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Philosophy, Science, & The Unexplained - Main Thread


Here is a post from about ten days ago by trained observer that presents some questions I'd like to see discussed if others here are willing to do so:

Don't you guys think the problem of consciousness is largely a semantic one driven by our limited perspective? We are limited to the "experience" of our own personal consciousness in our attempts to quantify it. To experience consciousness requires a functioning brain which being the organ of consciousness, can only experience itself.

Sure - go for it Constance! (are you bringing Noe in on this one?)
 
If you're talking to yourself. Then where did this post come from?

My sense of what trainedobserver is saying is that the info comes in to your brain, you process it with your model of reality, then release information back out and TO does the same thing . . . so your talking to "yourself" (your representation or model of TOs communication) not directly to TO himself . . . something like that?

And I'm gonna guess Constance/Noe has something to say about all of this!
 
A good range of possible motivations for the reaction. I think there's something else there too, a resistance to an implied challenge to follow those kinds of examples in one's own life. And I think that's too bad, a sign of a loss of something that I think humans need: a sense of the seriousness and value of life on this planet and the need to improve it for all living beings.

i agree with that - and I don't see how the consumer/materialist culture can continue indefinitely

What 11 Billion People Mean for Water Scarcity - Yahoo News
 
Steve and TO seem to agree that it would be worthwhile spending some time here exploring significant theories about consciousness other than the wholly neurologically based theory. And yes, Steve, Noe's work certainly has significance in this direction. I'll begin with one of the ideas postulated by TO about ten days ago. All three of his statements in that post open the way to further exploration.

Trained observer wrote: “To experience consciousness requires a functioning brain which being the organ of consciousness, can only experience itself.”

Does your body experience only itself? If not, why should consciousness as an extension of the body experience only itself? What we experience, primordially, is our being in the world, and we attempt to understand the world in which we find ourselves and the nature of our relationship with it. “Embodied consciousness” is Merleau-Ponty’s term to define what we are, part of nature and able at the same time to reflect on nature and on ourselves -- and most significantly on the place where our interconnectedness (with nature and with one another) is revealed, i.e., in our existential situation in a world known only partially through the phenomena by which it appears to us in our situated position in space-time and history, about which we can learn more than that which we personally experience because we can participate with others in a multiplication of perspectives on the phenomena that appear to us in common. This is how science makes progress in arriving at better descriptions and insights into the structures, forces, fields that constitute the physical world, and how philosophy and other disciplines are on that basis enabled to contemplate ontological theories about the structure of reality as a whole. Consciousness is not self-enclosed nor explicable on the basis of physical laws (at our present level of comprehension); it is primordially our opening to experience in and of the world which enables productive reflection on {thinking about} our individual experience in/of the world in the first place, and in the second place our engagement with thinking developed on the basis of what multiple consciousnesses/minds have discovered about the world and their experience in it, in science and also in other human activities and inquiries.
 
Thanks. That's a much clearer and better interview with Noe than the first one we listened to. I downloaded the transcript available there, much easier for me if I can read it.

Yesterday I wrote about Noe: "Noe seems increasingly out of touch with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, which he studied for his doctoral work, after which he worked with Daniel Dennett and tried to retrain himself in neuroscience." I now understand better and admire the project he's set for himself: to clarify and make real for neuroscientists and cognitive scientists the essential role of the palpable world in consciousness, a real world we access through our embodiment (we are part of the world's body) and the evolved attunements of our sensual and neural capacities to prepare and enable us to live constructively and meaningfully in the world. Noe has learned all of his critical phenomenological insights from MP and made an attempt to engage others in them -- those specific others who by scientific training in a materialist/objectivist age have looked at life and mind reductively. That reductive view has trickled down to the culture (of the West) to the detriment of how we see ourselves and the world we live in.

This was the one where he said we were still basically where Descartes was - right? Made the point that we were basically still working off that viewpoint . . .

interesting about the transcript, I meant to tell you that was available - I found out later in life that listening is so much more effective for me - if I can listen and move, I process so much more - I really think I have a degree of dyslexia or something . . . the best way for me is face to face communication and talking it out, then second is listening, third is reading and then finally watching a video seems to be the least effective -
 
Steve and TO seem to agree that it would be worthwhile spending some time here exploring significant theories about consciousness other than the wholly neurologically based theory. And yes, Steve, Noe's work certainly has significance in this direction. I'll begin with one of the ideas postulated by TO about ten days ago. All three of his statements in that post open the way to further exploration.

synchronistically I picked up a book last night and it fell open quite a ways from where I left off, but I started reading:

"If, as Gerald de Nerval said, the seat of the soul is not inside a person, or outside a person, but the very place where they overlap and meet with their world, . . . "

which made me think of the Noe interview

. . . did you listen to the one on Philosophy of Vegetal Life?
 
If you're talking to yourself. Then where did this post come from?

I'll put it this way. I assume that there is another human being pretty much doing what I'm doing at the moment, conveying his thoughts through the written word via the Internet. However, I realize that my conception of who Randall is, what he thinks, what he is attempting to communicate to me, is many times removed in form and substance from the actual Randall and his thoughts because all I can experience is my "mental conception" of what is happening, my consciousness itself modulated, if you will, by some data (although many times removed and abstracted) presumably generated by the being "Randall." There is a subtlety here that I may lack the ability to communicate.
 
sounds good - are you saying pursue the uses of our consciousness as a topic of conversation for this thread or just that we should not worry about the origins of our minds and get busy using them?

The latter. We appear to be communicating in the broader sense of the word. Nyuk, nyuk.
 
I'll put it this way. I assume that there is another human being pretty much doing what I'm doing at the moment, conveying his thoughts through the written word via the Internet. However, I realize that my conception of who Randall is, what he thinks, what he is attempting to communicate to me, is many times removed in form and substance from the actual Randall and his thoughts because all I can experience is my "mental conception" of what is happening, my consciousness itself modulated, if you will, by some data (although many times removed and abstracted) presumably generated by the being "Randall." There is a subtlety here that I may lack the ability to communicate.

i grok it - you could draw a diagram though, if you wanted to . . .
 
Steve and TO seem to agree that it would be worthwhile spending some time here exploring significant theories about consciousness other than the wholly neurologically based theory. And yes, Steve, Noe's work certainly has significance in this direction. I'll begin with one of the ideas postulated by TO about ten days ago. All three of his statements in that post open the way to further exploration.

Trained observer wrote: “To experience consciousness requires a functioning brain which being the organ of consciousness, can only experience itself.”

Does your body experience only itself? If not, why should consciousness as an extension of the body experience only itself?

Constance, any recommendations on starting points for phenomenology or MP (books, websites, etc?) . . . and don't say "Wikipedia"! :rolleyes:
 
This was the one where he said we were still basically where Descartes was - right? Made the point that we were basically still working off that viewpoint . . .

You mean the first interview you linked? I missed a lot of what he said there (audio was not good; again I'd prefer to read a transcript of that interview if one is available). I doubt that Noe meant that he himself is still where Descartes was, but rather that the scientific community still is. Mind/body dualism is still embedded in our culture in general, as well as in our scientific and philosophical presuppositions. Phenomenology is the path to overcoming it in my opinion.



interesting about the transcript, I meant to tell you that was available - I found out later in life that listening is so much more effective for me - if I can listen and move, I process so much more - I really think I have a degree of dyslexia or something . . . the best way for me is face to face communication and talking it out, then second is listening, third is reading and then finally watching a video seems to be the least effective -

Face-to-face dialogue and written discourse are where I'm most at home. I can listen to music with rapt attention to the whole and the parts, but can't absorb spoken verbal information nearly as well. These different ways in which we humans connect most adaptively with that which surrounds us may be significant in themselves for an understanding of the individuality of consciousness.
 
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You mean the first interview you linked? I missed a lot of what he said there (audio was not good; again I'd prefer to read a transcript of that interview if one is available). I doubt that Noe meant that he himself is still where Descartes was, but rather that the scientific community still is. Mind/body dualism is still embedded in our culture in general, as well as in our scientific and philosophical presuppositions. Phenomenology is the path to overcoming it in my opinion.

Face-to-face dialogue and written discourse are where I'm most at home. I can listen to music with rapt attention to the whole and the parts, but can't absorb verbal information nearly as well. These different ways in which we humans connect most adaptively with that which surrounds us may be significant in themselves for an understanding of the individuality of consciousness.

here's the bit, from the Brain Science Podcast #58:
transcript:
http://ec.libsyn.com/p/f/5/c/f5c5d2...1ce3dae902ea1d01c08236d4cd5ffd4f&c_id=1521326

"AN: Yes. I think that’s a very fair characterization. There’s this old idea that people have, that goes back to Descartes, I think. Descartes thought that inside of each of us there was a thing. He called it a thinking thing—a ‘res cogitans’ in Latin—and this thing inside of us, it thinks, it feels, it decides. And Descartes thought that each of us is that thing: We are that thing inside us that thinks and feels and decides.

Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2009

6

Now, Descartes supposed that that thinking thing inside of us must be something immaterial. Because he couldn’t understand how anything material—anything physical, anything obeying the laws of physics—could be something that thinks and feels and decides. And so, for him the big puzzle was how does the immaterial soul think and feel and decide? And then further, how does it interact with our bodies?

Now, the standard orthodoxy in the current science of consciousness is to agree with Descartes that there is something inside of us that thinks and feels and decides; that we are that thing—that each of us is that thing. But whereas Descartes thought it was the immaterial soul, the current view is that it’s the brain. What the brain does is it’s called on to play a role in a theory which was really articulated in its basic outlines by Descartes.

And one of the things I argue (and here I think this could hardly be called a controversial claim, this is really true; I think all sides of the debate will agree with what I’m about to say) is that at the current time we don’t really have any better idea how the brain gives rise to consciousness than we do how an immaterial soul does—or than Descartes did how an immaterial soul does.

Because we have all this information about the events in the brain—about the actions of cells, about the molecular processes, or the metabolic processes, or large scale dynamic processes that happen in the brain—but we don’t have anything like an insight into what it is about those processes that enables them to give rise to experience. And we don’t have any better idea how the brain does that than Descartes had how the soul does that.

And so, I think that sort of negative finding, that we just don’t even have a good back-of-the-envelope sketch of what a theory of consciousness should look like, gives me pause and makes me wonder whether the problem is that we’re looking for consciousness in the wrong place. We’re looking for it in the brain, we’re

Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2009

7

looking for it in these patterns of neuronal or cellular actions, but that’s just the wrong place to look. Because it’s only the larger context—that includes the brain but also goes out of the head and includes the dynamic with the world—that gives us all the ingredients we need to frame a better explanation of how consciousness works.

GC: So, you’re not questioning that consciousness arises in the brain; you’re just saying there’s more to it than that.

AN: Well, I don’t like the phrase, ‘arises in.’

GC: OK."
 
Constance, any recommendations on starting points for phenomenology or MP (books, websites, etc?) . . . and don't say "Wikipedia"! :rolleyes:

As it happens, the wikipedia entry on MP is a good place to begin (or was about a year ago when I was looking for internet sources to introduce MP's phenomenology to someone else). I'll check the wiki entry out again and try to find some other internet sources that actually clarify MP's thinking in less than book-length analyses. Reading MP is by all means the best way to follow his thinking and, thanks to the excellent work of his translators, reading him in English is a sublime experience close to what his French readers describe. The Phenomenology of Perception is a major MP source but not an adequate one since his thinking at that point was considerably deepened in later works. I recently read a substantive online review of one of the best books on MP which might be a good entree for the purposes of our discussion here. I'll look for it and post it.
 
synchronistically I picked up a book last night and it fell open quite a ways from where I left off, but I started reading:

"If, as Gerald de Nerval said, the seat of the soul is not inside a person, or outside a person, but the very place where they overlap and meet with their world, . . . "

which made me think of the Noe interview

. . . did you listen to the one on Philosophy of Vegetal Life?

That is a case of synchronicity. Gerald de Nerval is likely cited somewhere by MP and credited with that insight. Fascinating. I know nothing about Gerald de Nerval at this point; about to find out more. What book does that citation occur in?

I haven't listened yet to the interview concerning The Philosophy of Vegetal Life. I'm guessing the author makes reference to Deleuze and Guattari's writing concerning rhizomes.
 
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