Or do they exist? Dunno...) That is probably another discussion for polymaths wielding complex algorithms.

Beyond attempts to mathematically quantify qualia in terms of collapsing wave functions and other esoterica, Hoffman's efforts in turning the mind's relation to physical law on its head using CR emphasizes the wide chasm between philosophy and science. Any hope of solving the hard problem must lie in a more cross-fertilized approach. Three thousand years of philosophy has failed to make a dent in the Hard Problem. Neuroscience is doing a little better, but not much. So Hoffman is due his 15 minutes of fame and peer review by those versed in quantum mechanics and the higher mathematics used to describe it. This is a small club that may or may not yet be looking at his work. It is interesting to note that this club may be small precisely because widespread comprehension of QM is the victim of non-Faithful Depiction. Most people simply do not have the neural hardware. That his work is almost verbally ineffable may or may not be a weakness or smokescreen in terms of its validity. The predictive power of QM should prompt us to give him at least some benefit of the doubt.

The history of physicist turned mystic Brian Josephson's discovery of the Josephson junction is an excellent example of how conventional sanity may fail larger truth. The JJ simply should not work. Some of the best minds in physics predicted it would not. But it does. The story is a kind of cautionary tale for those placing too much stock in good sense.

-Hoffman is asked in Q & A after a lecture if he sees evidence of humans evolving to better model reality for truth as opposed to survival value. His opinion is that he sees, if anything, a retrogressive trend and a slight reduction in human brain size over the previous 30,000 years.

-He is asked if iconic spiritual seers throughout history may have been notable exceptions to the principle of "Faithful Deception". I find his answer intriguing: Possibly, but that perception and cognitive understanding are not synonymous. We therefore cannot say.

Some of what has been discussed here in terms of HFD and human evolution, seen in light of recent technological advances in human history, produce puzzle pieces that may fit. The fossil record is one of long lapses punctuated by relatively short bursts of "progress", characterized by appearance of new species. I honestly don't know if "punctuated equilibrium" is currently in vogue. Suffice to say the fossil record is oddly non-linear.

Consider now evidence that H sapiens may be approaching one such point of punctuation brought about by its modeling of reality that has rendered itself dangerously obsolete.

a) We are overpopulating our planet and altering its ecosphere in ways not conducive to our long term survival.
b) We have, since 1945, possessed weapons capable of rendering ourselves extinct.

As a species perhaps our brains lack a modeling format that, despite our best intentions, is capable of resolving these problems. The next logical step is not tough: We/nature may either re-configure our perceptual mechanisms in a way that allows us to survive by seeing reality at least a bit closer to a larger truth. Or lacking this, we run the risk of stagnation or complete extinction.


“Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.”


If it can’t be expressed in figures, it is not science; it is opinion.

Both quotes by the character Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love.
 
So the aporia that arises between the phenomenal and the conceptual is preceded by the aporia that arises between what-is and our perception of what-is, no?
Consciousness is hard to define because it is circular in the manner described above (and by my avatar).

How can we understand understanding?

In the NYT piece I linked to above by Strawson, he discusses the problem of defining consciousness.

He concludes that consciousness is the only thing we can know (which to me is different from defining).

He says: The having is the knowing.

As I've noted before, I dislike the term "have." I would prefer the following when it comes to consciousness:

The being is the knowing.

We don't have consciousness, we are consciousness. We are that which we perceive (or more broadly, experience).

However, borrowing a line from Hoffman, we must take our experience seriously but not literally in regards to the noumenal. We must be careful not to reify experience as it may relate to the noumenal.

@smcder can you direct me to a philosophy or philosopher who has written about this subject? Michael Allen had referenced Heidegger; does he engage this subject?
 
The history of physicist turned mystic Brian Josephson's discovery of the Josephson junction is an excellent example of how conventional sanity may fail larger truth. The JJ simply should not work. Some of the best minds in physics predicted it would not. But it does. The story is a kind of cautionary tale for those placing too much stock in good sense.
I know it seems that I'm consumed with the MUI concept of Hoffman's, and it's true that I am playing with it right now.

So consider the above from that perspective. It's as if physicists have drilled down to the pixels that make up the UI, and they're watching the behavior of the pixels and seeing that they are behaving in ways that the icons of the UI do not. Of course, the pixels are still part of the UI but From their behavior we can get a sense (?) of the underlying architecture.

Of course Hoffman says no; there is no way we can gain a sense of the diodes and circuits of the motherboard by plumbing the depths of the UI. Or is there?
 
Consciousness is hard to define because it is circular in the manner described above (and by my avatar).

How can we understand understanding?

In the NYT piece I linked to above by Strawson, he discusses the problem of defining consciousness.

He concludes that consciousness is the only thing we can know (which to me is different from defining).

He says: The having is the knowing.

As I've noted before, I dislike the term "have." I would prefer the following when it comes to consciousness:

The being is the knowing.

We don't have consciousness, we are consciousness. We are that which we perceive (or more broadly, experience).

However, borrowing a line from Hoffman, we must take our experience seriously but not literally in regards to the noumenal. We must be careful not to reify experience as it may relate to the noumenal.

@smcder can you direct me to a philosophy or philosopher who has written about this subject? Michael Allen had referenced Heidegger; does he engage this subject?

I recommend some background in philosophy ... and gaining some sense of your own pre-suppositions, which I think will come from reading philosophy - your sense of the problem will change, should change - your vocabulary will change, even an introductory textbook would be helpful, on philosophy in general, not just philosophy of mind - Coppleston's history is well respected but there are more contemporary ones, the main thing is to get some sense of philosophical thinking, some history of the problems in philosophy and the methods applied to them ... seeing what problems each philosopher was trying to solve in their historical context ... and reading the source material itself, not just books about philosophy.

I'd try to do this on the eastern side as well, there is much better scholarship now and good translations, if you're interested in the contemplative traditions, I recommend taking up a regular practice along with scholarship - that's not just a meditation practice, as there are prepatory practices before meditation.

There are so many good sources, the best I think is to follow (and in the process, hone) your own natural intuition and intelligence.

Heidegger ... no, not to start.

I'll try to post some helpful links and resources.
 
Last edited:
from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014.07.10

Havi Carel and Darian Meacham (eds.), Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 341pp. $39.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781107699052.

Reviewed byEvan Thompson, University of British Columbia


This somewhat disparate collection concerns the difficult relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. Although the editors state in their introduction that "phenomenology," as understood in the volume, refers to the style and method of doing philosophy that originated with Edmund Husserl and was carried forward in different ways by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, three of the fourteen essays (by James Lenman, Alison Assiter, and Iain Hamilton Grant, respectively) make little or no mention of phenomenology defined in this way, though they do concern various ontological and ethical issues about the relationship between human experience and the natural world. "Naturalism," too, is understood in a variety of ways. Given the heterogeneity of the essays, it will not be possible to discuss them all here. Instead, my focus will be on those essays that examine the relationship between naturalism and phenomenology in its broadly Husserlian and Heideggerian senses.

It will be useful to have in hand a forceful form of naturalism. "Scientific naturalism" can be defined as the view that science provides the best account of reality. The view has an ontological component and a methodological component (Papineau 2009). The ontological component is physicalism, the thesis that everything that exists, including the mind, is completely physical. The methodological component is the thesis that the methods of empirical science give science a general and final authority about the world, and therefore science should be epistemically privileged over all other forms of investigation. Scientific naturalism is a philosophical thesis, not a thesis belonging to any of the empirical sciences themselves. Although some scientists may espouse scientific naturalism, it is not built into the actual practice of empirical science. Moreover, when a scientist gives voice to scientific naturalism, she or he no longer speaks just as a scientist. Dan Zahavi quotes Husserl to make this point:

When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking; and it assuredly is not when they are talking about 'philosophy of Nature' and 'epistemology as a natural science.' (Husserl 1982, p. 39, quoted by Zahavi, p. 31).

Phenomenology, understood as transcendental philosophy (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), fundamental ontology (Heidegger), or existential analysis (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), stands opposed to scientific naturalism, especially its methodological component. Phenomenologists generally argue that naturalism overlooks and cannot account for the necessary conditions of its own possibility. For example, as Zahavi and Dermot Moran explain, Husserl argues that naturalistic treatments of consciousness as a biological or psychological property of certain organisms overlook and cannot account for the transcendental standing of consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear in whatever way it does and with whatever meaning it has. Husserl (1970) also argues that scientific naturalism presupposes and overlooks the "life-world" as a transcendental structure of intersubjective understanding, without which science would not be possible. Moran explains the phenomenological concept of the life-world as Husserl presented it. The concept also plays a significant role in Matthew Ratcliffe's contribution, which argues in an original way that the intelligibility of science presupposes the life-world, yet scientific naturalism remains oblivious to the life-world's existential and epistemological primacy.

Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III). We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).

We can now state the objection that phenomenology makes to the methodological component of scientific naturalism. Phenomenology charges that scientific naturalism is oblivious to the priority of the world as the space of meaning and does not recognize the need for specifically philosophical methods, especially transcendental and existential phenomenological ones, for investigating and understanding it.

Many of the essays take this phenomenological charge against naturalism as the background against which to consider whether there may be ways to revise phenomenology and naturalism in order to make them compatible or somehow reconcilable. Central to these discussions is the problem of consciousness. One approach, known as the "naturalizing phenomenology" project (Petitot et al. 1999; Roy et al. 1999), seeks to absorb phenomenological analyses of consciousness into some kind of naturalistic framework. Another approach, "phenomenologizing nature," uses phenomenology to enrich our understanding of nature, especially living being and the body, in order to do justice to consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Ultimately, both strategies are necessary and must be pursued in a complementary and mutually supporting way, if phenomenology is not to be reduced to or eliminated in favor of scientific naturalism, and if naturalism is not to be rejected in favor of metaphysically dualist or idealist forms of phenomenology.

This idea informs the first paper, by Zahavi. He criticizes the naturalizing phenomenology project for failing to appreciate that the problem of consciousness includes the transcendental problem of accounting for consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for objectivity. This problem is not addressed by using phenomenology to advance analyses of empirical consciousness for the purpose of bridging or closing the explanatory gap between physical nature and subjective experience, especially as the gap is seen from the perspective of scientific naturalism. In other words, the issue, for phenomenology, is not physicalism versus dualism; it is to investigate consciousness as one of the principal necessary conditions of possibility for the framework of intelligibility that science presupposes, including the empirical science of consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, Zahavi thinks that two alternative ways to pursue naturalized phenomenology can maintain a commitment to phenomenology as a transcendental project. First, phenomenology can collaborate with empirical science, especially in the investigation of consciousness, by providing analyses that can inform experimental design while also refining these analyses in light of empirical evidence. This approach follows Husserl's conception of phenomenological psychology as a local or "regional" investigation of psychological phenomena, in contrast to transcendental phenomenology as a global philosophical investigation of the conditions of intelligibility for any phenomenon. Second, phenomenology can revise the concept of nature and the classical dichotomy between the empirical and the transcendental by revealing the transcendental status of the self-organizing and sense-making capacities of biological systems (Zahavi identifies this approach with my book, Mind in Life).

Rudolf Bernet's contribution can be read as an example of this second approach. He focuses on the body and the phenomenology of bodily self-experience. On the basis of a thorough explication of Husserl's analyses of bodily sensations, the experience of the body in touch and vision, and the body's dependence on material circumstances (see Husserl 1989), Bernet argues that the concrete unity of the body's living and experientially lived aspects rules out an ontological dualism of consciousness and physical nature, and cannot be understood properly from either the perspective of the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness or the perspective of scientific naturalism. Instead, it requires a form of phenomenology that sees the body as a "legitimate naturalization of consciousness," that is, a form of phenomenology that understands the body as at once concretely natural and transcendentally constitutive of the world as the space of meaning. Bernet also argues that these insights into the body are absent from Heidegger's phenomenology.

In one of the more original papers, Ratcliffe undertakes to construct an argument for the philosophical primacy of phenomenology over naturalism from various lines of thought found in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. To this end, he presents an account of what he calls the "sense of reality," which consists not simply in taking certain things to be there, but in grasping the world in perception and thought as an open space of possibilities of presence and absence. For example, we are able to grasp experientially the possibility of something's being present to perception versus its presence being dubitable or imagined or anticipated. Following Husserl, Ratcliffe claims that our ability to distinguish between "is" and "is not" presupposes an understanding of the world as a richly structured cognitive and affective possibility space.

On this basis, he argues as follows: Science is concerned only with revealing what is the case; scientific naturalism restricts itself to what science delivers and thus to what is the case; therefore, scientific naturalism fails to accommodate the space of possibilities presupposed by the intelligibility of something's being the case; the space of possibilities is a phenomenological achievement; therefore, phenomenology cannot be naturalized. Although one might question whether this argument is sound -- for example, by questioning the truth of the premise that science is concerned only with revealing what is the case -- the argument can be taken as a challenge to the scientific naturalist to come up with an account of the experiential sense of reality that science presupposes and on which it depends. Appealing to physicalism is not sufficient for this task, because the issue "is not about what kinds of worldly entities there are or what those entities are made up of; it is about recognising a phenomenological achievement that is presupposed by the intelligibility of any enquiry concerning what the world does and does not contain" (p. 81).

Ratcliffe also describes how the sense of reality as an experiential possibility space is altered in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Phenomenology is important for specifying how the cognitive and affective possibilities offered by things are dramatically changed in mental illness. This discussion converges with Fredrik Svenaeus' illuminating discussion of illness experience and how purely naturalistic theories of health and illness as biophysiological phenomena leave out the constitutively intentional and normative features of health and illness that phenomenology is needed to reveal.

Another original effort comes from Michael Wheeler, who examines the tension between transcendental thinking and naturalism by asking whether transcendental phenomenology and cognitive science can be reconciled. He uses John McDowell's (1989) distinction between "constitutive understanding" and "enabling understanding" to effect this reconciliation. Whereas constitutive understanding concerns that which makes a given phenomenon be the phenomenon that it is, enabling understanding concerns the causal processes that generate and realize a given phenomenon in the world. Wheeler proposes that phenomenology provides a constitutive understanding of the mental phenomena for which a corresponding cognitive science determines the underlying causal processes. At the same time, the causal processes that cognitive science discovers may lead phenomenology to revise its conception of the mental phenomena under investigation.

Such bidirectional influence is Wheeler's version of the idea that cognitive science and phenomenology can be mutually enlightening and reciprocally constraining (for earlier statements, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Varela (1996), Gallagher (1997), and Thompson (2007)). Wheeler illustrates this idea, using everyday skilled action as his example, by drawing on phenomenological analyses from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Hubert Dreyfus, and combining them with cognitive science accounts from neurophysiology and robotics research. He concludes by proposing that to reconcile naturalism and transcendental phenomenology we need naturalism to be "minimal" and the transcendental to be "domesticated." "Minimal naturalism" requires phenomenological accounts not to conflict with science but allows for the possibility that empirical science may not be able to illuminate certain cognitive phenomena (e.g., constitutively normative or ethical ones), whereas the "domesticated transcendental" takes the necessary conditions of possibility for human cognition to be historically contingent (where "history" includes natural and cultural history).

Thomas Baldwin's contribution presents a similar view through a critical reading of Merleau-Ponty'sPhenomenology of Perception. Baldwin argues that although Merleau-Ponty is right to reject reductionistic accounts of bodily experience and intentionality, and insightful in his view that natural science presupposes a fundamental bodily intentionality that configures the perceived world as spatiotemporal, he is wrong that perception is not, in his words, "an event of nature," and therefore not susceptible to scientific explanation. In Baldwin's reading, Merleau-Ponty's arguments for this view depend on problematic idealist assumptions that even a minimal naturalist will reject. Nevertheless, natural science is not sufficient for explaining perceptual intentionality, to the extent that perceptual content is constituted by cultural elements that are a matter of historical traditions and not scientific laws.

David Morris pursues a more radical approach, which he calls the "phenomenological reconfiguring of nature." He follows Merleau-Ponty in using phenomenology to trace the emergence of meaning from the body, while using contemporary evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") to show how life-regulation processes generate forms of meaning or sense-making that underlie and motivate human conceptual cognition. For Morris, life is a "transcendental field" prior to reflective consciousness, and is both causally enabling and constitutive of mind and consciousness.

Eran Dorfman's contribution is also based on Merleau-Ponty. Using ideas from the Phenomenology of Perception, Dorfman proposes that perceptual experience is the source of what Husserl called the "objectivist attitude" that takes the object to exist apart from consciousness and thereby neglects the role that consciousness or subjectivity plays in constituting it as an object of experience. Dorfman suggests that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and therefore the task for phenomenology is not to contest it but to trace its genesis.

Whereas the foregoing essays aim to preserve a role for phenomenology as some kind of transcendental investigation, David Roden argues that phenomenology should be retained only as a descriptive, empirical method for providing data about experience. This method must be recognized as limited, because it cannot penetrate "dark phenomena" that are not available to introspection or reflective intuition, such as very fine-grained perceptual discriminations of shades of color that cannot be held in memory, or the deep structure of temporal experience. Roden's discussion of these dark phenomena is illuminating, but his conclusion about the status of phenomenology does not follow. Although he is right that phenomenology cannot be a completely autonomous investigation, but rather must be informed by experimental investigations, it hardly follows that all that phenomenology can do is provide data about what is available to introspection. On the contrary, as the articles by Zahavi, Ratcliffe, Wheeler, and Morris demonstrate, phenomenology can provide new concepts and models for enriching our understanding of nature.

Besides these discussions of phenomenology and naturalism, the volume contains essays on the phenomenology of the ethical cultivation of virtue (Jonathan Webber), on science, ethics, and moral realism (James Lenman), on Kant and Kierkegaard on freedom and evil (Alison Assiter), and on German idealist philosophy of nature (Iain Hamilton Grant). Given these disparate topics and the fact that none of the essays engages with any of the others, the volume lacks unity and coherence. Nevertheless, it serves as an important resource for current thinking about phenomenology and naturalism.

REFERENCES

Crowell, S.G. (2001) Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Gallagher, S. (1997) "Mutual Enlightenment: Recent Phenomenology in Cognitive Science," Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 195-214.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Heidegger, M. (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. A. Hofstadter. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1982) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1989) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

McDowell, J. (1994) "The Content of Perceptual Experience," Philosophical Quarterly 44: 190-205.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. D. Landes. London: Routledge Press.

Papineau, D. (2009) "Naturalism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E. N. Zalta (ed.).

Petitot, J., Varela, F.J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M. eds. (1999) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Roy, J.-M., Petitot, J., Pachoud, B., and Varela, F.J. (1999) "Beyond the Gap: An Introduction to Naturalizing Phenomenology," in J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud, and J.-M. Roy, eds., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-80. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Varela, F. J. (1996) "Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 330-349.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame
 
from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014.07.10

Havi Carel and Darian Meacham (eds.), Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 341pp. $39.00 (pbk), ISBN 9781107699052.

Reviewed byEvan Thompson, University of British Columbia


This somewhat disparate collection concerns the difficult relationship between phenomenology and naturalism. Although the editors state in their introduction that "phenomenology," as understood in the volume, refers to the style and method of doing philosophy that originated with Edmund Husserl and was carried forward in different ways by Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, three of the fourteen essays (by James Lenman, Alison Assiter, and Iain Hamilton Grant, respectively) make little or no mention of phenomenology defined in this way, though they do concern various ontological and ethical issues about the relationship between human experience and the natural world. "Naturalism," too, is understood in a variety of ways. Given the heterogeneity of the essays, it will not be possible to discuss them all here. Instead, my focus will be on those essays that examine the relationship between naturalism and phenomenology in its broadly Husserlian and Heideggerian senses.

It will be useful to have in hand a forceful form of naturalism. "Scientific naturalism" can be defined as the view that science provides the best account of reality. The view has an ontological component and a methodological component (Papineau 2009). The ontological component is physicalism, the thesis that everything that exists, including the mind, is completely physical. The methodological component is the thesis that the methods of empirical science give science a general and final authority about the world, and therefore science should be epistemically privileged over all other forms of investigation. Scientific naturalism is a philosophical thesis, not a thesis belonging to any of the empirical sciences themselves. Although some scientists may espouse scientific naturalism, it is not built into the actual practice of empirical science. Moreover, when a scientist gives voice to scientific naturalism, she or he no longer speaks just as a scientist. Dan Zahavi quotes Husserl to make this point:

When it is actually natural science that speaks, we listen gladly and as disciples. But it is not always natural science that speaks when natural scientists are speaking; and it assuredly is not when they are talking about 'philosophy of Nature' and 'epistemology as a natural science.' (Husserl 1982, p. 39, quoted by Zahavi, p. 31).

Phenomenology, understood as transcendental philosophy (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), fundamental ontology (Heidegger), or existential analysis (Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty), stands opposed to scientific naturalism, especially its methodological component. Phenomenologists generally argue that naturalism overlooks and cannot account for the necessary conditions of its own possibility. For example, as Zahavi and Dermot Moran explain, Husserl argues that naturalistic treatments of consciousness as a biological or psychological property of certain organisms overlook and cannot account for the transcendental standing of consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear in whatever way it does and with whatever meaning it has. Husserl (1970) also argues that scientific naturalism presupposes and overlooks the "life-world" as a transcendental structure of intersubjective understanding, without which science would not be possible. Moran explains the phenomenological concept of the life-world as Husserl presented it. The concept also plays a significant role in Matthew Ratcliffe's contribution, which argues in an original way that the intelligibility of science presupposes the life-world, yet scientific naturalism remains oblivious to the life-world's existential and epistemological primacy.

Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III). We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).

We can now state the objection that phenomenology makes to the methodological component of scientific naturalism. Phenomenology charges that scientific naturalism is oblivious to the priority of the world as the space of meaning and does not recognize the need for specifically philosophical methods, especially transcendental and existential phenomenological ones, for investigating and understanding it.

Many of the essays take this phenomenological charge against naturalism as the background against which to consider whether there may be ways to revise phenomenology and naturalism in order to make them compatible or somehow reconcilable. Central to these discussions is the problem of consciousness. One approach, known as the "naturalizing phenomenology" project (Petitot et al. 1999; Roy et al. 1999), seeks to absorb phenomenological analyses of consciousness into some kind of naturalistic framework. Another approach, "phenomenologizing nature," uses phenomenology to enrich our understanding of nature, especially living being and the body, in order to do justice to consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Ultimately, both strategies are necessary and must be pursued in a complementary and mutually supporting way, if phenomenology is not to be reduced to or eliminated in favor of scientific naturalism, and if naturalism is not to be rejected in favor of metaphysically dualist or idealist forms of phenomenology.

This idea informs the first paper, by Zahavi. He criticizes the naturalizing phenomenology project for failing to appreciate that the problem of consciousness includes the transcendental problem of accounting for consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for objectivity. This problem is not addressed by using phenomenology to advance analyses of empirical consciousness for the purpose of bridging or closing the explanatory gap between physical nature and subjective experience, especially as the gap is seen from the perspective of scientific naturalism. In other words, the issue, for phenomenology, is not physicalism versus dualism; it is to investigate consciousness as one of the principal necessary conditions of possibility for the framework of intelligibility that science presupposes, including the empirical science of consciousness as a natural phenomenon. Nevertheless, Zahavi thinks that two alternative ways to pursue naturalized phenomenology can maintain a commitment to phenomenology as a transcendental project. First, phenomenology can collaborate with empirical science, especially in the investigation of consciousness, by providing analyses that can inform experimental design while also refining these analyses in light of empirical evidence. This approach follows Husserl's conception of phenomenological psychology as a local or "regional" investigation of psychological phenomena, in contrast to transcendental phenomenology as a global philosophical investigation of the conditions of intelligibility for any phenomenon. Second, phenomenology can revise the concept of nature and the classical dichotomy between the empirical and the transcendental by revealing the transcendental status of the self-organizing and sense-making capacities of biological systems (Zahavi identifies this approach with my book, Mind in Life).

Rudolf Bernet's contribution can be read as an example of this second approach. He focuses on the body and the phenomenology of bodily self-experience. On the basis of a thorough explication of Husserl's analyses of bodily sensations, the experience of the body in touch and vision, and the body's dependence on material circumstances (see Husserl 1989), Bernet argues that the concrete unity of the body's living and experientially lived aspects rules out an ontological dualism of consciousness and physical nature, and cannot be understood properly from either the perspective of the phenomenology of transcendental consciousness or the perspective of scientific naturalism. Instead, it requires a form of phenomenology that sees the body as a "legitimate naturalization of consciousness," that is, a form of phenomenology that understands the body as at once concretely natural and transcendentally constitutive of the world as the space of meaning. Bernet also argues that these insights into the body are absent from Heidegger's phenomenology.

In one of the more original papers, Ratcliffe undertakes to construct an argument for the philosophical primacy of phenomenology over naturalism from various lines of thought found in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. To this end, he presents an account of what he calls the "sense of reality," which consists not simply in taking certain things to be there, but in grasping the world in perception and thought as an open space of possibilities of presence and absence. For example, we are able to grasp experientially the possibility of something's being present to perception versus its presence being dubitable or imagined or anticipated. Following Husserl, Ratcliffe claims that our ability to distinguish between "is" and "is not" presupposes an understanding of the world as a richly structured cognitive and affective possibility space.

On this basis, he argues as follows: Science is concerned only with revealing what is the case; scientific naturalism restricts itself to what science delivers and thus to what is the case; therefore, scientific naturalism fails to accommodate the space of possibilities presupposed by the intelligibility of something's being the case; the space of possibilities is a phenomenological achievement; therefore, phenomenology cannot be naturalized. Although one might question whether this argument is sound -- for example, by questioning the truth of the premise that science is concerned only with revealing what is the case -- the argument can be taken as a challenge to the scientific naturalist to come up with an account of the experiential sense of reality that science presupposes and on which it depends. Appealing to physicalism is not sufficient for this task, because the issue "is not about what kinds of worldly entities there are or what those entities are made up of; it is about recognising a phenomenological achievement that is presupposed by the intelligibility of any enquiry concerning what the world does and does not contain" (p. 81).

Ratcliffe also describes how the sense of reality as an experiential possibility space is altered in mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Phenomenology is important for specifying how the cognitive and affective possibilities offered by things are dramatically changed in mental illness. This discussion converges with Fredrik Svenaeus' illuminating discussion of illness experience and how purely naturalistic theories of health and illness as biophysiological phenomena leave out the constitutively intentional and normative features of health and illness that phenomenology is needed to reveal.

Another original effort comes from Michael Wheeler, who examines the tension between transcendental thinking and naturalism by asking whether transcendental phenomenology and cognitive science can be reconciled. He uses John McDowell's (1989) distinction between "constitutive understanding" and "enabling understanding" to effect this reconciliation. Whereas constitutive understanding concerns that which makes a given phenomenon be the phenomenon that it is, enabling understanding concerns the causal processes that generate and realize a given phenomenon in the world. Wheeler proposes that phenomenology provides a constitutive understanding of the mental phenomena for which a corresponding cognitive science determines the underlying causal processes. At the same time, the causal processes that cognitive science discovers may lead phenomenology to revise its conception of the mental phenomena under investigation.

Such bidirectional influence is Wheeler's version of the idea that cognitive science and phenomenology can be mutually enlightening and reciprocally constraining (for earlier statements, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Varela (1996), Gallagher (1997), and Thompson (2007)). Wheeler illustrates this idea, using everyday skilled action as his example, by drawing on phenomenological analyses from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Hubert Dreyfus, and combining them with cognitive science accounts from neurophysiology and robotics research. He concludes by proposing that to reconcile naturalism and transcendental phenomenology we need naturalism to be "minimal" and the transcendental to be "domesticated." "Minimal naturalism" requires phenomenological accounts not to conflict with science but allows for the possibility that empirical science may not be able to illuminate certain cognitive phenomena (e.g., constitutively normative or ethical ones), whereas the "domesticated transcendental" takes the necessary conditions of possibility for human cognition to be historically contingent (where "history" includes natural and cultural history).

Thomas Baldwin's contribution presents a similar view through a critical reading of Merleau-Ponty'sPhenomenology of Perception. Baldwin argues that although Merleau-Ponty is right to reject reductionistic accounts of bodily experience and intentionality, and insightful in his view that natural science presupposes a fundamental bodily intentionality that configures the perceived world as spatiotemporal, he is wrong that perception is not, in his words, "an event of nature," and therefore not susceptible to scientific explanation. In Baldwin's reading, Merleau-Ponty's arguments for this view depend on problematic idealist assumptions that even a minimal naturalist will reject. Nevertheless, natural science is not sufficient for explaining perceptual intentionality, to the extent that perceptual content is constituted by cultural elements that are a matter of historical traditions and not scientific laws.

David Morris pursues a more radical approach, which he calls the "phenomenological reconfiguring of nature." He follows Merleau-Ponty in using phenomenology to trace the emergence of meaning from the body, while using contemporary evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") to show how life-regulation processes generate forms of meaning or sense-making that underlie and motivate human conceptual cognition. For Morris, life is a "transcendental field" prior to reflective consciousness, and is both causally enabling and constitutive of mind and consciousness.

Eran Dorfman's contribution is also based on Merleau-Ponty. Using ideas from the Phenomenology of Perception, Dorfman proposes that perceptual experience is the source of what Husserl called the "objectivist attitude" that takes the object to exist apart from consciousness and thereby neglects the role that consciousness or subjectivity plays in constituting it as an object of experience. Dorfman suggests that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and therefore the task for phenomenology is not to contest it but to trace its genesis.

Whereas the foregoing essays aim to preserve a role for phenomenology as some kind of transcendental investigation, David Roden argues that phenomenology should be retained only as a descriptive, empirical method for providing data about experience. This method must be recognized as limited, because it cannot penetrate "dark phenomena" that are not available to introspection or reflective intuition, such as very fine-grained perceptual discriminations of shades of color that cannot be held in memory, or the deep structure of temporal experience. Roden's discussion of these dark phenomena is illuminating, but his conclusion about the status of phenomenology does not follow. Although he is right that phenomenology cannot be a completely autonomous investigation, but rather must be informed by experimental investigations, it hardly follows that all that phenomenology can do is provide data about what is available to introspection. On the contrary, as the articles by Zahavi, Ratcliffe, Wheeler, and Morris demonstrate, phenomenology can provide new concepts and models for enriching our understanding of nature.

Besides these discussions of phenomenology and naturalism, the volume contains essays on the phenomenology of the ethical cultivation of virtue (Jonathan Webber), on science, ethics, and moral realism (James Lenman), on Kant and Kierkegaard on freedom and evil (Alison Assiter), and on German idealist philosophy of nature (Iain Hamilton Grant). Given these disparate topics and the fact that none of the essays engages with any of the others, the volume lacks unity and coherence. Nevertheless, it serves as an important resource for current thinking about phenomenology and naturalism.

REFERENCES

Crowell, S.G. (2001) Husserl, Heidegger, and the Space of Meaning. Paths toward Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Gallagher, S. (1997) "Mutual Enlightenment: Recent Phenomenology in Cognitive Science," Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 195-214.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, U.S.A.: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Heidegger, M. (1982) The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. A. Hofstadter. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Husserl, E. (1970) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. D. Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1982) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Husserl, E. (1989) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

McDowell, J. (1994) "The Content of Perceptual Experience," Philosophical Quarterly 44: 190-205.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. D. Landes. London: Routledge Press.

Papineau, D. (2009) "Naturalism," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. E. N. Zalta (ed.).

Petitot, J., Varela, F.J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M. eds. (1999) Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Roy, J.-M., Petitot, J., Pachoud, B., and Varela, F.J. (1999) "Beyond the Gap: An Introduction to Naturalizing Phenomenology," in J. Petitot, F.J. Varela, B. Pachoud, and J.-M. Roy, eds., Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-80. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Thompson, E. (2007) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Varela, F. J. (1996) "Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem," Journal of Consciousness Studies 3: 330-349.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Phenomenology and Naturalism: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame

printing this off to read ...
 
I'm currently reading, and my thinking about consciousness is aligned with, the paper by David Morris described in this paragraph from Evan Thompson's NDPR review reproduced above:

"David Morris pursues a more radical approach, which he calls the 'phenomenological reconfiguring of nature.' He follows Merleau-Ponty in using phenomenology to trace the emergence of meaning from the body, while using contemporary evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") to show how life-regulation processes generate forms of meaning or sense-making that underlie and motivate human conceptual cognition. For Morris, life is a "transcendental field" prior to reflective consciousness, and is both causally enabling and constitutive of mind and consciousness."

I found the Morris paper online and used Acrobat Reader to save it to Word. I'll try to relocate the link where others here can read the Morris paper if they are interested in it.
 
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@Constance

I'm going to get an index card and put these points on it and take it with me to cocktail parties (or alligator wrestling matches):

  • Husserl argues that naturalistic treatments of consciousness as a biological or psychological property of certain organisms overlook and cannot account for the transcendental standing of consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear in whatever way it does and with whatever meaning it has.
  • Husserl (1970) also argues that scientific naturalism presupposes and overlooks the "life-world" as a transcendental structure of intersubjective understanding, without which science would not be possible. Moran explains the phenomenological concept of the life-world as Husserl presented it. The concept also plays a significant role in Matthew Ratcliffe's contribution, which argues in an original way that the intelligibility of science presupposes the life-world, yet scientific naturalism remains oblivious to the life-world's existential and epistemological primacy.
That's right: oblivious

Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).


Let's see that again, Bob run the re-play:

In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science.

Chock full o' philosophical goodness!
 
"In other words, the issue, for phenomenology, is not physicalism versus dualism; it is to investigate consciousness as one of the principal necessary conditions of possibility for the framework of intelligibility that science presupposes, including the empirical science of consciousness as a natural phenomenon."
 
I know it seems that I'm consumed with the MUI concept of Hoffman's, and it's true that I am playing with it right now.

So consider the above from that perspective. It's as if physicists have drilled down to the pixels that make up the UI, and they're watching the behavior of the pixels and seeing that they are behaving in ways that the icons of the UI do not. Of course, the pixels are still part of the UI but From their behavior we can get a sense (?) of the underlying architecture.

Of course Hoffman says no; there is no way we can gain a sense of the diodes and circuits of the motherboard by plumbing the depths of the UI. Or is there?

I wonder if you can interpret for me the reasons why Hoffman argues, and you apparently agree, that consciousness and mind can be accounted for in a computational description of (some) brain processes. Beyond this question, Hoffman also seems to believe (and you with him) that the entire structure of reality can be accounted for in computational terms, as if the world itself and experience, consciousness, and mind evolved within it, are produced by a computational program in which a deep meaning (?) of world, life, and mind are contained in "the diodes and circuits of the computational system's 'motherboard'. I need help in seeing the reasons why this perspective on 'what-is', which is entirely alien to my way of thinking, is persuasive for Hoffman, you, and others who support it. Thanks in advance.

It seems from this post of yours that your approach differs in some respects from Hoffman's and so it would be helpful if you would clarify the reasons why you differ and what you hope to discover beyond what Hoffman surmises.
 
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I wonder if you can interpret for me the reasons why Hoffman argues, and you apparently agree, that consciousness and mind can be accounted for in a computational description of (some) brain processes. Beyond this question, Hoffman also seems to believe (and you with him) that the entire structure of reality can be accounted for in computational terms, as if the world itself and experience, consciousness, and mind evolved within it, are produced by a computational program in which a deep meaning (?) of world, life, and mind are contained in "the diodes and circuits of the computational systems 'motherboard'. I need help in seeing the reasons why this perspective on 'what-is', which is entirely alien to my way of thinking, is persuasive for Hoffman, you, and others who support it. Thanks in advance.

It seems from this post of yours that your approach differs in some respects from Hoffman's and so it would be helpful if you would clarify the reasons why you differ and what you hope to discover beyond what Hoffman surmises.
Haha, I figured if you were going to respond, this would be your response.

The answer of course is that it's only an analogy.

This is what Hoffman is saying:

"Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3)."
 
@Constance

I'm going to get an index card and put these points on it and take it with me to cocktail parties (or alligator wrestling matches):

  • Husserl argues that naturalistic treatments of consciousness as a biological or psychological property of certain organisms overlook and cannot account for the transcendental standing of consciousness as a necessary condition of possibility for any entity to appear in whatever way it does and with whatever meaning it has.
  • Husserl (1970) also argues that scientific naturalism presupposes and overlooks the "life-world" as a transcendental structure of intersubjective understanding, without which science would not be possible. Moran explains the phenomenological concept of the life-world as Husserl presented it. The concept also plays a significant role in Matthew Ratcliffe's contribution, which argues in an original way that the intelligibility of science presupposes the life-world, yet scientific naturalism remains oblivious to the life-world's existential and epistemological primacy.
That's right: oblivious

Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3).


Let's see that again, Bob run the re-play:

In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science.

Chock full o' philosophical goodness!
And do you feel that the essays do this background justice?
 
Haha, I figured if you were going to respond, this would be your response.

The answer of course is that it's only an analogy.

This is what Hoffman is saying:

"Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3)."

??? You're quoting Thompson's NDPR review. How does that help us to comprehend Hoffman's hypothesis?
 
I need help in seeing the reasons why this perspective on 'what-is', which is entirely alien to my way of thinking, is persuasive for Hoffman, you, and others who support it. ... ??? You're quoting Thompson's NDPR review. How does that help us to comprehend Hoffman's hypothesis?
In the following, I've taken out Heidegger's terms and replaced them with Hoffman's terms:

"Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "Multimode User Interface" (Heidegger 1962). By "Multimode User Interface" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-Multimode User Interface," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our Multimode User Interface, we are not thinking of the Multimode User Interface in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the Multimode User Interface in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the Multimode User Interface (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the Multimode User Interface that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. ... As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, Conscious Realism asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3)."


Below is the original:

"Another way to sharpen the issue between phenomenology and naturalism is to draw on Heidegger's concept of "world" (Heidegger 1962). By "world" Heidegger means neither the totality of things or states of affairs nor the being of that totality as nature, but the everyday world as the place in which we find ourselves and as an existential structure of our being (Being in Time, Part One: II-III).

We exist as "being-in-the-world," which means, among other things, that we always find ourselves inhabiting a "space of meaning" (Crowell 2001) that we ourselves create. When we think scientifically of the universe or nature as containing our world, we are not thinking of the world in the proper philosophical sense as the space of meaning in which anything is intelligible. When we think of the world in this philosophical way, however, then we have to reverse the formulation and say that the universe or nature is within the world (Heidegger 1982, p. 165), for it is always within the world that the universe or nature is disclosed to us. In this way, the world as the space of meaning has priority in the order of philosophical inquiry and understanding over the universe as represented by empirical science. As Havi Carel and Darian Meacham state in their "Editors' Introduction," "whereas naturalism takes objectivity as its point of departure, phenomenology asks how objectivity is constituted in the first place" (p. 3)."
 
In the following, I've taken out Heidegger's terms and replaced them with Hoffman's terms . . . . .

Doing so is no response at all to the two questions I asked you to answer. Where did you get the impression that such strange manipulation of texts constitutes a critically reasoned treatment of what either author has written? It's likely a falsification of both Hoffman's and Heidegger's ideas. Have you had a course in scholarly writing?


ETA: Scholarly writing requires understanding of the sources you quote and responsibility to the preservation of the integrity of your source's texts before you attempt to interpret their meaning. That alone requires many pages of exposition, including the recognition of different interpretations than your own. You might think (or hope) that the authors whose work you manipulate and falsify are saying the same thing, but your simply asserting this is a far cry from demonstrating its validity.
 
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