It is coded in the transmission and the reading of the code is demonstrated (acted out) by the teacher and imitated by the student, who learns to repeat the demonstration themselves. Over time and many more lessons this constitutes a knowledge (an understanding of that which is coded) by the student. This knowledge can include the concept of an ideal 7 and a universal 7. Resulting in two people, the teacher and the student having this knowledge about 7 in their consciousness.
Where these conceptions of 7 came from is from the first person who figured it out by themselves and it has been transmitted to every other person who also now has this knowledge by the above process.
We have a thought. This thought can be either non-material (mind) or material (brain).
How does this thought know whether it is non-material or material?
A thought can only be about something external to itself. It is logically impossible for a thought to be about itself, meaning that it is logically impossible for a thought to know whether it is non-material or material.
As has been said in the OP (edit) “The ancient question therefore remains: whether mind is simply another physical process, or whether the activity of reason belongs to a different order altogether”
The ancient question not only remains, but will always remain.
That is still shaped by the view of ‘all learning from experience’. As remarked, in the Phaedo, Socrates presents the argument that the knowledge of equals is innate - ‘in the soul when born’, as he would put it (see The Phaedo, 73e onwards). I’ve already acknowledged that this is regarded as archaic, but that the point still remains that humans have the innate capacity to learn such concepts. Remember that the root of the word ‘educate’ is ‘to bring forth.’
That book you referred me to is Husserl’s ‘Lectures on Internal Time-Consciousness’. I have located an online version, although haven’t had the opportunity to read much of it. However, the first chapter is calle ‘The Exclusion of Objective Time’. That chapter starts with:
Involved in this, as in any other such analysis, is the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, or conviction concerning Objective time (of all transcendent pre-suppositions concerning existents).
This seems impossible to reconcile with your claim that for Husserl, time is constituted ‘within the world’, which would seem to be implied in your analysis.
I think here is where you are failing to grasp the meaning of ‘the phenomenological stance’. This is that that the very distinction between subject and object is itself constituted within the field of intentional consciousness. There is no in-itself subject confronting an in-itself object. There is always already a structured intentional relationship in which object and subject are co-constituted poles. So the vacillitation between ‘given with the object’ or ‘constituted by the subject’ is the very tendency which phenomenology seeks to critique.
It is implicit in what I have said that I am not speaking of objective time but of time immanent to consciousness. But what we must consider is why the concepts of time and space, against Husserl, become necessary and impose their necessity.
But it remains constituted in and for consciousness. The universal as a noema, says Husserl, belongs neither to consciousness nor to the world (neither real nor reell). This raises a problem: there is a passivity of consciousness with regard to the noema, and this is where the question of its origin arises. If it belongs neither to consciousness nor to the world, then where does it come from? The problem of the constituted and the non-constituted arises. And that is what I have been referring to when I speak of the universal that gives itself or is constituted by the subject.
By you, in the OP; the primary reason I spoke up in the beginning here at all: total agreement w/ the notion of a higher cognitive power in the architectonic human intellectual order.
Coincidentally enough, and given that particular theoretical purview, precisely under which universals are given their authority and justifications.
This contradicts what he said in The Origin of Geometry, where Husserl insists that geometrical ideality does not fall from the sky. It originates in the prescientific, perceptual lifeworld — in the manipulation of empirical shapes, surfaces, and bodies. The geometer performs an idealization that transforms vague morphological types (the “more or less round,” the “roughly straight”) into exact, limit-shapes. The world is the ground from which ideal objects are lifted.
Yes. But one could always counter this by arguing that ideality is already present, so to speak, for a hypothetical first mathematician or the first geometer. That is why I have explored the temporality of ‘solitary’ consciousness to show that there is already a process of idealisation within it, similar to what occurs outside it in cases of transmission. Within consciousness, ideality is constituting itself as duration: the permanence of the object through different moments of consciousness. But it is also my intention to show that this duration or permanence of the ideal or universal object requires retentions; the ideal object leaves behind, like a comet’s tail, immediately preceding perceptions as persisting, but these perceptions are present as absent, like a sign or a trace.
It is at this point that I ask myself whether this structure of idealisation immanent to consciousness is not the same as external processes of idealisation (language, writing), where we deal with signs, marks and traces, just as within the interiority of consciousness we deal with retentions. Writing, for example, works with marks where an absence is present (to which the sign points). We deal with traces of the past which we then internalise and reactivate the ideal and universal meaning of the object. But this introduces temporality and space both within consciousness and outside it in the acts of transmission, thereby achieving idealisation and universality.
Within consciousness, temporality is spaced out; this spacing is inseparable from temporal deferral; there is no pure presence of the object (the 7, equality) in itself, but always a spacing-in-time. A space is inscribed, established and opened up in the world.
The question “where does it come from” is itself the recursive trap the OP identified. It seeks an origin for the condition of intelligibility within the domain that intelligibility makes possible. Socrates’ answer — that it is an innate power of the soul — is regarded as archaic, but not because it has been philosophically superseded. No alternative account of equal explanatory power has been produced. The hard problem of consciousness, the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, the normative dimension of reason — these remain precisely because the question “where does it come from” cannot be answered from within the naturalist framework without circularity. To do so is to try to ‘explain explanation’ from a perspective outside of it.
Naturalism will say ‘the world.’ Phenomenology will say ‘the world as experienced.’ That is the difference in a nutshell.
But then you are falling into a kind of idealism insofar as you are attributing intelligibility not to the object but to consciousness which constitutes it as intelligible. In other words, it is what I have already pointed out: we remain faced with the problem of the intentionally-constituted/unconstituted. Yet you seem to accept that consciousness constitutes the ideal object as an ideal. However, according to Husserl’s analyses, there is a passivity of consciousness with regard to the noema (the ideal object), which is neither real nor reell which imposes us necessarily to question its ideal constitution beyond consciousness. And from there to everything else I have referred to.
But by then you are already in the epoché. Yet, in The Origins of Geometry, Husserl has not yet carried out such a move regarding the worldly origins of the ideal objects as he describes them.
That things are intelligible to us does not mean that there is “a domain of intelligibility.” It is, rather, that we are intelligent animals who try to understand things, and revise our stories from time to time.
None . Although one might criticise it for ignoring the passivity of consciousness with regard to the noema, which belongs neither to the world nor to consciousness.
Yes, very much so. I was addressing where the concepts found in human knowledge come from. For each concept there is a lineage tracing back to the first person who worked it out for themselves, a light bulb moment (It’s possibly that another person also worked it out on a different continent, independently).
Once it has dawned on that first person then social transmission occurs.
Human knowledge is a web of these lightbulb moments and their interconnections.
As for the innate capacity, well this can be seen well developed in the animal world, in the ability of animals to adapt to their environment. This then became accelerated with intelligence, where in a sense the process of adaptation became internalised within the mind.
Yes, in my cat analogy, the cat sees it’s world through a lense of ideality, although it is entirely unconscious, the ideality is innate in the cat, as in people.
I’m with you the temporality component is interesting.
Yes, I visualise this as a standing wave, which manifests as a steady state, but is actually emergent from the complex processing, or movement in the system.
Where does “space” come from here? You talk about a temporal separation, and you call this a “spacing” out, but that’s not literal unless “time” means the same as “space”. So your conclusion: “A space is inscribed, established and opened up in the world.”, is really an equivocation. You have simply used “space” to describe a separation in time, then moved on to use “space” to describe what is “opened up in the world”. That appears to me like direct, unabashed, intentional equivocation.
Remember that we are not talking about temporality as something separate from experience. In this case, spatiality also applies to experience, because it is experience that is temporalised. It is therefore said that experience, in its differentiation (retention, protention), requires the concept of space in order to be described. If the present differs from the immediate past (or trace of the past), it is due to a spatial separation or transition, however minimal. Here the ideas of limit, space, differentiation and separation, spacial transition, coexistence impose their necessity. Hence, experience is spaced out. Remember that space is the framework of coexistence. And memory is not merely the past; it coexists with the present.
I don’t think so. Suppose someone says something to me, and by the end of the sentence the beginning is a memory. That is not a spatial separation, it is a temporal separation. And this is the same with all sensations. I see a car passing in front of me, and it is at first to the left. That’s a memory by the time I see the car to the right. That again, is a temporal separation. That there is a spatial distance between where the car was to the right and tp the left, is inferred, not experienced. What is experienced is only the temporal difference, one is in the memory, and the other comes after. it would be wrong to portray that as a spatial separation, between what’s in my memory, and what my mind is experiencing now.
. Although one might criticise it for ignoring the passivity of consciousness with regard to the noema, which belongs neither to the world nor to consciousness.