Time and relationships (or, consciousness per Martin Heidegger)

[apeiron]

So I'll amend my statement: "Nature abhors jumps except at the most fundamental quantum level; and she particularly abhors jumps once the level of cell-based life has been reached."

I would put it differently. Nature love discontinuity over all scales as much as it loves continuity over all scales.

Reductionism always wants to reduce the intrinsic complexity of polar opposites to an either/or. Either nature must love one thing, or it must love the other. But a systems approach is based on dependent co-arising. Polar alternatives are in fact the creatively complementary. They are the synergistic.

So it would be "against nature" for one pole to be suppressed at the expense of the other. Because nothing can actually exist as a persisting whole, a lasting state of structure and process, unless there is that synergistic interaction to power it.

If you think of the actual "science of complexity" that arose in the 1980s, it was all about the "edge of chaos", about self-organising criticality. And this was completely based on the dichotomy of the discrete and the continuous in a "scalefree" (ie: a powerlaw distribution of scale) fashion.

In a critical system, the product of a persisting dissipative balance, you have to have a constant balance of integration and differentiation over all scales of observation. Continuity and discontinuity is a fractal story.

So where nature is "lively", it is marked by this critical balance that loves continuity and discontinuity with equal vigor.

And then for the complex to itself become complex - to get systems arising within a system - you need the radical discontinuity of the epistemic cut. But of course, by the same argument, you have to look around for the matching radical level of continuity that must also be produced in the process.

And this is why we have life and mind as systems which display far greater levels of autonomy, integrity, autopoiesis, ascendancy, or whatever you want to label it, than the surrounding non-living realm of entropification and dissipative structure.

By introducing the sharp boundary-making device of the epistemic cut, life and mind moves itself into a separate realm of "subjective" existence. It has a continuity of existence (represented by its goals, memories, anticipations) that is removed from the hurly burly of the "objective" realm.

So again, your metaphysical orientation is reductionist. If nature displays a fruitful dichotomy, your urge is to reduce that inherent complexity to a singular pole of existence.

Nature produces "mind" as its highest level of complexity. A complex complexity in that it involves systems within systems, worlds within worlds. But you want to break that down so that there is only the monadically simple. Mind gets reduced to a property of substance.

Of course, you then say that there is a level of ur-stuff below that. You talk of the ether/brahman/apeiron. There is a base level that is a pure potential, and not yet either mind or matter.

So in the end, you agree reductionism does not work. The simple is not simple enough if it is something that definitely and crisply exists. But now you have still scrunched up the notion of mind, and all the complex complexity it represents in its full splendour, down to trivialised "drops of experience". You have made what you seek to explain so reduced, it has become a hard and discrete property of matter - the "inner qualia".

While this shrinking of the critical issues to microscopic scale then makes the essential transition - the development of a simple ur-potential into a complex world - harder to see, it does not actually remove the problem. You still have to explain how there is this evolution from the ether/brahman/apeiron level to a level where something actually exists, whether this first level of existence is double aspect panpsychic or not.

 

[JDStupi]

My problem is in the justification for the jump from

[...] subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible

and

[...]This is the case because the only thing we know - our own thought - is a subject, and we surmise that we/our bodies are objects for other subjects through our normal interaction with people and other thinking creatures like dogs, cats, etc. So the only objects we know with any intimacy at all are in fact subjects - our own subjects

to the supposition that all objects possesses "consciousness".

The general trend of reasoning seems to be using an epistemological observation to ground an ontological conclusion. I don't see how " [that] the only objects we know for certain are our own [have subjective experiences]" suggests that all objects behave similarly.

The key word there is "suggests", what do you mean by suggests? Having 100% certainty in the fact that our own bodies as "objects" possesses a "subjectivity" is by no means a sufficient condition for concluding that "therefore all objects must have some degree of subjectivity".

You are certainly not resting your argument for panexperientalism on that premise.

Your next contention is most likely that "mind" cannot arise from "no-mind" and so this is a premise for your pan______ism. My first question is what is mind? How do you define mind? Do I have a mind when I am sleeping? If you define "mind" in a broad sense a la Gregory Bateson you would say that when I am sleeping I have mind, namely my body is performing certain "mental" activities such as regulating my blood and breathing and other normal bodily functions. To be certain, an individual in a coma would have mind in that sense as well. My point here is that even if you define mind in this broad sense, you still cannot justify that all objects must have internal experience. This example demonstrates that "mental processes" are by no means a sufficient condition for concluding that objects have "qualia" or an internal experience.

Now, that "mind" in the sense of a "conscious" (even that term is subject to analyses) qualia experiencing subject cannot emerge from no-mind may be a relatively uncontroversial assertion. However, I have yet to see any justification for how come it is claimed that "mind" in the broad Bateson sense cannot emerge from no-mind.

Your assertion that "nature's continuity" serves as evidence for your positition is wrong. It serves as evidence that qualia experiencing subjects did not just emerge, it does not serve as evidence that "ergo qualia must be fundamental". Moreover, I would agree with apeiron's assertion that it is certainly not "continuous or discrete" but both. There certainly are jumps in nature.

You seem to stretch vocabulary beyond its limits. Atoms have "rudimentary perceptions"? I don't even know what it means to say that I have rudimentary perception when I am sleeping (excluding dreaming) never mind that an atom has "perceptions". Does a quark-gluon plasma have "perception"? Unless you are using percpetion in a sense which is nowhere near what people mean by perception generally, then I fail to see how you can say that.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

JD, you've asked and answered your first question: the principle of continuity supplies perhaps the key argument for panexperientialism, along with many other lines of reasoning I've fleshed out in this thread. For more detailed discussion, see my series of essays (1-4 in particular):

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

I've also explained what I mean by mind a number of times in this thread so I suggest you review what's been said so far. Again: mind is, at its essence, a subject, an object, and a link between the two. The subject-object relation is a brute fact that cannot be further explained. Why? Because we know subjectivity is fundamental and we infer that it goes all the way down due to the principle of continuity and many other lines of reasoning.

I respect Bateson highly, but I don't adopt his overly broad approach to "mind." To solve the combination problem we need further limitations on what is to be considered a unitary subject.

The "link between the two" I described above is what I mean by "perception." I've also explained previously what I mean by perception: any reception of information. So an atom perceives electromagnetic, gravitational, etc., forces in every moment of its existence. Whitehead uses the term "prehension" to distinguish this generalized reception of information from biological perception but I prefer to just use perception and explain that it is broader than our biologically chauvinist notions of perception.

Do you have a mind when you are sleeping? No. "Your" mind is only the flickerings of field coherence in the network of relationships that is your brain/body/universe. "You" don't actually "have" a mind. "You" are a particular brain/body/universe relation in each given moment.

"You" are the actual occasions of experience (to use Whitehead's term) in each moment. Your general waking consciousness is the result of gamma synchrony (30-90 Hz) achieved by various parts of your brain in concert with parts of your body and, of course, with the rest of the universe through your various connections to the rest of the universe - dominated by the five traditional senses.

When "you" dream, it is not the normal, habitual you. Rather, it is different configurations of brain/body that leave traces available to your normal waking consciousness. Each person consists of countless constituent "yous" that aren't accessible in terms of direct communication. There is a society of mind in a vast hierarchy beneath each complex subject/actual entity that is a human being.

And as I've already mentioned, very likely an infinitely complex hierarchy above the human level of existence.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, I've explained a number of times that I am NOT advocating consciousness as a "property" of matter. Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Mind/matter (what I call "menter" in my JCS paper) is the limitation of pure potentiality.

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately. Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically? You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

The solution to a slippery slope is to slide to the bottom, the fundament, apeiron. Apeiron, accept the apeiron :)

Anaximander was a panpsychist. Peirce was a panpsychist. Why aren't you a panpsychist?

You make a decent point, however, about the need to explain the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality. Whitehead delves into this in detail in Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality, though I don't accept his theories in whole. I do accept, however, that the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality is the "creative advance" that is the temporal flow, the laying down of the universe, in each moment. This is a process whereby each locus of the universe prehends prior actual entities and decides how to manifest in each moment. This universal process is the universe.

I've also suggested that this process may map onto the time quanta suggested by the Planck moment (10 to the minus 44 seconds), though this number is not necessarily the ultimate time quantum. So each tick of the universe is a time quantum and each time quantum is itself a consequence of each actual entity at its simplest level manifesting from the previous round of actuality.

I could go on, but this is probably sufficient for now.

 

[apeiron]

apeiron, I've explained a number of times that I am NOT advocating consciousness as a "property" of matter. Mind and matter are two aspects of the same thing. Mind/matter (what I call "menter" in my JCS paper) is the limitation of pure potentiality.

What is an "aspect" then?

At least the idea of local properties of substantive objects is a well understood ontic concept. It is very easy to introduce vague terms that lessen your committment to any actual position and so allow you to elude specific criticism. It is a familiar tactic called hand-waving.

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately. Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically? You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

Pattee's theory is well enough understood and accepted among theoretical biologists. Their views count rather more for me here.

I answered you in some detail and won't waste further comment.

Anaximander was a panpsychist. Peirce was a panpsychist. Why aren't you a panpsychist?

I am sure that I am in grave danger of being added to your list of believers. You have a loose way with citations as I noted early on.

I do accept, however, that the fundamental emergence of actuality from potentiality is the "creative advance" that is the temporal flow, the laying down of the universe, in each moment. This is a process whereby each locus of the universe prehends prior actual entities and decides how to manifest in each moment. This universal process is the universe.

So there is still no story on how that first drop of experience arises out of a prior state of non-experiencing. Where does this power to prehend come from? It is sounding very chicken and egg, is it not? You need a locus to prehend, and prehension to have a locus.

That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory).

I could go on, but this is probably sufficient for now.

You could always have a go at answering my cortex/cerebellum question. Please.

 

[Ferris_bg]

You still have to explain how there is this evolution from the ether/brahman/apeiron level to a level where something actually exists, whether this first level of existence is double aspect panpsychic or not.

Yes, basically panpsychism doesn't solve anything by itself. Even Chalmers acknowledges that, although he favors and supports the http://consc.net/papers/nature.html" , in which the "ether/brahman/apeiron" is called "(proto)phenomenal".

Accepting mind as a part of nature avoids some problems, but again you are still in the middle of the desert, when it comes to explaining the evolution of mind, the formation of the consciousness we refer to, etc. As William James said panpsychism faces its own problem of emergence.

And one more thing for those still following the discussion to think about - why we need mind or matter, when we have "ether/brahman/apeiron"? I'll tell you - we don't. Our need is justified only by our evidence of what we call mind and matter. Thats a problem I see in general with neutral monism theories, but its again another thread by itself.

 

[ConradDJ]

I agree with Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc., that subjectivity is fundamental. It is the ONLY thing we know with certainty. And this seems to be incontrovertible. What do you know with 100% certainty? Only the fact of your own thought.

...Now, I also infer a ground of being, the neutral substrate for reality... because it seems clear to me that there has to be a foundation for reality to rest upon. If there is no base, no ultimate level of being, it all just falls away and there is nothing...

Again, my panexperiential neutral monism is a general theory that can apply to quarks to quagga mussels to quasars. And this is what philosophy should be seeking, as well as science.

How can this "unification that isn't a unification" succeed?

It sounds as though you are arguing that only local particulars are authentic (the actual dyadic interactions which are everywhere going to be different and individual).

The general is identified with the inauthentic. So the global rules, the universal truths, Peircean thirdness, the laws of physics, the unified field theories, are all wrong as a basis of reality. There is only the local atomic particulars.

But you can't actually have the local without the global. You can't have "just the interactions" without the space and time that is necessary to separate them - to allow them to be particular... It is incoherent to talk about events without having the contexts that allow them to be distinguishable as events.

With apologies for another very lengthy post... which I hope those following the pan-X-ism discussion will feel free to skip.

I feel like I’m arguing here on the one hand with Descartes, and on the other with Hegel. That’s not a bad thing, since they were both profoundly original thinkers dealing with the fundamental issue of ontology. But there’s no winning this kind of argument... what we can do is to try to clarify the premises each of us is building on.

To me, Descartes represents the beginning and Hegel the end of the heroic period in modern philosophy... the period in which Reason breaking through to the fundamental Answer seemed imminent. This is where the spirit of modern Science was born, in a deep belief that we can soon understand Everything through careful thought.

What the beginning and end of this period had in common was a dedication to Certainty. PhizzicsPhan follows the Cartesian formula faithfully – start with what we Know absolutely, and then a little rational argument gets us to an Answer that seems 100% certain... or at least, is clearly the only reasonable one.

Hegel’s sense of absolute Certainty is almost opposite to this. He sees how many ways Reason can go wrong, and has to go wrong, in the process of its self-education. The things that seem most clearly true, at one stage, turn out to be delusions at another. His sense of Certainty, like Apeiron’s, comes from a hard-won ability to see the Answer in the complex interplay of opposite kinds of truth... all of which are needed in the grand scheme. It feels Certain not because it’s the only reasonable answer but because it’s the one that can make sense of all the reasonable answers and fit them together. From this magisterial point of view, the Cartesian kind of commitment to a particular Right Theory or “-ism” seems kind of quaint.

Now Heidegger’s deep belief was not in Certainty of any kind. He lived through the two World Wars when the most cilivized countries in the world were using science to destroy each other’s populations. He saw even physics and mathematics radically questioning their own 19th-century foundations. Today we’re used to this sort of questioning... scientists in general no longer believe in an ultimate, philosophically-grounded Answer at all. So it’s hard for us to realize how deeply the sense of being on the verge of The Answer had permeated Western culture, during the 19th century – or what a violent disillusionment was forced on the intellectual world in the first half of the 20th. Particularly in Germany, where the insanity and the ensuing destruction were most intense.

What Heidegger believed was that the terribly uncertain struggle to find your own authentic viewpoint is what gives us a window into the depths of existence. Neither the Cartesian nor Hegelian sense of Reason could get beneath the surface of the inauthentic view, the general and reasonable view of reality we can all agree on, the plane on which ordinary science makes its daily progress toward more and better information.

So this is my premise too. I don’t believe we’re on the verge of The Theory that answers everything. But I hope we’re close to breaking through to a radically different way of seeing the world around us, that will reconfigure all the questions. I don’t have confidence that rational arguments from evidence will get us where we need to be. It seems all too clear to me – the state of physics being only one example – that we’re no longer making real progress toward a fundamental truth. But I believe such a truth is possible. It’s not The Answer, not a Right Theory... it’s a different intellectual viewpoint on the world.

I don’t believe in a magisterial Reason that can see the whole universe from outside and grasp its Logic in a formula. What feels deeply right to me is that there’s a truth in seeing the world from one’s own unique viewpoint, enmeshed in one’s relationships. This kind of truth has no access to Certainty or to any “global” reference-frame... everything is “local” and in play, in the here and now. In my authentic view, I don’t even get to “see” both sides of a single relationship I’m in.

Now clearly such a limited personal viewpoint can’t be The Basis for Science. We need the kinds of thinking to which PhizzicsPhan and Apeiron have dedicated themselves. Hegel was right – the Truth is a process with many stages, and we need them all.

But Heidegger’s argument was that the detached, globalizing, generalizing view of the world was inherently limited – specifically in its ability to grasp what’s ontologically fundamental. Traditional philosophy sees the world in its own image. It wants a logical process, it wants a “clear and distinct” Answer that follows from rational argument based on objective evidence.

This is all good – and certainly far better than the prevailing style of academic philosophers, who chug along “proving” things without believing in anything that matters to anyone but themselves.

But the point I’m trying to make – not to prove, only to make plausible – is that we can’t understand the world we live in scientifically, unless we can also understand it “from inside”. Because ultimately, the world exists only “from inside” – only for the unique individuals who are actually participating in the web of one-on-one relationships. Not “observing” it in their own heads, but participating, being out there with each other, making the web happen. I think this is what’s fundamental. More than any picture of a Reality no one actually lives in.

And like Heidegger, I’m trying to imagine what kind of “categories” are needed for this kind of thinking, which none of us yet knows how to do... even though ultimately, our own limited and authentic viewpoint is the only one any of us have.

 

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

Lets say one invents a device with which one has the power to go "inside" in others and participate in their relationships exactly in the way they are. In other words my brain gets linked to yours, and I can feel your qualia, depending not on my "brain configuration", but on yours. So my experiences, during the time I participated in the world like you do, get stored somewhere and I can later access them somehow. So I can later say, ConradDJ's qualia from bier drinking felt "better" than mine. This kind of method get repeated by all people so that some "qualia map" is established. Now, if you agree with the logic of this example (if you disagree you can change it the way it applies best), what are the benefits of this "qualia map"?

 

[JDStupi]

The subject-object relation is a brute fact that cannot be further explained. Why? Because we know subjectivity is fundamental and we infer that it goes all the way down due to the principle of continuity and many other lines of reasoning.

We know that subjectivity is our epistemological brute fact, this does not warrant an extension to it being an ontological brute fact. Saying that the abstract relation between subject and object is a brute fact is not the same as saying qualia is fundamental is a brute fact. The idea of the abstract subject-object relation being fundamental in fact seems related to apeiron's speech about "the epistemic cut".

As for the epistemic cut you assert to explain the emergence of life and mind, I've explained in detail the flaws in this reasoning and you have yet to address my points adequately.

I may have missed something, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I have yet to see this alleged "detailed explanation" of the flaws in his reasoning.
First, apeiron's notion of "the epistemic cut" isn't apeiron's notion of the epistemic cut. It has a history, and if your intereted in that line of reasoning there are books available.

Why and where does the epistemic cut arise phylogenetically and ontogenetically?You criticize my ideas as lacking in detail and yet your working theory lacks even the beginning of an operational framework. How does your theory apply to reality?

Pointing out that apeiron is unable to point out when the epistemic cut arose exactly and then arguing the point that that is a reason against his viewpoint says nothing except that you may be insisting on false standards of exactitude. The non existence of a sharp line when the "epistemic cut" occurred does not say anything about its validity, in fact the question "When exactly did the epistemic cut occur?" may be a falsely phrased question. Is the lack of knowledge of exactly when life arose (which this question is closely related to) entail that evolution is a vague theory?

The epistemic cut is a much more modest theory than proclaiming that subjectivity must be fundamental. The epistemic cut simply arises from considerations about life and the measurement problem, and they do not posit the extra entity of "fundamental qualia".

In fact, the assertion that everything has "fundamental qualia" doesn't even seem to be justified by your definition, unless you are playing word-games and equating qualia with receptivity of information.

Do you have a mind when you are sleeping? No. "Your" mind is only the flickerings of field coherence in the network of relationships that is your brain/body/universe. "You" don't actually "have" a mind. "You" are a particular brain/body/universe relation in each given moment

Yes, I apologize for my cartesian-laden english, I understand that there is no "I" who is some object who posseses a "body" and floats around in the world. "I am my body" in the Merleau-Ponty sense.

But in any case, that still has yet to say anything, my only point was I am not experiencing qualia in that state. That I am not experiencing qualia in one state is not a sufficient condition for concluding that therefore no other body experinces qualia, however it does serve as one counterexample to the assertion that all things experience qualia (well actually it only serves as sufficient to conclude that not everything has qualia at all times). Given that your epistemic grounds for asserting that everything has qualia is based off your experience, it would be largely assymetrical to ignore a portion of your (lack of) experience in favor of your conclusion.

Also, out of curiosity, do you explicitley presuppose free will's truth? Because you speak of electrons being conscious and therefore making "choices".

I respect Bateson highly, but I don't adopt his overly broad approach to "mind."

Wait wait wait wait, Bateson has an overly broad approach to mind? But defining perception as "receptivity of information" and some type of mathematical "field coherence" isn't an overly broad defintion of perception? I'm stumped.

Not to mention that founding your notion of "the subject" on a mathematical abstraction doesn't seem to solve much. You realize you have basically equated mind with anything that can exist, but in doing so have lost what people mean by mind and consequently have solved nothing. That which you call mind is not identical to what everybody else calls mind and the problem of emergence. It might share one property with that notion, namely "receptivity of information" which your notion also happens to share with everything else that exists.


To be sure, I don't have a problem with your process metaphysics or even your assertion that "mind is a subject and object and a relation between the two", but then your mind definition is virtually identical to epistemic cut. If you can't find whaen aperion's epistemic cut happens, how then can you find when your epistemic cut happens? If you say "slide to the bottom" sure, now we're at the measurement problem. I'll accept that. I won't accept the assertion that everything must have qualia. I won't accept the assertion that what you mean by "mind" and "subject" and "perception" is anything like what most people mean mind and emergence and perception. Because it is not the same notion, it doesn't solve the problems peculiar to that notion.

If all your asserting is "subject, object and a relation between the two is fundamental and all things are 'behaving' (in a loose sense) based off of available information" then I can agree, all you're asserting is the primacy of the measurement problem, saying that it isn't a problem but a feature of reality and elaborating a Bohrian relationalist metaphysics.
Fine. Then say that. "Mind is fundamental and all things are perceiving" now that you have redefined the word though, you can't jump back and say you've solved the problems of perception and mind.

It just seems to me like I am claiming to be solving for x and then solve for y, but then say "let y=x" and then saying "therefore x", clearly violating the law of existential instantiation.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, again, thanks for the thoughts.I can see that you're a deep thinker committed to achieving your own synthesis.

I should clarify at this point that I agree entirely in the need for humility and acknowledge that we'll never know the Answer. There is no Ultimate Truth. It's all a matter of more or less plausible stories that use the best available evidence and the best lines of reasoning. I love Whitehead's statement from Process and Reality:

"How shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly.”

So if I have come across overly certain in my views, I want to stress now that there is no certainty - only inquiry. And, at the same time, a conviction that the views I'm putting forward, while by no means certain or final, are better (from my point of view) than the prevailing metaphysics and better than any other set of solutions I've come across to date.

See the last three essays in my series, On Logic, On the Heart and On Explanations:

http://www.independent.com/news/eco-ego-eros/

However, it also seems that you're not understanding what I've been writing.

You state:

"But the point I’m trying to make – not to prove, only to make plausible – is that we can’t understand the world we live in scientifically, unless we can also understand it “from inside”. Because ultimately, the world exists only “from inside” – only for the unique individuals who are actually participating in the web of one-on-one relationships. Not “observing” it in their own heads, but participating, being out there with each other, making the web happen. I think this is what’s fundamental. More than any picture of a Reality no one actually lives in."

I couldn't have said it better. I agree 100%. And this is the point of panpsychism - it explains the world "in here" and "out there" by accepting that all objects are subjects are objects are subjects - in perpetual oscillation as the creative advance proceeds.

It seems that you are currently taken with Heidegger's efforts to magisterially sweep away all previous efforts at philosophy - this is after all how Heidegger fans describe his role. But keep in mind that Heidegger was writing at exactly the same time as Whitehead, who was the last truly systematic philosopher, present at the creation of modern physics' twin jewels (quantum mechanics and relativity), who also had a deep familiarity with the western philosophical tradition. Heidegger may have found himself a Whiteheadian if he had had a chance to take in his views.

 

[apeiron]

I don’t believe in a magisterial Reason that can see the whole universe from outside and grasp its Logic in a formula. What feels deeply right to me is that there’s a truth in seeing the world from one’s own unique viewpoint, enmeshed in one’s relationships. This kind of truth has no access to Certainty or to any “global” reference-frame... everything is “local” and in play, in the here and now. In my authentic view, I don’t even get to “see” both sides of a single relationship I’m in.

I agree that it is in fact fair to form a third person objective or globalised description of what you are actually trying to do - which is get completely away from that POV to have a view based on "just interactions". Which sounds exactly like Peirce's secondness BTW.

There is no choice but to look back and try to describe the indefinite, indeterminate in terms that are themselves then well defined in a way that what they refer to is not.

It is exactly the same with modelling vagueness or apeiron. So basing a philosophy on proto-interactions would be no different.

The only question is then whether such an approach can be made to work. But the quest itself has a legitimate goal and is not self-contradictory simply because it wants to talk about the ontically indefinite or proto-whatever in definite language.

And no, this is not a vote for pan-psychism which IMHO does not have a goal to explain anything in a causal fashion - answering the how or why questions - but simply posits that something is the case as brute fact. And reality's only acceptable brute fact is the fact that we subjectively exist [JDStupi's point]. All else must follow as explanation or I can't see how it is either philosophy or science, just an argument from faith.

 

[Pengo]

apeiron,

That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory).

Is this really a good criticism? I ask because it seems that in any scientific or even philosophical theory, the search always stops somewhere with that which "just is, period". Fundamental forces, for example.

I can understand the idea that we should be very reluctant to add new fundamental substances or forces. But still, it seems someone can still argue in good faith that some things "just are" (even if they qualify that with "in this theory, which may one day turn out to be wrong").

 

[ConradDJ]

Lets say one invents a device with which one has the power to go "inside" in others and participate in their relationships exactly in the way they are. In other words my brain gets linked to yours, and I can feel your qualia, depending not on my "brain configuration", but on yours. So my experiences, during the time I participated in the world like you do, get stored somewhere and I can later access them somehow.

I don't believe in the possibility of such a device... but regardless -- if you had access to my brain-states, how would you know the "qualia" you experience -- given your very different life-history -- was anything like how I experience them? The beer I'm drinking might taste amazing to you, because you've never experienced my beer-qualia before, but to me it's just the same old taste that I take for granted, right?

The basic problem here is imagining experience as if it were something "real" -- confusing categories of objective reality with categories of existence, that can only be "one's own".

I'm going to indulge myself in a little mini-essay on this difference in the next post.

 

[ConradDJ]

Here’s a way of imagining our situation. Let’s say, there’s Reality and there’s Existence. These are two ways of talking about the same world we all live in together.

Reality is the world we imagine “objectively” – the world of things that are in fact what they are, without regard to the context they happen to be in at the moment, or the perspective from which they might be seen.

Existence is the world we experience “from inside”... only from our own point of view, in this particular moment now, in the context prepared by our own entire life-histories.

We’ve been very successful at learning to describe and understand Reality, especially in the sciences. We’ve evolved an elaborate array of sophisticated conceptual tools for sifting and interpreting evidence, to verify facts and uncover basic principles.

There are however two big holes in the scientific view of Reality. When it comes to the foundations of the physical world, or the basis of human consciousness, it seems pretty clear that we don’t have the conceptual tools we need. Let’s suppose, that’s because these two questions are not really about Reality. We’re no longer dealing with “things as they are in themselves” but with being in relationships.

When we try to apply our conceptual tools to these questions, we get nonsense. Quantum mechanics is very beautifully structured nonsense – we know the theory is right, because it explains far more about the world far more precisely than any other theory ever has. But no one understands at all what it means. The only thing that’s clear about it is that it doesn’t give us definite facts about physical systems “in themselves”.

But when it comes to “consciousness”, the nonsense really gives us nothing at all. When we apply the kinds of logic we’ve developed for Reality, we get notions like “qualia”. Because I’m a philosopher, I do sometimes try to “experience qualia”, with some success. To do that I have to “step beck” into my own mind and see the world around me merely as my own internal “perception”, and then try to isolate some tiny aspect of it, like a patch of color or a moment of sound. I can do that, but I guarantee you that my wife has never “experienced qualia” in her life. And the notion that our experience is essentially made of these bits and can be understood in terms of them is a typical misapplication of our reality-tools.

Likewise the idea that other animals “have qualia” or “have subjective awareness”. It’s not that this is wrong, since of course the sensory functions of other animals aren’t very different from ours. But it applies an objective mode of thinking in contexts where it can have no possible meaning.

And this is the fundamental issue in Existence – how do things come to have meaning? This is where our categories for Reality fail us, fail to provide even a starting-point. We hardly know what “meaning” means or where it comes from, even with regard to us humans, who can talk about. But it’s just as fundamental in physics, where things “have” definite states and properties only insofar as they make a difference to other things.

The goal of Being and Time was to make such a starting-point, for understanding Existence – the world “from inside” – as distinct from Reality.

Existence is always in a specific context of relationships, in this moment. The context is always “anticipatory” – a context of possibilities, so that what actually happens now can make a difference, can “mean” something... namely, to what can happen further on.

The context also has a built-in history, made of everything that’s gone on in all these different relationships I’m in, over many different time-scales, all of which go to make this present situation possible.

So Existence is an evolving “present moment”, from one’s own point of view, in many different relationship-contexts at once... where what happens in each relationship makes a difference to what can happen in others, and so “has meaning”. When the relationships are talking-relationships, e.g. between human beings, they generate an “internal” relationship of talking to yourself. And in a highly-evolved, literate culture, this self-relationship can evolve into something like a “consciousness” that thinks of itself as such.

Now as to basic categories. Reality gives us a vast body of fact, laid out in space and time. The purpose of our categories is to let us describe, accurately and insightfully, what it is.

Existence is always only “here and now”. But it has its own kind of depth and complexity. There are many, many layers of history built into it – personal history, cultural history, the history of life, and many layers of physical history as well. All of these are built into the context that makes possible whatever’s possible for us in this present situation.

So the kinds of categories we need for this, to untangle this kind of profound complexity, are the kinds that can distinguish all these different layers of “meaning” that constitute this present moment. Some have to do with the physical interactions with our environment we experience as sensation, some have to do with the many stages of biological evolution that support the functioning of our bodies and minds, some have to do with the many stages of evolution of language and thought.

This amounts to a kind of archaeology of the moment – uncovering all the distinct layers of relationships in which different dimensions of “meaning” arise, through which people and things make a difference to each other. Instead of describing “what is” in Reality, by talking about all the different kinds of things there are spread out in space and time, we’re trying to describe all the different kinds of meaning in all these distinct relationship-contexts, that support our Existence in this ongoing “now”.

This thread was titled “Time and Relationships”, because this was the key point I learned from Heidegger. Each of the many relationship-contexts that underlie Existence has its own “temporality” – not only its own time-scale, but its own way of “doing” time, its own way of making happening “meaningful”. The time of physics is different from the time of biology, which is different from the time in which you and I exist as “conscious” beings. And each of these “times” is made up of many distinct relationship-contexts, each distinguished by a different “timing”.

In sum – we have in Science an wonderful picture of Reality. When it comes to Existence, we’re still at about the stage of the pre-Socratic philosophers, who were struggling to find language for imagining the world as a whole, as “seen from outside”. In Heidegger we see just the first steps of an equally difficult struggle.

 

[JDStupi]

But when it comes to “consciousness”, the nonsense really gives us nothing at all. When we apply the kinds of logic we’ve developed for Reality, we get notions like “qualia”. Because I’m a philosopher, I do sometimes try to “experience qualia”, with some success. To do that I have to “step beck” into my own mind and see the world around me merely as my own internal “perception”, and then try to isolate some tiny aspect of it, like a patch of color or a moment of sound. I can do that, but I guarantee you that my wife has never “experienced qualia” in her life. And the notion that our experience is essentially made of these bits and can be understood in terms of them is a typical misapplication of our reality-tools.

As a comment, I would say that I absolutley agree with this statement. It seems to me a perfect example of what I call the "Fallacy of Misplaced Linearity" which happens so frequently in certain philosophical discussions. Essentially, possibly due to the prominent role played by Analytic Philosophy in modern discussions, philosophers tacitly assume a belief in the primacy of formal logic in their reasoning. This is not inherently a bad thing, but frequently it seems to be that logical considerations and ways of conceptualizing the world are mistaken for ontological ways of thinking and conceptualizing the world. Formal logic can be viewed simply as yet another conceptual scaffolding, a scaffolding which enjoys no aprioricity with regards to justification. Formal logic is an abstract algebraic system with operators and primitive undefined terms, and it is we who apply this abstract algebraic system with its primitives, "The Proposition" serving the same role as "The Number" in other algebras. As such, it is subject to the same criticisms and epistemological uncertainties associated with the traditional scientific endeavor, for both involve the application of a formalized conceptual framework to reality.

Where the linearity comes into play, is in trying to formulate our conceptions in terms of this scaffolding. We take the whole of experience and break it up into "Qualia" some type of atomistic building block that linearly adds up to the sum of experience, we then isolate qualia and sicuss them as if experience were composed of qualia, but as you stated anybody who has really looked into experience, knows that qualia are absolutley not what experience is made of. In a Duhem analogy, there are always a conjunction of background "assumptions" and processes going on at any given time, and we cannot simply isolate one "qualia" out among others as being primitive. The most forceful illustration of this is in philosophers traditional lack of respect and appreciation for aesthetics. When you are sitting outside and the whole of a scenery takes on a perceptual sense, and it is not "this qualia" or "that qualia" but the whole field of consciousness that takes on an indescribable sense of calmness or beauty, this cannot be broken up into a "qualia".

This misplaced qualia abstraction then leads to misplaced science, because certain scientists influenced by a dominant philosophy will try to find one-to-one correspondances between "neural states" and "primitive qualia" and from there claim that the sum of the neural states associated with primitive qualia will successfuly explain consciousness. I am not saying the mind is separate from body, simply that the specific methodology associated with atomistic qualia will fail.

And this is the fundamental issue in Existence – how do things come to have meaning? This is where our categories for Reality fail us, fail to provide even a starting-point. We hardly know what “meaning” means or where it comes from, even with regard to us humans, who can talk about. But it’s just as fundamental in physics, where things “have” definite states and properties only insofar as they make a difference to other things

You see, I am certainly interested in this Heideggerian viewpoint, but what I keep seeing as problematic is the attempt to develop a "view from existence" because I see it is a continual banging our head against the wall, against the limits of what can be said. Namely, I think that Heidegger attemped to get down not to "beings" but to "The meaning of Being". His idea was, as you are saying, that our Western Metaphysical tradition has went away from what it means to "Be" and simply explicated upon "beings" while leaving behind the fundamental ontological question of "Being". As such he believed the only way to view the meaning of "Being" it self was to investigate it from the perspecctive of Being, of existence as you call it, and so analyze our human condition and authentic existence. I see this as a great idea. However, where it seems to run into problems is that, we are limited to and can only know our own way of existence and of Being and the meaning that Being takes on for us is a personal "Existential" question, the minute we attempt to create a framework for how other beings "Be" we are necessarily abstracting and extrapolating from our own mode-of-Being and nothing necessitates that this is the case for others. We cannot understand their mode of Being, almost by definition. So this is where we get into, what Apeiron (or rather Pierce) calls thridness, namely we have to speak of habits and regularities between the world of beings. We may even come to Secondness or the world of individual fact and relation between beings, but the question of Being is relegated to the world of Firstness or quality and cannot be explicated upon or built upon without turning into Secondness or Thirdness.

This is why I feel as though we can learn from Wittgenstein in that "What can not be said can only be shown" or "Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent" in that we are coming up against the limits of abstraction, and we can only attemp to point and describe in terms of secondness or thirdness, we can only attempt to wake people up to the "Radical root of their existence" as Ortegga y Gassat called it, but we cannot built a system of Being, for that would be against the spirit of Being itself. Then we would just have yet another "paragraph in a system".

I completely agree that we need to show people that there is a world of Being that lies beneath the world of beings, but I think that this is best achieved through "pointing" and the world of art. Art can form a bridge between beings and Being. This is also why I spoke of certain aspects of Zen earlier, namely that its entire project is of bringing us into closer realation with Being, and realizing that Being is not to be spoken of, but to Be.

This is another reason why, I think the meaning of Being is difficult to approach in our culture, a culture entirely built around beings. A culture whose religions are even sometimes formed around beings and shallow moral rules and outdated abstract belief systems, but if there is anything to religion it is not its abstractions or its moral rules (well not from an Existential point of view, maybe from a sociological point of view) but it is towards its means of orienting people towards Being, a pursuit largely neglected.

Essentially, I think we may remain at the level of the "Pre-Socratics" and the only way to improve would be to show people the "limits of language" and then we can use language to discuss this mode of Being simply by virtue of having a shared experience of it.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And it shall always remain this way, neccessarily, for Being is not to be completely elucidated through speech.


I apologize for my long and winding post

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, again, you're taken with Heidegger's supposed sweeping away of traditional philosophy. You think "qualia" is some scientistic term to distract from authentic experience.

Qualia ARE authentic experience. Qualia are subjectivity. Qualia are mind.

Everything you do is the flux and flex of qualia. You are qualia. Your wife IS qualia.

These are all terms for exactly the same thing.

Reality, as you have defined it, is a construct of complex collections of qualia - human minds, in this case. Reality is, thus, dependent on the deeper reality of what you have called Existence. So Existence is what needs to be explained in any decent ontology.

And, again, this is what Whitehead and other sophisticated panpsychists have attempted to do.

You really need to read Panpsychism in the West and Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot. You might find that the vocabulary you claim doesn't exist has in fact been around for a long time.

 

[Ferris_bg]

ConradDJ,

My example was influenced by that of Rama, in which he addresses the problem, which the third person account create.

Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, "Fine, but you'll never know what it feels like to sense electricity."
These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It's just that the your account is incomplete epistemologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a "third-person" account.
For centuries philosophers have assumed that this gap between brain and mind poses a deep epistemological problem - a barrier that simply cannot be crossed. But is this really true? I agree that the barrier hasn't yet been crossed, but does it follow that it can never be crossed? I'd like to argue that there is in fact no such barrier, no great vertical divide in nature between mind and matter, substance and spirit. Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of language. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is any translation from one language to another. (...)
But what if I were to skip spoken language as a medium of communication and instead hook a cable of neural pathways (taken from tissue culture or from another person) from
the color-processing areas in my brain directly into the color-processing regions of your brain (remember that your brain has the machinery to see color even though your eyes cannot discriminate wavelengths because they have no color receptors)? The cable allows the color information to go straight from my brain to neurons in your brain without intermediate translation. This is a farfetched scenario, but there is nothing logically impossible about it.
Earlier when I said "red," it didn't make any sense to you because the mere use of the word "red" already involves a translation. But if you skip the translation and use a cable, so that the nerve impulses themselves go directly to the color area, then perhaps you'll say, "Oh, my God, I see exactly what you mean. I'm having this wonderful new experience."
This scenario demolishes the philosophers' argument that there is an insurmountable logical barrier to understanding qualia. In principle, you can experience another creature's qualia, even the electric fish's. If you could find out what the electroceptive part of the fish brain is doing and if you could somehow graft it onto the relevant parts of your brain with all the proper associated connections, then you would start experiencing the fish's electrical qualia. Now, we could get into a philosophical debate over whether you need to be a fish to experience it or whether as a human being you could experience it, but the debate is not relevant to my argument. The logical point I am making here pertains only to the electrical qualia - not to the whole experience of being a fish.
The key idea here is that the qualia problem is not unique to the mind−body problem. It is no different in kind from problems that arise from any translation, and thus there is no need to invoke a great division in nature between the world of qualia and the material world. There is only one world with lots of translation barriers. If you can overcome them, the problems vanish.

Now let's go back to my "qualia map" example - we have three possible results from such an experiment (consider the experiment successful):
1) There is no chance for the establishing of such qualia map. My comparison differs from yours, that is to say I find your feeling of the beer better than mine and you don't, you find them the same. So, applied on a massive scale, where a lot of people participate (a lot of reports differ), such map is impossible to make and materialism is not the whole truth, so you can stop worrying about solving consciousness.
2) Such map can be established, but the gap can't be reduced - we are left with a property dualistic view, in which matter is everything, but mind as its supervenient property is unsolvable.
3) There is no gap, mind can be reduced to matter.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, responding to #145:

Dual aspect panpsychism and panexperiential physicalism may be equated but I think, to be entirely clear here, it's important to stress that I am not saying: "There is substance/matter and it has a mental aspect." Rather, I am saying: "There is mind/matter (menter) and it is equally mind and matter as it oscillates from subjectivity to objectivity in each time quantum."

You have already said you accept Griffin's panexperiential panpsychism - and he is a strong panpsychist - so, yes, if you accept Griffin's views then you are a panpsychist. Why do you resist the Borg?

As for Pattee's views, I'll assume that your appeal to authority substitutes for a lack of a good response. This forum is about debate, not appeals to authority.

As I explained previously, I'm not asking you to reconstruct historically the actual events that took place with the emergence of life - I'm asking you to describe your criteria for deciding exactly when "life" exists and thus how it emerged phylogenetically on our planet and ontogenetically with each new life form springing forth from its parents, seeds, spores or what have you.

You state: "So there is still no story on how that first drop of experience arises out of a prior state of non-experiencing. Where does this power to prehend come from? It is sounding very chicken and egg, is it not? You need a locus to prehend, and prehension to have a locus."

No, it is not chicken and egg. I'm not sure why you're battling me on this one because it seems our views are pretty much identical on the apeiron and the limitation of pure potentiality (apeiron) by actuality (the physical universe). We'll never know exactly how this process takes place because pure potentiality is necessarily inferred not detected. But we can theorize. And Anaximander, Plotinus, Whitehead and many others have written extensively on how pure potentiality becomes actuality.

Whitehead appeals to a complex process of "ingression" of "eternal objects" (akin to Plato's forms) and "prehension" of "actual entities." Ingression and prehension for each actual entity leads it to transition from unformed subjectivity to objectivity (or "superjectivity"). The set of eternal objects may be equated to apeiron/ether/Brahman. The set of actual entities may be equated with the physical universe.

Thus, each locus is, for me, akin to a three-dimensional pixel that manifests as space or matter as the sum of ingressions and prehensions suggests. Whitehead doesn't state this, but I imagine the substrate as an infinite 3-D grid through which the physical universe moves. Each actual entity/physical object is translated through this grid in each moment as it moves. And each translation is a result of the ticking of the time quanta that constitutes the creative advance, in each corner of the universe.

You state: "That is the problem with panpsychism of any stripe. Consciousness is explained away (as just something that is always there) rather than explained (as something that comes into being for a reason which is the object of the theory)."

I agree that the panpsychist assertion that all things have a mental aspect doesn't get us very far in explanations. But it's a very key starting point. The necessary follow up is the framework I've outlined here and in more detail in my forthcoming JCS paper. The key follow up question is: what determines the boundary of each unitary subject? This is the "boundary problem" or the "combination problem." And this is what my three-part theory of complexity addresses:

The Perception Index (PI) x the Connectivity Index (CI) = Omega (the capacity for phenomenal content).

But we must establish the extent of field coherence in each candidate subject in order to apply this formula. And establishing the extent of the applicable field coherence is a matter of empirical inquiry, as I will flesh out in Part 2 of my paper.

Here's an example from Part 1 of my paper:

The fruit fly’s brain is mostly devoted to visual processing and contains about 100,000 neurons.[1] If we assume about 100 dendrites for each neuron, we have about 10,000,000 synapses, which are the internal connections quantified by CI in this case. (We would also, to be comprehensive, have to determine what neural subunits exist in the fly brain and quantify interconnections between neural subunits in addition to the simple internal connectivity of all synaptic connections.) For the purposes of this example, we can translate this calculation to a normalized CI value of 4 (again, the normalization rules will be described in Part 2 of this paper). Recalling the PI value of 3 for fruit fly vision, we obtain an Omega of 12 for the fruit fly’s visual system. In actuality, of course, there is no separation of senses in the complex subject that is a fruit fly. But, again, this is just a dramatically simplified example to illustrate the formalisms.

[1] Rein, K., et al., (2002). Chiang, et al., (2010).

And with respect to field coherence, I state:

“Field coherence” refers to the coherence in time of the various constituents of the complex subject. Reality is conceived as a series of snapshots – chronons – that represent an entire slice of the universe in each moment. Chronons are incredibly brief in duration – possibly as short (or shorter) as the Planck moment, which is about 5 x 10-44 seconds. Each constituent of the universe resonates at some chronon multiple. When different constituents near each other resonate at the same chronon multiple, they bind together into a single subject in addition to the constituent subjects. That is, as each constituent oscillates back and forth at the same frequency, they are bound together in such a way that a new larger-scale subject is formed. This process is, when conditions are supportive, hierarchical (holarchical[1]) and iterative. Simple subjects bind together to form a complex subject, then bind together again to form a higher level complex subject, and so on, up to the rarefied heights of human subjects and perhaps higher in the ontological chain. Each constituent of the complex subject at issue achieves synchrony through a jostling process that must occur within the time limits of the iterative process that constitutes the laying down of reality (the creative advance), like a sieve producing layers of dust, dirt, small pebbles, larger pebbles, etc. As more and more constituents become linked, and oscillate at the same frequency, the subject at issue becomes more complex. The limit on this process is the finite speed of information between the complex subject’s constituents. As constituents become linked through connections that provide faster and faster information flows, the possible size of complex subjects increases. Quantum entanglement is the fastest physical connection we know of currently and it appears to operate at least 10,000 times faster than the speed of light. This is still, however, a finite speed. Quantum entanglement may be a necessary condition for complex subjects.

[1] Wilber (1995, 2000) is adamant that the true nature of reality is hierarchical/holarchical all the way up and all the way down. I agree that nature is hierarchical/holarchical, but I differ with Wilber in that I do posit a lowest level holon, what I call “simple subjects.” My rationale is simple: for there to be anything at all there has to be some initial ontological emergence from pure potentiality, particularly if we agree with Whitehead’s views on time as the creative advance. Accordingly, this initial ontological emergence, which happens as each chronon ticks, produces my simple subjects.

Now, with respect to your cerebellum/cortex example, can you state your question clearly and I'll take a crack at giving you a good answer?

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Ferris, my previous post also addresses your points.

 

[ConradDJ]

You see, I am certainly interested in this Heideggerian viewpoint, but what I keep seeing as problematic is the attempt to develop a "view from existence" because I see it is a continual banging our head against the wall, against the limits of what can be said...

...we can only attempt to wake people up to the "Radical root of their existence" as Ortega y Gasset called it, but we cannot built a system of Being, for that would be against the spirit of Being itself...

Essentially, I think we may remain at the level of the "Pre-Socratics" and the only way to improve would be to show people the "limits of language" and then we can use language to discuss this mode of Being simply by virtue of having a shared experience of it.

Thanks very much for your comments, JD... I can see you appreciate where the problem lies. If there can be an adequate way of understanding existence, it will have to operate with a conceptual language quite different from what we’re used to. And you’re right – it will need to bring us closer to our shared experience instead of distancing us from it.

The thing is – this is the reason I fell in love with the history of Western thought, when I was much younger – that over and over again these remarkable people were inventing new kinds of language, starting with the earliest Greek poets and philosophers. When the pre-Socratics began, there was simply no way of talking about “reality”... the concept had to be built up through a series of metaphors, piece by piece, until it finally emerged in Plato and Aristotle. Even in Plato “really” is still essentially an adverb, a way of emphasizing that one thing is more true than another. The concept of one exclusive truth about the world, that somehow encompasses all the differences and shades of truth we know in our lives... that notion of “reality” as a noun required not just a new word, but a whole new way of talking with each other. Eric Havelock is worth reading on this – e.g. The Muse Learns to Write. He points out for example that the construction “X is Y”, which came to dominate Western thought through philosophy, is almost absent from the language of pre-literate culture and from the earliest writing, e.g. Homer and Hesiod. It took many generations to establish the possibility of “theorizing” about the world.

At every stage, in the development of Christian dogma and then Medieval theology, in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, people were learning how to imagine the world in ways that just hadn’t been possible before. But you’re right – when it comes to “existence”, we face a new kind of challenge. And so it’s not so surprising that philosophy more or less gave up the ghost in the 20th century. The conceptual creativity of our tradition from 11th to the 19th centuries was unparalleled... but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of our Philosophy Departments today.

Namely, I think that Heidegger attempted to get down not to "beings" but to "The meaning of Being"... As such he believed the only way to view the meaning of "Being" itself was to investigate it from the perspective of Being, of existence as you call it, and so analyze our human condition and authentic existence. I see this as a great idea. However, where it seems to run into problems is that, we are limited to and can only know our own way of existence and of Being and the meaning that Being takes on for us is a personal "Existential" question, the minute we attempt to create a framework for how other beings "Be" we are necessarily abstracting and extrapolating from our own mode-of-Being and nothing necessitates that this is the case for others.

Yes, this is very good. If there’s an “authentic” way of thinking about existence, it can’t be a matter of generalizing from what I experience to what people in general experience... let alone to what animals or plants or atoms “experience”.

As soon as we start down that path, we lose what’s essential about existence, that it’s only “one’s own”. Each of us has only our own life, in this web of connections with others. It’s remarkable how much we can share with each other, but the “own existence” that each of us has is not something anyone can share.

So I strongly disagree, for example, with the perspective of Ramachandran quoted by Ferris_bg in #157 above. The point is not that there are objective “experiences” going on in my brain that could be transmitted to someone else’s brain through “a cable of neural pathways.” Apart from the fact that I think this completely misconstrues how the brain works, what gives me my own unique, “private” perspective on the world is not the fact that my “brain-state” at a given instant is walled off and hidden in my head. It’s that I’m the only one who will ever have lived my life, from beginning to end.

But then – If we can’t generalize about “what it means to Be”... does that mean there’s nothing to understand about it? Or is it that we need to find language for an appropriate kind of understanding?

My thought is that understanding has two directions. The one that we’re very accomplished at has to do with gaining knowledge – investigating the facts, and finding explanations that lead to further investigation. The premise is that there’s a lot out there we don’t know... including, of course, a lot we don’t yet know about us humans, how our brains and our cultures work, etc.

The other direction of understanding has to do with what we all already know, but take for granted. What’s hardest for us to understand are the things closest to us, that we’re all intimately familiar with, that we’ve all experienced ever since we were born. Time, for example. There are no mysteries about time, nothing “unknown” about it. We all know how this business of “past, present and future” works. But it’s very hard to describe it, or even to think about the time we actually live in. Our language about “flow” and “passing” and “lengths” of time all describe something we don’t experience.

Now I don’t see why it’s impossible to develop adequate language for this. But the point is not to develop a “correct theory” about time – i.e. to generalize about our “internal sense of time”, for example. Gaining knowledge about that is a valid task for psychology, part of the traditional task of understanding Reality.

The point of understanding our Existence is to stop taking it for granted... to appreciate what each one of us has been given as our own. As you say, “to wake people up.” But I don’t see this as a one-shot deal, like a spiritual awakening you achieve once and for all. It’s not at all possible or desirable simply to stop taking everything for granted at once. This was Kierkegaard’s objection to Descartes, that he presumed to “doubt everything” intellectually, while still going on with his daily life, taking so much for granted. That there’s a beautiful planet for us to live on, that the laws of physics are so reliable, that life evolved, that we can talk with each other and have such a rich culture, on and on.

The realm of Existence, of what we all know but take for granted, is maybe just as vast as the realm of objective Reality. These are not two different worlds, but two sides of the same world we all live in. So the intellectual project of “not taking for granted” will maybe turn out to be just as extensive as the project of gaining scientific knowledge. And the two are not unrelated.

Look, in physics today, virtually everything is known. We have good theoretical explanations for virtually all observable phenomena. But, because the theories themselves don’t make any sense to us, we go on and on looking for further knowledge – about “branes” and “hidden dimensions” of reality, etc. – in the hope that it will somehow clarify things.

But the problem isn’t that something is still unknown, the problem is in what we take for granted about the physical world. That it happens “in real time”, for example, or that everything about it is “measurable”. We know all about how to measure things... but we don’t know how to think about that, we don’t have the conceptual tools that would let us not take it for granted.

So the issue of thinking “existentially” is not just about us humans. It’s about finding a different point of view and learning to think in a different direction, for a different purpose. There’s more to life, and there’s more to understand about life, than this business of gaining factual knowledge and arguing about theories.

 

[JDStupi]

At every stage, in the development of Christian dogma and then Medieval theology, in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, people were learning how to imagine the world in ways that just hadn’t been possible before. But you’re right – when it comes to “existence”, we face a new kind of challenge. And so it’s not so surprising that philosophy more or less gave up the ghost in the 20th century. The conceptual creativity of our tradition from 11th to the 19th centuries was unparalleled... but it’s hard to imagine anything like that coming out of our Philosophy Departments today

Ahhhh so your saying that you're much more optimistic about the creation of a new conceptual language because, historically, this has had to be the case for even the abstractive language we now take for granted.

So I strongly disagree, for example, with the perspective of Ramachandran quoted by Ferris_bg in #157 above. The point is not that there are objective “experiences” going on in my brain that could be transmitted to someone else’s brain through “a cable of neural pathways.” Apart from the fact that I think this completely misconstrues how the brain works, what gives me my own unique, “private” perspective on the world is not the fact that my “brain-state” at a given instant is walled off and hidden in my head. It’s that I’m the only one who will ever have lived my life, from beginning to end

I too would say I disagree with this mainly because I am skeptical of any overly "linear" ideas about how cognition and perceptual experience work. The way in which the very field of your consciousness is carved out is highly underappreciated, and I think that the way in which perceptual experience manifests itself in quality is intimatley related to your personal history, your body, your culture and the interaction between all of them. And again when I say "your x, your y" my language doesn't convey what I mean, I don't think there is a "you" to posess some body and some culture, you are these things.
Moreover, Rama explicitley stated that his idea was merely to show the logical possibility of connecting cables to the brain and "sharing" subjective experience, but this is not much, all it amounts to saying is it isn't a necessary truth under any definition. But then again, who ever thought that empirical knowledge was a matter of logical necessity?

The point of understanding our Existence is to stop taking it for granted... to appreciate what each one of us has been given as our own. As you say, “to wake people up.” But I don’t see this as a one-shot deal, like a spiritual awakening you achieve once and for all. It’s not at all possible or desirable simply to stop taking everything for granted at once. This was Kierkegaard’s objection to Descartes, that he presumed to “doubt everything” intellectually, while still going on with his daily life, taking so much for granted. That there’s a beautiful planet for us to live on, that the laws of physics are so reliable, that life evolved, that we can talk with each other and have such a rich culture, on and on.

Again I am finding I need to be more careful with the implications of my language, and I apologize for my blunders in this area. I do not mean to imply that it "waking people up" is sufficient, only necessary. "Waking people up" is only the first step, but continurally learning to see your existence from a new perspective is a life-long endeavor, an act of continual becoming. Yes, C.S. Pierce too spoke of how you can only start philosophy from where you are and that Descartes "doubt everything" dictum is not an actuality.

But then – If we can’t generalize about “what it means to Be”... does that mean there’s nothing to understand about it? Or is it that we need to find language for an appropriate kind of understanding?

I certainly do not want to seem like I am saying "there is nothing to understand" if anything I was doubting that it could be understood soley on the basis of discursive thought.

Now regarding "finding a language" would you agree with my notion ("my" as if it is all mine) that the "language" of art seems to be stronger at communicating this type of "thought" at this time? Mainly that language is simply communication and certain types of poetry or music may be able to better convey the depth of "Being"?

I hate to sound like some type of Eastern pundit, which I am surely not, but simply in the interest of discussing these notions I do still say that turning East would be a fruitful idea. I have yet to dig into the East's philosophy, but as you have stated it is the West who largely developed this abstractive mode of communication. Quite possibly, many of the germinal seeds for the creation of this new authentic mode of speech is already to be had in Eastern thought. Something like the Dao-de-jing with its "The way that can be named is not the true way" may help us seek thought in that direction.

Of course, the problem with that is that it will be very difficult to open our culture up to for a number of reasons. First, if you wish to discuss Being authentically, it cannot be discussed as divorced from "Ethics" and by ethics I simply mean "how you exist" in a broad sense. Talking about ethics and how we exist is not something people like to do or are used to, our "Ethics" many times consists of abstract moral principles rather than transforming your Being itself. Another thing is talking about "Being" and "personal existence" and "The way in which we live our life from the inside" will seem repulsive to some of our culture's "knowledgeable fellows" they will conflate non-logical language with illogical language and think that talking about existence isn't a serious affair or that it should be left to religion, another lingering shadow of our dualism. As though "serious" "professional" people don't think about such things as "Existence itself" from the "inside". Professional people are supposed to be impersonal, "objective", but "friendly" to everyone. "Belief" is a matter of everybody's own personal opinion and what right have we to discuss the validity of personal beliefs because "Everybody is equal".

That is something that also needs to be discussed, not only developing a language for "the web of relationships from the inside" and authenticity, but communicating it. As you may agree, any communication about authenticity must be of a different type, must be "authentic". How are we to communicate about "authenticity" in a culture that is anathema to authenticity? We have dug so deep into dualism and have divided our life so much we have become "nihilistic". I do not know how the world is, I am in the US, I do not know where you are, but if you are in the US I am sure you can agree that our culture is diametrically opposed to authenticity in every form. We have a culture where everyone's beliefs are equal and ever person believes they are equal and all opinions are equally valid. We have a rampant relativism motivated by a lack of wanting to have to think. We have cultural idols who have lots of money and buy lots of products. We have popular music based around partying and purchasing. We have the notion that a "Successfull" existence is one in which you "get a good job" and run the rat race and have lots of things. Even the people who think they have "values", they make a big stint about curse words or sex or people mkaing fun of people, as though there weren't things by far more important to your existence. By the way, the psychologist Erich Fromm wrote a book you may like called "To have or to be?"


And I apologize for what partly is a rant about our culture, but it certainly is a problem. Authenticity requires a mode of communication where we share some amount of common ground. In order to do this we must change our culture, the mindset of our people, and this is largely a difficult thing.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

JD, there is indeed a limitation to language - many. But it's important to keep in mind the broader issues:

1) We try in philosophy to explain the world through words and the abstractions represented by words. Ontology seeks to at least in theory explain everything through the (hopefully) simplest set of words and concepts - while matching the evidence we glean from our senses.

2) A deeper understanding of the universe is experienced rather than conceptualized - it is beyond words. Some can go through life with words alone but for those seekers who want to plumb the depths more authentically, there is a need to abandon words - at least at times.

Eastern traditions emphasize 2) over 1) and vice versa in the West. But there is no exclusivity of modes.

Here's my best effort to explain the limitations of words and logic in a recent essay entitled On the Heart.
______________________________

The kindness of strangers seems irrational to some people and wouldn’t generally be considered economically rational behavior to an economist focused on pure cost/benefit analysis. Thankfully, humans aren’t entirely rational creatures, despite the assumptions of economists. We follow our hearts as much or probably more than we do our heads.

This latest essay in my series on absent-minded science continues the exploration of reason and logic, begun in my last installment. Part X will conclude the series with a light-hearted examination of why certain explanations are more compelling than others.

A broader insight into such kindnesses may be arrived at when we consider what it really means to be “rational.” Like a lot of concepts, we think at first blush we know what this word means. But there’s really no clear and defensible definition of rational behavior or “rationality” more generally. What time frame are we referring to? How broad are our considerations in making “rational” decisions? These details are key to any conclusion regarding “rational behavior” in any situation; and these details depend on the choices of the person acting in each situation. (As discussed in my last essay, truth is perspectival in all situations, other than definitions that are independent of any particular space-time.)

Paulo Coelho’s masterpiece, The Alchemist, has much to say about the heart. This amazing little book is a parable about how to live a good life by finding and achieving one’s “personal legend.” Alchemy is unsurprisingly a consistent theme in the book, meant as a metaphor for personal transformation. The book is still on bestseller lists despite its release in the early 1990s.

The book’s main character, a young sheepherder from Andalusia, Spain, travels with the Alchemist through the desert of North Africa looking for his personal legend. He asks the Alchemist: “Why do we have to listen to our hearts?”

‘“Because wherever your heart is, that is where you’ll find your treasure.”

‘“But my heart is agitated,” the boy said. “It has its dreams, it gets emotional, and it’s become passionate over a woman of the desert. It asks things of me, and it keeps me from sleeping many nights, when I’m thinking about her.”

‘“Well, that’s good. Your heart is alive. Keep listening to what it has to say.”’

The boy had a long conversation with his heart there in the desert. He came to understand his heart. “He asked it, please, never to stop speaking to him. He asked that, when he wandered far from his dreams, his heart press him and sound the alarm. The boy swore that, every time he heard the alarm, he would heed its message.”

The secret that alchemists have pursued over the centuries, according to Coelho, is known as the “Master Work.” The Master Work is written on an emerald and describes how to create the Elixir of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone. But the Master Work, according to the Alchemist, “can’t be understood by reason alone. It is a direct passage to the Soul of the World.”

This metaphor stands for life in general. Can we grasp life, can we understand our own lives and find meaning, with reason alone? It seems not. Reason is a very powerful tool and it is certainly a good guide to most aspects of life. But reason has limitations. Reason depends on representations, on models of reality. To try and grasp life with reason alone is like trying to describe the most beautiful sunset you’ve ever seen with words alone. It can’t do it justice.

The problems go far deeper, however.

A prominent Second Century CE Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna, concluded that there is no ultimate truth: All doctrines are ultimately empty. Jan Westerhoff writes in his introduction to Nagarjuna’s work (Nagarjuna’s Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction): “According to [Nagarjuna’s] view of truth, there can be no such thing as ultimate truth, a theory describing how things really are, independent of our interests and conceptual resources employed in describing it.”

But if there is no ultimate truth, even this doctrine cannot be true, so there is ultimate truth. We end up in paradox, a problem inherent in all logical or conceptual systems, as discussed in more depth in my last essay.

This is a key insight of the Zen Buddhist tradition (which came much later than Nagarjuna’s version of Buddhism, but still relies in part on Nagarjuna’s thinking): Langauge and concepts ultimately fail in leading us to true understanding. They are, at best, pointers to reality. Hence the use of paradoxical koans as teaching aids, the most famous of which is, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” These mind-twisters have no correct answer – they are intended to show that logic itself is illogical.

Reality is apparently deeper than logic.

Nancy Cartwright, a respected philosopher of science, makes a great case in her 1999 book, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science, that science does indeed exist within fairly limiting boundaries. Even our best theories of physics, biology, economics, etc. consist of a “dappled” patchwork of ideas and mathematics. Despite the fact that we have accomplished truly great things over the last few hundred years—modern medicine, powerful computers that fit in our palm, marvels in entertainment, etc.—we are just scratching the surface of what the universe has to offer.

Science, while limited, has obviously been tremendously important in helping us to understand the world and create useful technologies. This trend shall certainly continue, probably in perpetuity.

We know with certainty, however, that we will never know the fullness of nature because we never know the full extent of what we don’t know. We are like a hiker seeking the top of a mountain who thinks she sees the top not far away only to find as she crests the hill she is on that she sees yet another hill above her, and so on. We will never know where the top is because we don’t know the full extent of what we don’t know.

To extend the physical metaphor further: This mountain springs from an ocean of unreason, with other islands of reason rising from the ocean’s surface in the dappled manner suggested by Cartwright and other thinkers. The best we can hope for is to navigate this vast ocean of unreason and scale the islands of reason we come across with equanimity and grace.

The kindness of strangers often demands this, as does a more complete experience of the universe.

 

[ConradDJ]

Now regarding "finding a language" would you agree with my notion ("my" as if it is all mine) that the "language" of art seems to be stronger at communicating this type of "thought" at this time? Mainly that language is simply communication and certain types of poetry or music may be able to better convey the depth of "Being"?

I do agree with you. And you probably know that Heidegger wrote several essays on poetry as a kind of fundamental thinking... drawing mainly on Rilke and Holderlin.

I would say that art and music and poetry are the primary language we have for articulating existence – as contrasted with describing reality. Literature (fiction-writing) usually operates on both sides at once – describing the object-world we live in from a personal point of view. As ordinary conversation also does.

The thing about art and music and poetry is that they have the power to pull you into the present moment, if you can teach yourself how to pay attention to them. When I was in college I wanted to be a composer, and spent a lot of time learning how to listen to music. You have to stay focused and think about what you’re hearing, because music articulates “the moment” over different time-scales – notes and phrases and extended melodies, and the “architecture” of the piece as a whole, that supports a kind of drama, of one theme or one section contrasting with what came before. But the purpose of this “thinking” is to stay with the music in the moment and feel what’s going on. So this was an education for me in the “back-and-forth” aspect of paying thoughtful attention. It’s not just letting yourself be immersed in the moment, getting lost in it, but about using your mind to participate in it.

Art doesn’t have this aspect of articulating time, as music does. But it’s also all about being there in the moment with a painting or photograph, or whatever. Seeing becomes a kind of listening, you stay with it and see what happens, as you look at it. So there’s a similar kind of back-and-forth of attention, thinking “in your head”, but also coming back into the moment and focusing on a real-time relationship with something. And the same with poetry. Unlike fiction, poetry tends to trip you up with unexpected language, making you stop and think. But again, it’s not the kind of thinking that comes up with “ideas”, primarily. The goal is “appreciation” – which may sound trite, but I think it might be the best word we have for thinking in relation to existence.

 

[ConradDJ]

I hate to sound like some type of Eastern pundit, which I am surely not, but simply in the interest of discussing these notions I do still say that turning East would be a fruitful idea. I have yet to dig into the East's philosophy, but as you have stated it is the West who largely developed this abstractive mode of communication. Quite possibly, many of the germinal seeds for the creation of this new authentic mode of speech is already to be had in Eastern thought. Something like the Dao-de-jing with its "The way that can be named is not the true way" may help us seek thought in that direction.

I wouldn’t want to discount the Eastern traditions... if we want to think about evolving human consciousness, it’s important to get to know something about them, because they developed very sophisticated ways of “thinking” in completely different directions from the West. I put “thinking” in quotes because the word doesn’t really even have the same meaning in all these different traditions.

And personally, I very much appreciate the expression of Taoist philosophy in Tai Chi. But the Western tradition is unique, in a certain way. It started out with the Greeks, who invented a kind of “abstractive” thinking that was actually fairly primitive, in comparison with the Indian or Chinese traditions. And if you only look at Greek thought – say, through the development of neo-Platonism in the 3rd century AD – you have a tradition that’s more or less comparable to the much more sophisticated traditions that developed in the East. All of them reached a certain point of development and then essentially leveled off.

But in the West, the Greek intellectual language got taken over by Christianity, in the development of its complex body of “doctrine”. This time I put the word in quotes because no other religious tradition has anything really comparable. There was a very strange fusion here between two utterly different way of thinking – you can see it maybe most clearly in Augustine. On the one hand there was the intellectually detached, “scientific” frame of mind of the Greeks, and on the other a passionate religious commitment to finding an ultimate meaning in day-to-day human existence.

Considered as an intellectual invention, Christian doctrine is just bizarre. It makes claims about reality that are deliberately paradoxical. It was a weird compromise created through a series of intellectual battles between those who believed in rational, intellectually satisfying explanation, and those who insisted on personal faith as the “meaning of Being”. And these conflicting commitments continued through the entire Western tradition. Look at Newton, for example, who was just as deeply engaged in theological debates (from a fairly fanatical point of view, incidentally) as he was with the creation of mathematical physics.

Now of course every tradition has its own history of conflicts and resolutions. But there’s something unique about the Western tradition that has kept it evolving, questioning its own foundations again and again in a long series of intellectual revolutions. So yes, this is why I believe in the possibility of another revolution in thought.

As to your “rant”, I’m much in sympathy with you. But our culture has many sides – even here in the US. In the 1950's and 60's there was a lot of talk about “authenticity” – Erich Fromm being a good example – and the intellectual world felt very alive, very engaged. Since then we’ve seen a long period in which “intellectuals” have been essentially irrelevant to what’s going on in the world. But I don’t think that will last.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

An interesting comparison of Whitehead and Heidegger - the author concludes:

"Focusing particularly on Whitehead’s concept of prehension, I propose that the reconciliation between [the scientific and religious] tendencies of the West have been achieved. I argue that Heidegger has achieved a similar reconciliation within the context of Continental thought, but ultimately betrayed this delicate synthesis with the anti-humanistic and anti-scientific thrust of his later philosophy. Thus, I argue that it is the metaphysical vision of Whitehead which has set the dialogue between religion, science, and philosophy upon a new course."

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...gA-Ur-KzQ&sig2=rCnQtvSpXCfHALyqyKKVXw&cad=rja

 

[ConradDJ]

An interesting comparison of Whitehead and Heidegger -

Thank you, this is indeed an interesting paper, and it describes just the issue I was getting at very briefly in my last post. The direct link seems to be
http://www.metanexus.net/conference2005/pdf/weidenbaum.pdf"

Early on in his career my Dad also thought highly of Whitehead’s “process” philosophy, and I get why it’s attractive. This paper shows that if what you’re looking for is a nice, comfortable “reconciliation of these dual tendencies of the West,” Whitehead is a good place to settle.

The author says, “From Scholasticism to liberal theology, innumerable philosophical systems have been proposed to achieve the final synthesis of these two worldviews” – i.e. “the synoptic vision of the Greeks and the spiritual legacy of Abraham.” I agree that this goes to the heart of our intellectual tradition. And he seems to feel Whitehead has done a good job with this reconciliation. So I guess we should be glad that the driving conflict behind so many centuries of creative work finally got resolved, early in the 20th century. Now we can get on to other business of tidying things up, like reconciling Whitehead with Buddhism, and then we’ll be all set.

I apologize for the sarcasm, I know that’s not polite or appropriate, but I can’t help it. I don’t even want to disparage this paper – I recommend it, because I would guess most philosophy students these days don’t get this kind of viewpoint on their tradition. But when the author more or less equates the issues of Kierkegaard and Heidegger with those of William James and Whitehead, I don’t think he’s grasped what’s essential.

This paper is written from a viewpoint in which the obvious purpose of philosophy is to come up with a satisfying theory of the world. It doesn’t necessarily have to explain much – we can leave that to Science – it just needs to give us a friendly feeling that we’ve got the world more or less wrapped up and accounted for, that we have the kinds of basic concepts that can more less "explain" everything, and resolve all the conflicts that arise from our various one-sided viewpoints.

The thing is, the people on the “religious” side of this age-long conflict were not after this sort of reconciliation. They were radicals who believed in conceptual revolution, as I do too. So if you want, you can interpret Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel as a philosophical “refutation of totalization”, which is handled even more intelligently by Whitehead, and in a more balanced way. But Kierkegaard wasn’t trying to achieve a “correct” philosophical system. He was trying to break through the comfortable self-assurance of 19th century intellectuals, trying to show that with all their comprehensive theories they hadn’t even begun to think about what’s most important in human life.

I would agree with you that Whitehead was quite successful in developing a coherent intellectual system. Heidegger certainly was not. And now at the start of the 21st century, despite the radical breakthroughs in science a century ago, we’re still thinking pretty much in the same old 19th-century categories. Whitehead didn’t accomplish it single-handed, but it seems that teachers of philosophy have pretty much convinced their students that there’s no revolution on the horizon.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, I get the impression that you haven't read much Whitehead yet - I think you should before you judge him as inadequate.

And I'm still not sure what you're looking for exactly. You seem to be suggesting that philosophy is perhaps a failed enterprise from the outset - in which case the vehicles of words and concepts aren't going to be much help for you no matter their nature. If you're seeking a more spiritual route, there are many options.

There is in fact already a huge literature on Whitehead and Buddhism and these two traditions are fairly compatible in their philosophies. Here's a recent talk I gave on this topic at UC Santa Barbara (where I am a visiting scholar):

http://tamhunt.blogspot.com/2010/10/process-philosophy-buddhism-and-western.html

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

apeiron, going back to an earlier criticism of yours: I agree with Skrbina that Koestler should be labeled a panpsychist, by implication if not by self-labeling. See page 220 of Skrbina's Panpsychism in the West, in which he discusses Koestler's various arguments on this issue. Koestler's final statement, from Janus: A Summing Up, is that psyche proceeds in a step-wise fashion at all levels of existence. This is panpsychism, even if Koestler himself didn't like the label:

http://books.google.com/books?id=Zd...&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[fuzzyfelt]

I couldn’t get to page 221 in the Existentialism book, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to. The Harvard article is very interesting.

In Heidegger’s thinking, “language” always refers not just to the words and grammar and syntax, but to the whole world of communicative connection that humans grow up inside.

The Harvard article ends with the question “Do people think before they speak or do words shape their thoughts?” I would say, the experiments described here are exploring the world of human meaning in which young children already participate, before they begin learning actual words. This is important, because if we want to maintain that language is what’s most essential to being human, we need to think of “language” in this broader way.

When human “consciousness” first began to evolve, branching off from the primate mainstream, I doubt very much that it involved anything like a “language” in the narrow sense of the word. I imagine it involved giving certain kinds of experiences a special emotional weight that people could share with each other and pass on... out of which something like “symbols” could eventually emerge.

The key point is that something got passed on, from individual to individual, from generation to generation, something that kept on getting itself passed on. It’s hard to imagine what this earliest form of communicative connection might have been like, as it’s hard to imagine how self-replicating entities first got going, as the basis for the evolution of life.

We could maybe say – the essence of “language” is the feeling that at bottom it’s important to connect with others, to understand them and make ourselves understood. I would guess that whatever it was that first began to get itself passed down among our proto-human ancestors must have been able to communicate some such feeling, to hook children into to the process of reproducing what eventually became human culture.

As to my point of view being “free from confusion” – as if! It certainly is not. My hope is only that it may eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of “consciousness”. I don't feel that mysticism or panpsychism are heading in that direction.

From this I take it you are saying that although initially confusing it may offer a better alternative to firstly, something which you say only results in confusion and secondly, to pansychism ( that may have the same result). I don’t know that these are exculsive or that this offers an exhaustive choice.

But, Heidegger is presented as an alternative, with a nebulous outcome that may be better, it may ‘eventually lead toward some clarity on this matter of “consciousness”’.

Regarding how this may be appreciated, Whitehead was about hermeneutical concerns, his metaphysics being about an interrelated matrix of experience giving an interpretive context where experience has meaning. Much like Derrida, there is interest in language, and the limitations it involves. That is why I mentioned Derrida when Conrad first wrote of Heidegger here, a long time ago. Whitehead is probably more suited.

Some suggestions as to things that may be authentic here have been art including poetry and meditation. Elsewhere, Descartes mentioned dreams and madness, hence Foucoult’s “Madness and Civilization”. Silence is another.

There was mention here and elsewhere about the origins of language and ideas about a relationship with music. This may interest:
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=413657&page=15
Post #236 and the next.

“but if you are in the US I am sure you can agree that our culture is diametrically opposed to authenticity in every form. We have a culture where everyone's beliefs are equal and ever person believes they are equal and all opinions are equally valid. We have a rampant relativism…

Will you explain the conclusions drawn about inauthenticity and relativism?

 

[ConradDJ]

Conrad, I get the impression that you haven't read much Whitehead yet - I think you should before you judge him as inadequate.

Tam – You’re right. I looked in my library and found only his one little book on The Function of Reason, written for a general audience, around the same time as his major work Process and Reality. It begins with a nice summary:

“History discloses two main tendencies in the course of events. One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness there is degradation of energy... The other tendency is exemplified by the yearly renewal of nature in the spring, and by the upward course of biological evolution... Reason is the self-discipline of [this second] originative element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic.”​

Of course this doesn’t get at what’s most original in his work, but it gives a feeling for his view of the world. And whether this kind of thinking is inadequate depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. You seem to be looking for a bridge between Science and Buddhism, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. I believe you that Whitehead is more than adequate for this.

His work is not “adequate” if you believe, like Heidegger, that Western thought came to an impasse at the end of the 19th century, with Nietzsche, and has to find a new starting-point. Not because it was wrong, but because it couldn't get to what's fundamental.

I looked into Whitehead’s “process” ontology many years ago, and didn’t spend much time with it, although it has some similarity to the ideas I was trying to develop. But it seemed clear to me that he’s operating within a pretty standard intellectual frame of reference. As represented in the quotation above, he has a quite traditional view of the role of reason and is content with some rather vague notions about science. This was the opposite of what I was looking for.

The bottom line for me is that Whitehead is still envisioning the world “from outside”, from the usual objective point of view. Instead of a world of objects, it’s a world made of “actual occasions” or “experiences”... Here’s a little summary from Wikipedia:

“Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time. Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences. This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe.”​

I have no real objection to this, but it has the same sort of vague relationship to science as the previous quotation. Many have found it adequate and interesting, as an alternative to the “materialist” view. But to me the discoveries of science are much more interesting than this kind of philosophical debate. What’s actually going on in Quantum Mechanics is not going to be illuminated by these tired old categories of “mind” and “matter”.

Leibniz made a real breakthrough in imagining the world – in essence, he saw the universe not as a single vast entity but as the coordination of all our unique individual worlds. But he still framed this within the unimaginable “mind of God”, i.e. from the traditional philosophical standpoint “outside the world”. I see Whitehead’s ontology as a version of this same kind of thinking, that was revolutionary back in the 18th century, but quite calmly “rational” in the 20th.

This is inadequate only if you’re looking for a more radical viewpoint. What I found in Heidegger was a way of thinking that’s trying not to “back away” from one’s own unique perspective in a world of relationships, that’s not trying to achieve an all-embracing view of the world as a whole, but to understand the nature of existence “from inside”. Instead of seeing the world from a distance, laid out along a time-line of "before" and "after", like Whitehead, he's trying to see it "in real time", as in fact we all do.

Whether that will turn out to be a new beginning remains to be seen. But it’s an attempt to find a radically different perspective.

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

Conrad, you write: "I looked into Whitehead’s “process” ontology many years ago, and didn’t spend much time with it, although it has some similarity to the ideas I was trying to develop. But it seemed clear to me that he’s operating within a pretty standard intellectual frame of reference. As represented in the quotation above, he has a quite traditional view of the role of reason and is content with some rather vague notions about science. This was the opposite of what I was looking for."

This is not accurate. Whitehead was a truly original thinker and I think you'll find a lot of what you're looking for in his work. Remember previous posts of yours in this thread where I've said I agree 100%? I agreed because the point of view you were expressing is the point of view that Whitehead came from (which I share, not because of any blind devotion, which is not the case, but because after decades of searching for an adequate ontology I found that Whitehead's system fits the bill in many many ways).

What you're looking for is, I believe, in Whitehead and his successors. His whole point is to recognize the fundamentality of the inside - which I've mentioned a number of times to you in this thread - and then to explain the relationship of the inside to the many outsides each inside is confronted with.

No, my primary purpose is not to reconcile Buddhism with any Western philosophy. I've crafted my own philosophy/spirituality over the decades and expressed it in the in-progress book I've linked to in this thread (Mind, World, God). My ideas draw on Western process philosophy, Vedanta, Buddhism, and many other traditions.

Again: you really should read Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality. And if you find that you need some easing into his ideas, check out Griffin's Unsnarling the World-Knot or a Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality (this is the route I took).

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

I forgot to mention that Whitehead's philosophy does in fact provide key insights into quantum mechanics, as well as just about every other major area of science or philosophy. You write: "What’s actually going on in Quantum Mechanics is not going to be illuminated by these tired old categories of “mind” and “matter”."

To the contrary, David Bohm's "ontological interpretation" of QM is explicitly based in Whitehead's ideas. It resolves the wave/particle duality conundrum by suggesting that there is an actual particle in each case but there is also a "guiding wave" or "quantum potential" that influences the particle's course, like a small boat tossed on the ocean during a storm. So the wave is not a particle at the same time - they are, rather, two aspects of a single phenomenon.

I would go a bit further, however, and suggest that these two aspects can be united more closely when we consider the oscillatory nature of actual entities. So rather than there being a particle that remains a particle, and a guiding wave that represents the quantum potential, we can suggest that each particle oscillates with its wave aspect over time. When it is objective and measurable it is a particle, but between each particle aspect it is a wave, which is its subjective/prehensive aspect. This is why the double slit experiment can reveal wave or particle behavior depending on the conditions - particles aren't just windowless monads, they are, instead, feeling and choice-making entities, albeit at an extremely rudimentary level.

Other conundrums that the process view of the world helps to resolve:

- the hard problem of consciousness (discussed at length in this thread)
- spiritual experience
- "origin" of life - all things are alive to some degree because life and mind are different terms for the same thing
- free will - also fundamental, as I illustrated with the wave/particle issue (it compounds as matter compounds in its complexity, with true individuals exercising free will at every level, as opposed to mere aggregates, which are not true individuals)
- the nature of time: it is the result of all actual entities oscillating from subject to object to subject to object, which Whitehead calls the "creative advance"
- many problems in evolution, including the source of variation for evolution and a naturalization of mind

 

[PhizzicsPhan]

If apeiron is still tuned in, I wanted to respond to an earlier point I left hanging. Apeiron acknowledged the difficulty in establishing the exact point of emergence of life (and thus of mind in his theory), but said just because it's hard to pin down it doesn't mean it's not there. Just as we can't clearly distinguish the shore from the ocean, he wrote, we can't clearly distinguish life from non-life but we still know there is a transition.

His analogy is in fact strong support for my thesis of panzoism (life is omnipresent and it's all a matter of degree, literally). We can in fact exactly identify the border between the shore and the ocean because we can define clearly what "shore" and "ocean" mean. Ocean is water, which is uncontroversially defined as H2O mixed with various other trace elements and the creatures that inhabit the ocean. Shore is uncontroversially defined as solid rather than liquid - not H20. Thus we can exactly delineate the boundary between shore and ocean as the exact point where solids become H20. This point surely changes in each moment due to erosion, etc, but it is easily identifiable at any particular point.

Not so with life. Apeiron hasn't even given any particular criteria for what life is, other than to appeal to a fuzzy "epistemic cut," which seems by its very name to be an epistemological not an ontological notion.

As I've explained previously, any criteria-based notion of life falls prey to arbitrariness in selection of criteria (must life be DNA-based?) or non-discreteness, that is, the criterion at issue exists on a continuum. For example, metabolism: does self-replicating RNA metabolize as it replaces its molecules? Does an atom that exchanges electrons metabolize? Only if we circularly define metabolism as limited to cell-based life can we answer these questions in the negative.

The far simpler and cleaner approach to life is to acknowledge that "life" is simply a term we give to the more obviously complex features of our universe. Cell-based life has complexified to the point that it appears to be discontinuous, but it's really not - it's just an example of exponential complexification. We can arbitrarily choose to designate this a difference in kind, but when we think deeply we realize that's it's "just" a difference in degree.

 

[ConradDJ]

Looking again at my earlier posts in this thread, I don’t think I did justice to the concept of “authenticity”. So I’d like to try one more time. My earlier attempts at this were in https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=3225035&postcount=12".

The very odd thing about this notion in Being and Time is that it has a very personal tone – what JDStupi called “ethical”. Authenticity is about “being yourself”, as opposed to living within a point of view determined by others. Yet at the same time Heidegger presents it as the key to “fundamental ontology”, as leading to a new way of conceptualizing our world.

People often object to this notion of an “existential” basis for philosophy. E.g. Apeiron’s comment in his post #4, that “Heidegger remained too attached to the human condition and a narrowly psychological model.”

Now apart from his very personal standpoint, Heidegger’s thinking essentially follows the same path taken by Descartes and Kant. Each of them wants to make a new beginning for philosophy by going back to one’s own immediate experience of the world... since after all, this is the only point of view any of us ever have. If we can’t build philosophy on our own actual experience, then all we’re doing is accepting the stories people tell us about things.

Descartes believed that the application of reason to the data of our senses would get us to an ultimate, objective truth about the world – which is the basic perspective of modern science. Kant understood that even the world of our “immediate perception” is something we ourselves actively construct, in our minds – so there can really be no such thing as a pure, unbiased viewpoint. We have no access to reality “as it is in itself,” but we can learn the principles on which our mental constructions work. I would say, the dialogue between these two perspectives underlies most of modern thought.

Why then does Heidegger want to “personalize” this issue? Why does he want to make it about how we live our lives, about “being yourself” instead of just seeing the world from your own viewpoint?

Because so long as the issue is how we see the world and what we can know about it, we’re in effect “standing outside” the world as observers. From this “inauthentic” standpoint, we automatically conceptualize the world as a thing, an object we can look at from various points of view, about which there are facts to be found out. Even the “post-modern” perspective – which Heidegger would characterize as neo-Kantian – still tends to maintain this kind of intellectual distance from the world it constructs.

This is not a bad thing, for many purposes. But there is a basic aspect of the world it can’t grasp. I tried to summarize our situation in my second post –

We know how to describe “systems” of many kinds objectively, from the outside... and we’ve developed ways to investigate the structure of our internal subjective experience. But the deep problem is how to reconceive the “outside” world of relationships from the standpoint of one participating in it.

It’s not that our view of the world “from outside” is inaccurate. The problem isn’t that our objective scientific theories are wrong, but that they’re not fundamental – they’re operating with the wrong notion of what a foundation should look like. So we can know all about the physical world, down to an incredible level of detail, and still have no clue what the picture is showing us.

So what does “authenticity” have to do with foundations? The thing is, when we see the world as an object, a set of given facts, then we’re looking for some ultimate set of given facts as its “foundation”. Or from the Kantian perspective, we’re looking for the ultimate ground of subjectivity. In either case, what’s fundamental seems as though it ought to be something “basic” – simple and singular. We model what’s fundamental in the world on what we take as fundamental in our own being.

But for Heidegger, our “actual experience” of being is not a matter of “observing” but of participating and communicating. “Having one’s own point of view” in the world is not just an intellectual problem. “Being yourself” is hard for human beings, because we don’t exist independently of how other people see us and feel about us. For us to “be who we are” depends on being able to express ourselves to other people, and to understand and care about them, and to let them “be who they are.” This all has to work, or we have no way even to find out “who we are” authentically. Whether or not we think about it much, we all grow up inside a complicated nexus of personal relationships, and it’s never easy for us to be clear about the point of view that’s uniquely our own... even though this is the only point of view any of us ever really has.

So in a participatory world, the foundations are not simple. It’s not easy to be a basis for anything, and nothing ever depends on only one other thing as its foundation. Everything depends on a context of relationships with other things, each of which depends on some other, quite different context of relationships. And not much of what goes on in this kind of world can be nailed down as definite fact – since all the information exchanged between things is seen from some particular point of view in some particular situation.

In short, the “authentic” perspective gives us a different sense for what to look for as fundamental. The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

For Descartes, to be “authentic” meant to doubt systematically what we learn from others, to test what we believe against our own experience, in the light or reason. This is all to the good. This is the perspective of an independent mind, focused on a factual reality that just is what it is, in and of itself. But this doesn’t describe the world of interdependent existence that you and I live in.

So unless we start from the very personal difficulty of “being ourselves” in the world, we remain stuck in the “inauthentic” intellectual perspective of a detached observer, modeling the world on his own detached logic. That has worked very well, for analyzing facts and uncovering principles. But it doesn’t let us grasp what’s fundamental – i.e. where the facts are coming from, and what the principles are for. I don’t think we’ll be able to see what our world is actually doing unless we learn to see it from inside, from the unique viewpoint of something that’s helping to do it.

 

[apeiron]

In short, the “authentic” perspective gives us a different sense for what to look for as fundamental. The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

For Descartes, to be “authentic” meant to doubt systematically what we learn from others, to test what we believe against our own experience, in the light or reason. This is all to the good. This is the perspective of an independent mind, focused on a factual reality that just is what it is, in and of itself. But this doesn’t describe the world of interdependent existence that you and I live in.

So unless we start from the very personal difficulty of “being ourselves” in the world, we remain stuck in the “inauthentic” intellectual perspective of a detached observer, modeling the world on his own detached logic. That has worked very well, for analyzing facts and uncovering principles. But it doesn’t let us grasp what’s fundamental – i.e. where the facts are coming from, and what the principles are for. I don’t think we’ll be able to see what our world is actually doing unless we learn to see it from inside, from the unique viewpoint of something that’s helping to do it.

Again Conrad, you are presenting a very clear and useful argument. But I still see Peirce as offering the step forward from Descartes, Kant and the rest.

I think where these conversations keep floundering is with the urge to assert that the situation is fundamentally this (ie: monistically boiling down to authenticity, to the primacy of subjective interaction) and so not fundamentally that (ie: the antithetical notion of the inauthentic, the objective view of a collection of interacting subjects).

But what is real only exists because it is separable into figure and ground, event and context, the particular and the general, or whatever hierarchical dichotomy you choose to describe the situation.

It becomes tenditious to call one "authentic", and the other not, when nothing could actually exist without them both being present and having a precisely complementary and synergistic relationship. So stepping back, the real interaction we should be focused on is the global one between the authentic and inauthentic, using your terms, not simply the localised play of interactions which you call the authentic.

Philosophy, like all forms of knowing, is about generalisation - the forming of universal ideas or universal truths. Descartes' faculty of reason is simply the result of a history of such generalisation about the world, the accumulated knowledge of how things work, how causality operates, the invariant seeming principles by which reality self-organises.

So when you say...

The issue is not how to reduce complex facts to simple, basic facts. Instead the issue is how to understand the kinds of support each thing needs, in its relationships, in order to be what it is.

...then it is general systems principles which explain how particular points of view can even be. There has to be a context (of universalised constraints). This is what supports the existence then of localised interactions.

Imagine some kind of interaction between two points. Draw a line. It seems easy to do. At a stroke, there can be a crisp and unambiguous relationship. It seems fundamental. You can now imagine building upwards to construct a world of point-to-point authentic interactions in this fashion.

Yet to draw that line, you also needed a generalised context, an empty backdrop. The line could only be definite to the extent that the absence of line everywhere else was equally definite. It was the dichotomy between event and context that was the fundamental relationship. And this fact needs to be central to the philosophy.

Say instead you tried to draw a line in some chaotic space where there was just a foam of possibility and no simple unmarked backdrop. How could the line have been clearly a line (when it is lost in a general confusion). It would be like painting a trace on a choppy sea.

So Heidegger's approach does not tackle the necessary existence of a global context for any localised notion of an authentic interaction.

Yes, you can argue that all philosophising must start with personal experience. The subjective stance. But it also seems clear enough that our subjective mind already has a history of development and carries its own heavy freight of context.

The marks of our own thoughts in any instant are crisp and clear because they are made against a living backdrop of all the other possible thoughts that we are not having, but could have had. The information we suppress (to create the blank page of our thinking) is just as fundamental to our current mental stance as the information we represent (as the chosen marks which construct our specific state of interaction at that moment).

This is the psychological reality. Thinking involves a dichotomisation into figure and ground, particulars and generals. The two parts of the process go hand in hand (even if they seem actions in opposite directions - in your terms, one a striving after the authentic, the other a stepping back to the inauthentic). And so a complete philosophy would have to embrace that essential dynamic. It would value both the particular and the general. And seek to account for the whole of nature in terms of that most fundamental interaction.