Consciousness is a ‘ness’ term, what’s actually being described is likely multiple things.
I think the term ‘consciousness’ is a temporary way to understand the target subjects.
I think there is brain stuff.
There is brain-space and body-matter. An offline mind exists in brain-space that if combined with body-matter, creates an online mind.
Interesting,
Can we talk about what our bodies and brain is made of and share with the environment ?
We share many molecules and some varations of moleclues and atoms with the environment. Is this applicable to the discussion, does basic particles make up something in the brain that allow consciousness as you describe it or is it something else ?
Is it just large objects that bring narrative to the mind that is important, or the smaller parts we can’t see, like atoms.
It seems either can be important for us to experience consciousness, if we share building blocks in our bodies with the outside world, what does that mean ?
So my approach to language ( dialogical positivism, etc.) takes the “meaning” of words to be developed in particular dialogues. Basically I have to talk to others in order to figure out, if I can, what they are doing with a mark or noise. We humans are creative. We abuse words and call it poetry and philosophy. Of course there are “average” meanings that work for practical life, but that doesn’t get us far in this context.
I like the way you phrase it. Dualism, yes ? Well the people ( the majority ) are on your side rather than mine I think.
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“consciousness has a strange relationship with flesh.”
Have you ever heard that some plants are conscious too ?
What do you think of conscious computers ?
Thank you. Brain-space, Body-matter, and offline and online mind, and Lightframe(which is what an online mind interacts with), is my main area of study.
I agree with the point that consciousness doesn’t exist. Consciousness is just property or quality of the conscious beings. Or the capacity for acts and responses of the beings in intelligible manner sharing signs, interacting linguistically co-operating for the positive purposes with other beings in the society they exist.
But when you say “only from points of view” sounds like pseudo idealism. If the world exists only from points of view, does it mean it doesn’t exist if there were no points of view?
I don’t know. I have the usual sense that brains are very important. Can non-organic entities be conscious ? I don’t know. At the moment, I don’t know of any machines that I would call “conscious.” But I will probably believe a creature like the android played by Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina, but we might chalk this up to wishful thinking, also known as thinking.
Speaking of materials, I can’t prove that others in the usual flesh are conscious. But proof doesn’t make sense anyway unless they are. I mean the word “proof” to me means convincing another “conscious” person for whom my signs are “there” and “significant.”
I find it plausible that plants are conscious. Don’t know how I could become sure one way or another. I think sci-fi tells us how computers might convince us —often by looking like us, so that we feel the usual empathy, desire, etc.
Indeed,
You may like the next question. The objects you mention are necessary for consciousness, do they need to be physical ? I just thought of this and it has me intrested.
My position is ontological perspectivism, nicknamed ontocubism, and it both denies consciousness altogether and yet stinks of the most shameless idealism.
Yet it’s not idealism but Wittgenstein’s “pure realism.”
Indirect realism says that your experience is a picture of the world. Between the one who sees and the world is the picture. Only the picture is seen.
Pure realism says: There is no picture. There is no consciousness. There is only world. But there is only world-from-point-of-view. Can I prove this ? I don’t feel the need. All experience that I am aware of is “located.” I believe that others experience the same objects I do. But I don’t believe in a God who “sees everything at once” or “how things truly are.”
Some philosophers play a few games of Chess and then think the world is like that too. They pretend to hover over the story, or to hover over all the uses of signs in the world. Or they do some math on a screen, and they hover over that like a god. “Objective reality” turns out to be whatever so-and-so pretends to hover over like a god.
But Chess ain’t War and math is only a tiny part of the world.
Many will settle for a hidden Truth. “I don’t know the truth but I know that there is truth.” Of course I grant our tendency to crystallize or abandon beliefs about objects when those objects are perceptually present. Seeing is believing or disbelieving.
Well sort of. But “points of view” are tricky here. An organism is a thing in the world. For a particular organism this or that object is present or there ( in the form of quality like color, smell, etc.). It is in the way that the object is present that “from-a-point-of-view-ness” manifests.
For instance, look at a penny. I bet you don’t see heads and tails at the same time.
I suggest that this “from-a-point-of-view-ness” is fundamental. But it is not “internal.” It is not mindstuff but the shared world immediately. The penny you find is in my world too, and you can tell me about it.
“From-a-point-of-view-ness” and “between-us-ness.” Replacements for “immanent” and “transcendent.”
Feuerbach is huge influence too. He gets adorably sappy at the end. I see him as the official proto-Heidegger.
We feel not only stones and wood, not only flesh and bones, but also feelings when we press the hands or lips of a feeling being; we perceive through our ears not only the murmur of water and the rustle of leaves, but also the soulful voice of love and wisdom; we see not only mirror-like surfaces and spectres of colour, but we also gaze into the gaze of man. Hence, not only that which is external, but also that which is internal, not only flesh, but also spirit, not only things, but also the ego is an object of the senses.
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All is therefore capable of being perceived through the senses, even if only in a mediated and not immediate way, even if not with the help of crude and vulgar senses, but only through those that are cultivated; even if not with the eyes of the anatomist and the chemist, but only with those of the philosopher.
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Empiricism is therefore perfectly justified in regarding ideas as originating from the senses; but what it forgets is that the most essential sensuous object for man is man himself; that only in man’s glimpse of man does the spark of consciousness and intellect spring. And this goes to show that idealism is right in so far as it sees the origin of ideas in man; but it is wrong in so far as it derives these ideas from man understood as an isolated being, as mere soul existing for himself; in one word, it is wrong when it derives the ideas from an ego that is not given in the context of its togetherness with a perceptibly given You. Ideas spring only from conversation and communication. Not alone but only within a dual relationship does one have concepts and reason in general. It takes two human beings to give birth to a man, to physical as well as spiritual man; the togetherness of man with man is the first principle and the criterion of truth and universality. Even the certitude of those things that exist outside me is given to me through the certitude of the existence of other men besides myself. That which is seen by me alone is open to question, but that which is seen also by another person is certain.
Taken in its reality or regarded as real, the real is the object of the senses – the sensuous. Truth, reality, and sensuousness are one and the same thing. Only a sensuous being is a true and real being. Only through the senses is an object given in the true sense, not through thought for itself. The object given by and identical with ideation is merely thought.
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An object, i.e., a real object, is given to me only if a being is given to me in a way that it affects me, only if my own activity – when I proceed from the standpoint of thought – experiences the activity of another being as a limit or boundary to itself.
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Being as the object of being – and this alone is truly, and deserves the name of, being – is sensuous being; that is, the being involved in sense perception, feeling, and love. Or in other words, being is a secret underlying sense perception, feeling, and love.
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Only in feeling and love has the demonstrative this – this person, this thing, that is, the particular – absolute value; only then is the finite infinite. In this and this alone does the infinite depth, divinity, and truth of love consist. In love alone resides the truth and reality of the God who counts the hairs on your head. The Christian God himself is only an abstraction from human love and an image of it. And since the demonstrative this owes its absolute value to love alone, it is only in love – not in abstract thought – that the secret of being is revealed.
Yes, that is the problem for me. The complicated scaled-up world I live in leads me into so many mysteries and misconceptions, perhaps most pertinently the mystery and possible misconception of consciousness, and this is why I considered simplifying it. In my simplified model, we are each subjects with the other as object, so subject and object must be different aspects of a “fragment.” I’m keenly aware that I may be hijacking your thread so I don’t want to push this further if you don’t consider it relevant.
This is a very intriguing line, and I would be enthusiastic about hearing more. Time is a profound enigma for me, and any new angle on it would be welcome.
Have you read c’s My View of the World ? I am almost sure you have. If I recall, he does see the entire world as a unified system. So do I, basically. For me, subjects (at the moment ) are always entities themselves. The “consciousness” of the subject is the “being” of what that subject as creature perceives. The subject as creature has “all of its being” as this or that other creature’s “consciousness.”
A. J. Ayer even goes this far, if briefly. He saw that it’s implied Mill’s phenomenalism.
This general point may be nothing new to you. But it’s a slippery issue. So I try to hammer out a crucial point. Consciousness is the being of objects including those objects that are associated with “a” consciousness. Schrödinger and others might say that it’s all “fragments” of the “same” consciousness. This makes sense given the simplicity of being/consciousness/presence. All that varies is the quality, what is present, etc.
I don’t mind at all. Push away.
I will have to invoke the dreaded Heidegger on this topic, for he is the great theorist of time. Skip these perhaps if you have seen them already, posted in another thread.
It is now a matter of regarding the basic structures in which this being-in-the-world takes place and plays itself out. How is the world given? Originally not as an object of theoretical knowledge, but as an environing world in which I look and move around, do something and takecare of it.These objects are primarily not objects of theoretical knowledge, but are matters I have to deal with, which carry within themselves references to what they are used for and how they are employed, their usefulness.Material things in physics’s sense are not what is first given. The extrication of nature from the immediately given world is a complicated [thought] process.
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The immediate world is a world of practical concern. The surrounding world [Umwelt] and its objects are in their space, but this space of the world-around-us is not the space of geometry. The space of our immediate environment is essentially defined by moments of proximity and distance, near and far, in our “getting around” [Umgang] this world-around-us, by possibilities of turning toward or turning away from handy things and things on hand, and the like. It does not have the homogeneous structure of geometric space, but is rather structured by particular and distinctive places. The spacing of furniture, for example, is not given as measurements, but rather in dimensions which are disclosed in “going about” [Umgang] our occupations with them (they can be reached by hand, we can pass between them, etc.). Uncovering the space of the surrounding world is also a task of the painter.It is on the basis of this environmental space that geometric space is, by way of precise procedures, first elaborated.
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Being-in-the-world is thus being-with-one-another. Being-in-the-world is defined by this being-with-one-another even when there is factically no other human there. In the natural way of living, I myself am not given to myself in such away that I[in detachment] observe my own experiences. I am first given to myself in what I have to do, in that with which I am involved, in that in which I daily dwell. The world (room, house, city, etc.) has a certain familiarity about it. It is in this world that I see myself, fading into its background, as it were, as something real. I encounter myself in my surroundings. The environing world [Umwelt] is immediately given in my practical circumspection, as I “look around” [Umsicht]. The possibility of theoretical research arises here only by way of a certain reorientation [Umstellung]. I can reorient myself by loosening my circumspection from my practical concern and letting it become a “mere” [detached] looking around, i.e., θεωρία [theory, “theater”].
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This declaration of independence from the surrounding world and move toward the autonomy of sight is the proper source of any science. Science is the cultivation of the mere look, looking straight at a matter. But now who is this Dasein ? First and foremost, we are not ourselves. We live according to what everyone says, what everyone judges to be the case, how every one sees things, what everyone wants. It is this indefinite “everyone” that rules this Dasein. First and foremost, this everyone exerts a proper dominance over Dasein.
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Even science lives under its rule. Tradition dictates how everyone investigates, how everyone does research.This publicness of Dasein which rules our being-with-one-another makes clear that we are mostly not ourselves, but the Others. We are lived by the others. Who is this everyone? It is imperceptible, indefinable, no one. Yet it is not nothing, but rather the most proper reality of our everyday Dasein.
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This everyone-Dasein has the tendency to lose itself in the concerns of the world and so to fallaway from itself.The human being is inauthentic in its everydayness, not itself. And this being-inauthentic, not-being-itself, is the primary reality of human Dasein. This becomes most evident in a constitutive structure of human being that the Greeks saw and used in their definition of human being. The human being isaζῷον λόγονἕχον [a living being possessive ofspeech].
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For the Greeks, who loved to talk a lot, the human being is defined by its speaking. Speech is not taken here as the basic structure of our being. (Here, of course, speech should not be understood as mere sound after the fashion of psychology as a natural science). Speech is always speaking about something and expressing oneself about something to and with others. What is being discussed is through discussing uncovered and made accessible to others. Λόγος [speech] is δηλοῦν[making visible]. But the possibility of mere talk [gossip, hearsay, idle chatter, etc.] shows that human beings have a tendency to fall or lapse. Idle talk is the possibility in which the everyone takes over.
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Characteristically, speech by and large does not arise from any original knowledge of the matters, for it is in fact impossible to have seen and demonstrated everything by oneself.Abroad range of speech comes from hearsay. What characterizes repeated gossip is that, in the process of being circulated, what is said gets solidified in its validity and at the same time becomes removed from the very matter about which it is said.The more idle talk dominates, the more the world gets concealed. Everyday Dasein thus has the tendency to cover over the world as well as itself. This tendency of concealing is nothing but Dasein’s flight from itself into the public, a flight that will become important for understanding the phenomenon of time.
I’m running on fumes over here. Perhaps you were most interested in the intersection of math and time. I can dig up links tomorrow. A great topic !
Suppose five people are standing around a chair. How many chairs would ontocubism say are there? If I’m one of those five, how many me’s are there?
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Could you clarify your use of ‘same object’ here? I think of Wittgenstein asking what the word same is doing, because it can have an indefinite multiplicity of senses depending on the context. If I point to something flying in the sky and ask my friend if they see what I see, a certain sense of same is implied here , pertaining to the identification of a visual form. If I am engrossed in tracking this flying thing and my friend is busy reflecting on an argument they had with their wife while staring vacantly at the sky, then the object of his attention is clearly different than mine.
He and I are not playing the same language game involving identifying visual forms. If he shares my form of life, then he can quickly learn that game even if he has never played it before, since it will have similarities to other language games he has. If he doesn’t share my form of life, then scanning and identifying may appear nonsensical to him. From this vantage, it would seem that ‘same object’ or ‘same world’ is a contingent achievement of shared language games and forms of life rather than a fact independent of or prior to such interactions.
Husserl, in different way, makes world , same world and same object contingent and relative achievements of constituting subjectivity. “Each of us has our own perspective on the same objects in the same world” already presupposes a great deal that phenomenology is meant to investigate rather than simply accept.
From the natural attitude, we take it for granted that there is one world and that different subjects have different views of the same object. If you and I look at a tree from opposite sides, we assume there is one tree that both of us perceive. But after the epoché, Husserl suspends this naïve commitment to a mind-independent world. What then becomes thematic is not “the same tree itself” but the manner in which objectivity and worldhood are constituted in experience. In that context, Husserl would ask ‘how does an object come to be experienced as identical through changing appearances? How does another subject come to be experienced as another center of consciousness? How does the world come to be experienced as one shared world rather than a private stream of appearances? For Husserl, none of these are primitive facts.
The “same object” is a constitutive achievement. The object is given through an open horizon of profiles, yet consciousness synthesizes these changing appearances into the identity of one thing. Likewise, the “same world” is an even higher-order achievement. The world is constituted as an intersubjective horizon in which objects are available not only to me, but in principle to others, and can continue to appear from indefinitely many perspectives. It could happen that no such achievement of correlating sense takes place. In this case, the world , and with it shared objects, are ‘annihilated’:
“Let us imagine that we effect natural apperceptions, but that our apperceptions are always invalid since they allow for no harmonious concatenations in which experienced unities might become constituted. In other words, let us imagine that, in the manner described above, the whole of Nature, in the first place, physical nature, is “annihilated.””.. (Ideas I).
Husserl here isn’t eliminating all worlds, just the world of fulfilled adumbrations that the natural sciences call ‘real objects’. There is still a world of subjectively experienced sensate data after the bracketing of the natural world. But what is annihilated along with the wortld of physical objects and nature is the world of human beings and alter egos, my own psychological ego included.
“ The epoche creates a unique sort of philosophical solitude which is the fundamental methodical requirement for a truly radical philosophy. In this solitude I am not a single individual who has somehow willfully cut himself off from the society of mankind, perhaps even for theoretical reasons, or who is cut off by accident, as in a shipwreck, but who nevertheless knows that he still belongs to that society. I am not an ego, who still has his you, his we, his total community of co-subjects in natural validity. All of mankind, and the whole distinction and ordering of the personal pronouns, has become a phenomenon within my epoche; and so has the privilege of I-the- man among other men. “(Crisis)
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You’re preaching to the choir here. I came across the notion that there are multiple chairs many years ago, or the world as a multi-dimensional dream. My question wasn’t meant as a challenge from folk psychology.
I was merely asking how @j_j was looking to answer it.
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We might model this “each in the other” as a line – the two ends of the line (A and B) entail each other. We could say that in our model the line represents a relation (between A and B). By adding a third, a ‘C,’ we begin to build a structure – a network of nodes joined by relations, rather suggestive of James Ladyman’s ontic structural realism. But recall that we began with an “each in the other,” so we end up with an “all in all.” Each node would be a partial perspective on the network – a slice or ‘face’ of the structure – the way the structure ‘presents’ to that node. And that ‘presenting’ would have a richness or sparsity commensurate with the density of the node’s relations.
But when you ‘present’ in the world that is “living” me, or when I present in the world that is “living” you, there is almost an insistence that that such an appearance is a disturbance in some kind of medium or substance, and that is difficult to shake. Hence William James’s regret at having adopted Mach’s and Avenarius’s term “pure experience” – i.e. it inadvertently reifies.
Additionally, this kind of aligns with my view that William James’s radical empiricism wasn’t radical enough – i.e. he refused to cross over from his pluralism to the non-dual – possibly because of the morbid depression he suffered in the 1860s, and the way that the writings of Charles Renouvier helped him claw his way out of that abyss. But in my noddy model the structure/network may have many limbs, but bifurcations are purely internal for any particular ‘face’ (node).
More of a glimpse of what was to come I guess. Continuing with my noddy model, relations can change – i.e. the structure is ‘alive.’ Following the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, this change is given direction by the fact that entropy always increases in isolated systems (TD2), so the network must be sufficiently complex for thermodynamic systems to exist. How did it get this complex if not by some kind of process? Don’t we have a chicken-and-egg problem here? So I say that time is a profound enigma to me, but I suspect this is tangential to the discussion you were aiming at.
Would it be intentional methodology for representation of objects?
Or could it be the inherent nature of objects existing in the world? It seems doubtful it would be, because the object in the painting seems to be existing in some other world than the real world. What could be the world the object in the painting existing in?
It looks like the content of the painting is timeless. There is no trace of temporal image in it. But can time be represented or depicted in a single image?
I would just add a few pertinent points. While the spatial object is never experienced as a pure ideal unity in the way that a geometric form like a circle is, when we intend such an object as a thing, it is not just perceived as individual adumbrations either. The previous adumbrations are combined in memory and projected forward noetically into the current perspective such that we don’t just experience an isolated element but ‘a new aspect of this thing’.
In doing so we are not compressing what is transcendent about the object into a punctiform now, but we are compressing retentional and protentional horizons into a fat now. We intend the object , not its adumbrations And each new adumbration already has the sense of the whole developing sense of ‘ this self-same object’
The unitary thing is a ‘belief in action’ , but this belief can never be completely fulfilled since new, unexpected aspects of it will always appear.
I also want to point out that the process of objectivation, as a developing belief in action, is guided by a particular interest. One only sees adumbrations as adumbrations’ ‘ of something’ when the interest develops along the lines of connecting new perceptions to the validation of an ongoing belief that they belong to a persistently self-identical object.
Husserl’s account of objectification might seem to divergent strongly from Heidegger’s account of the ready to hand. For Heidegger the primary way we know the hammer is through how we are using it. By contrast, adumbrating the perspectival appearances of a spatial object would seem to involve just staring at it. But pragmatic use is also built into this account.
For Husserl we know the object, and continually strive to know it better, by doing things with it. Central to what a thing is for us is how it responds to changes in our bodily comportment toward it, what it does when we move our head or body, when we walk around it, how the kinesthetic feedback responds to touching it. In short , knowing an object as an object is about anticipating how it will respond to changes we impose on it.
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