Is the Mind Cause or Consequence?

Philosophy of Mind
82

I don’t share the prohibition against the supernatural, but I recognize that it’s a boo-word. And also the Victorian connotations of seances and spirit mediums :weary_cat: . So it is not a word I like (although worth noting in passing that ‘metaphysical’ is the Greek equivalent of the Latin ‘supernatural’).

It is here Buddhism can provide an alternative lexicon. The corresponding Buddhist term is ‘lokuttara’ which is customarily translated as ‘trans-mundane’, although you shouldn’t need an English degree to spot the convergence.

There has been an effort to ‘naturalize’ Buddhism (e.g. Owen Flanagan) but it fails to recognize that Buddhism is a religion - although that word means something else in the Buddhist contex. But we tend to bring a set of assumptions to it based on the connotations that it has in our culture.

But this is why I tend to look towards Buddhism rather than existentialism when it comes to the positive content of philosophical praxis. Husserl’s criticism of naturalism and the epochē seem to have some convergences with Buddhism (Husserl himself said so) but it lacks the ‘cultural infrastructure’ that exists in the Buddhist world, so I don’t know if it really ever took root (although I think it does explain why it is so easy for cross-cultural philosophies such as enactivism to link phenomenology and Buddhism. There’s also quite a lot of literature on the possible influences and cross-overs between Tao, Buddhism and Heidegger — subject of much commentary by the Kyoto School.)

And Buddhism does provide a reason for existence - but it’s a very different to the Christian.

But the use of Darwinian theory to justify reason is a just-so story . ‘Hey, fire and tool use! Good! Chemical and nuclear weapons! Bad!’ It extends the rationale of evolutionary fitness far beyond its domain of applicability. (An essay on this by Antony Gottlieb, It Ain’t Necessarily So.)

No, the real issue is the one given by Jacques Monod in the first quote in the OP:

The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man… Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance.

Doesn’t the notion that ‘life begins by chance’ vitiate reason? From those premisses, the ‘darwinian algorithm’ kicks in so as to maximize survival, through the physical processses of cognition, adapatation and reproduction. Hence Jonas’ charge, that in the physicalist ontology, inert matter is the norm, and life an anomaly that has to be explained. And also the attempt to re-introduce intentionality in the earliest stirrings of organic life - no, this is not simply ‘the collocation of atoms’, but a directed activity acting with a purpose in mind, namely, to persist, to carry on existing. That accounts for something essential to organic life, although in itself it doesn’t provide an explanatory framework for rationality.

83

This is a completely different topic, but nevertheless I’ll take a stab at it.

I accept the validity of the ‘in-itself’ because it allows the possibility of a distinction between what things appear to be, and how they really are. So the way I draw the distinction is between ‘the world’ (or object or thing) as it is itself, unperceived by us, and how it appears to us in sensible experienced. But this also means that you can’t bring the in itself to awareness or say what it is. As soon as you begin to refer to it, then you’ve already ‘thing-ified’ it. Then it appears as a ‘mysterious thing’ or ‘mysterious unknowable realm’, which is, I’m sure, what all Kant’s critics are so violently reacting against (even Schopenhauer!) I say it’s considerably more apophatic than they allow.

As for your ‘vision of what cannot be destroyed’, doesn’t that have to be understood in terms of the ‘union with the One’ (or, ‘the divine’ in theistic terms)? The immortal/deathless? I say so, because in the neoplatonist vision, ‘the One’ (Ta Hen) can’t be an object of knowledge. As Vervaeke remarked in one of his lectures, you can’t know the One, but only be it - this is the meaning of ‘henosis’. And the aim of philosophical praxis in that domain of discourse is the ‘way of being’ that culminates in that vision. All very high-fallutin’ words, and I make absolutely no claim to have attained to those rarefied domains of mystical experience whatsoever. But I think that’s what is meant by them. And that it requires a fierce discipline, I would imagine.

84

Darwinian theory cannot justify reason. Reason, good reasoning, is just consistent thought. The fact that reason is consistent thought is not contradicted, and its value and validity not vitiated, by the fact that reason evolved. You don’t think the ability to reason and reason better via language would have bestowed a survival advantage? I really can’t see the problem you apparently think you are addressing.

85

I’m glad you jumped in on this excellent topic. Your approach is how most understand Kant, yes ? We might say that Kant “radicalized” the concept of matter by understanding the primary qualities of an object to be “just as subjective” as the secondary qualities. This is a twist on Berkeley that saves a materialism made sublime. Harman sees even the scientific image as likewise “only appearance.” The “truth” of objects is always in the dark, like machinery in the basement one can never visit.

He defends himself against the charge of “idealism” like this in Prolegomena, which I find fascinating as the little book that came after the reception of the CPR.

Idealism consists in the claim that there are none other than thinking [4:289] beings; the other things that we believe we perceive in intuition are only representations in thinking beings, to which in fact no object existing outside these beings corresponds. I say in opposition: There are things given to us as objects of our senses existing outside us, yet we knowf nothing of them as they may be in themselves, but are acquaintedg only with their appearances, that is, with the representations that they produce in us because they affect our senses. Accordingly, I by all means avow that there are bodies outside us, that is, things which, though completely unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves, we know through the representations which their influence on our sensibility provides for us, and to which we give the name of a body – which word therefore merely signifies the appearance of this object that is unknown to us but is nonetheless real. Can this be called idealism? It is the very opposite of it.
…
That one could, without detracting from the actual existence of outer things, say of a great many of their predicates: they belong not to these things in themselves, but only to their appearances and have no existence of their own outside our representation, is something that was generally accepted and acknowledged long before Locke’s time, though more commonly thereafter. To these predicates belong warmth, color, taste, etc. That I, however, even beyond these, include (for weighty reasons) also among mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies, which are called primarias: extension, place, and more generally space along with everything that depends on it (impenetrability or materiality, shape, etc.), is something against which not the least ground of uncertainty can be raised; and as little as someone can be called an idealist because he wants to admit colors as properties that attach not to the object in itself, but only to the sense of vision as modifications, just as little can my system be called idealist simply because I find that even more of, nay, all of the properties that make up the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance: for the existence of the thing that appears is not thereby nullified, as with real idealism, but it is only shown that through the senses we cannot cognize it at all as it is in itself.

If the categories are imposed by the subject, then it’s hard to justify calling it “the thing-in-itself.” We might just say that some X imposes itself on us so that a world of objects appears in a way that is “necessary” for humans. So Kant is giving us the “form” of all possible human experience as a “mediation” of this ineffable X.

A critic might say that Kant “needs” this X precisely to avoid the charge of “idealism.” As I read him, he puts all experience “inside subjects” but understands it to be “caused” by a radically external reality that is no longer constrained by hard-wired human notions of space and time. So “something out there” is the “cause” of what is in here, but nothing in here gives us a clue about that something. Yet Kant ( perhaps fuzzy on the issue himself ) still apparently thought in terms of a “thing-in-itself” to go with the thing of perception.

Later thinkers objected to the “emptiness” of this “thing-in-itself.” I’ve suggested that Kant maybe wanted the thing-in-itself to capture the position of the-thing-for-humans in an enlarged ( trans-human) " space of reasons" for conversations between humans and intelligent life not from this planet. I should look that up. Did he read Voltaire’s early sci-fi ?

To me the strongest reading is that “the substance of the object is logical.” In other words, the “idea” of thing, its identity, is fundamentally “virtual” in the sense of inexhaustible. The thing is given in terms of its perceiver, but never wholly given. This “ideality” of the thing is precisely its “transcendence” in phenomenological terms. This fits in well with Bluoin’s reading of Husserl in terms of a “ontological phenomenalism,” which is more or less my position. For me this X is tempting to read in terms of the future — in terms of what the world “hides from me” in order to show me what it does shows me. To be a subject is to be subject to a darkness beyond one’s torch. God as the “infinite” subject is also the non-subject, though Feuerbach would offer the plurality of human subjects, time-binding experience through language, as a kind of God-in-progress.

86

I tried to get a pdf of the actual texts, but I could only find this so far:

Kant was not the first in whom the ‘starry heavens’ above us inspired awe and wonder. For Kant, who was firmly convinced of the existence of inhabitants of other worlds, these heavens were inhabited. He is certain that ‘If it were possible to settle by any sort of experience whether there are inhabitants of at least some of the planets that we see, I might well bet everything that I have on it. Hence I say that it is not merely an opinion but a strong belief (on the correctness of which I would wager many advantages in life) that there are also inhabitants of other worlds.’ In this statement by Kant in no less a work than the Critique of Pure Reason one can, on the one hand, recognize a reflection of Kant’s earlier convictions and expositions, on the other hand, the context of the citation and the contemporary background are, of course, relevant.

This suggests ( to me anyway ) that the thing-in-itself is basically a “trans-human” concept. The thing could maintain its logical identity between species who “mediate” it differently. We can talk with those born blind about the objects we see. Likewise, aliens with more sense organs may be able to discuss perceptual objects with us, which they perceive quite differently. The “thing in itself” would be the stable “identity” of the discussed object within the conversation.

87

Right. So we agree that this “thingification” is problematic.

First, I’ll give you part of that Gadamer quote:

If we want to quote another witness for this third element in the nature of experience, the best is Aeschylus. He found the formula—or, rather, recognized its metaphysical significance as expressing the inner historicality of experience—of “learning though suffering” (pathei mathos). This phrase does not mean only that we become wise through suffering and that our knowledge of things must first be corrected through deception and undeception.
…
Understood in this way, the formula is probably as old as human experience itself. But Aeschylus means more than this. He refers to the reason why this is so. What a man has to learn through suffering is not this or that particular thing, but insight into the limitations of humanity, into the absoluteness of the barrier that separates man from the divine. It is ultimately a religious insight — the kind of insight that gave birth to Greek tragedy. Thus experience is experience of human finitude.
…
The truly experienced person is one who has taken this to heart, who knows that he is master neither of time nor the future. The experienced man knows that all foresight is limited and all plans uncertain. In him is realized the truth value of experience. If it is characteristic of every phase of the process of experience that the experienced person acquires a new openness to new experiences, this is certainly true of the idea of being perfectly experienced. It does not mean that experience has ceased and a higher form of knowledge is reached (Hegel), but that for the first time experience fully and truly is. In it all dogmatism, which proceeds from the soaring desires of the human heart, reaches an absolute barrier. Experience teaches us to acknowledge the real. The genuine result of experience, then—as of all desire to know—is to know what is. But “what is,” here, is not this or that thing, but “what cannot be destroyed” (Ranke).

We might understand the One as “time itself.” To say that being is time is to make a radical statement about the permanent continuing revelation of the world. I “give up” on a “final vocabulary” that will resist the future’s power to surprise me.

In this case, I agree with Heraclitus that

Fire in its advance will judge and convict all things.

Yes I also think philosophy is appropriately directed toward some “repeatable” moment of insight. Above, this “being of The One” sounds like one being-of-the-One that is available who all who work hard enough to realize or activate this universal human potential.

Heidegger’s concept of authenticity can be understood like a marriage of these too seemingly opposed goals. In order to “be” the “one” of “time” properly, I have to find the infinite in the finite. I reactivate tradition as a genuine future for myself, which will always involve novelty. The repetition in spirit is innovation and even destruction at the level of letter.
The repeatable moment of insight is not perfectly repeatable, for the subject who repeats it is not abolished. It’s more like the same melody on a different instrument.

88

A profound saying from a profound philosopher.

1 Like
89

You know Heidegger better than I do, but I had the idea that in his later lectures, he talked about ‘objectification’ and the ‘objectifying consciousness’. It’s actually a state or a way of being that is so instinctive to us that it just seems natural.Hence the continual emphasis on objectivity as the criterion of truth. It can be distinguished from the ‘no-thing-ness’ of e.g. the mystic.

This is Kant distancing himself from the ‘problematical idealism’ of Berkeley and Descartes, which seemed to call the reality of the external world into question.

Right. That’s why I said that Kant creates a problem with the expression ‘ding an sich’. Perhaps it might have been better to simply leave it as ‘an sich’ - the ‘in itself’. When asked 'what do you mean the ‘in itself’ the answer is ‘that of which we cannot speak.’ But by designating it ‘ding’ (‘thing’) you’ve already made it an ‘unknowable something’ which is bound to provoke scepticism.

1 Like
90

I don’t think quite that way. My position is that consciousness is a fundamental property of matter. It is the capacity to subjectively experience. Because of it, everything subjectively experiences itself. When the thing in question is a human, the combination of sensory input, information processing systems, and feedback loops is subjectively experienced as the awareness and self-awareness we are familiar with. We can, as @Wayfarer recently said, stand back from our own existence. We can stand back from all existence, think abstractly, imagine things that don’t exist, and cause them to come into existence.

So it’s not subjectivity that is casual. It is something with sufficient complexity and intelligence subjectively experiencing itself (it can’t not subjectively experience itself) that is causal.

91

As I read him, this is a theme from the earliest days. Philosophers have tend to privileged the object as it shows itself to the theoretical gaze. The “true” hammer has volume and weight, but the “true” hammer is not “too heavy” or “the one my dad gave me when I was 14.”

Heidegger tried to point out the way that objects are mostly there for us in life as tools that we take for granted. I don’t address the doorknob or the spatula theoretically for the most part. I “automatically” turn the doorknob to exit the room. I “automatically” reach for the spatula when it’s time to flip the burger.

The typical “objective ontologist” will tell you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They will tell you that “value” and “beauty” are painted on like “color qualia.” But Heidegger would say that experience isn’t like that. I “suffer” the value or disvalue of objects. Objects “radiate” their quality. The sign ( the text ) “radiates” its significance.

This dualist approach tries to “construct” the world in terms of its deep presumption that the mathematical/theoretical gaze gives the “true” object. Since life isn’t like that, the theory requires a strange story that gets us back from the dessicated X-ray to the lifeworld in which this X-ray game makes sense in the first place.

1 Like
92

I understand. Whereas Husserl’s criticism was more that science tended to treat the reified abstractions of physics as fundamentally real and foundational.

1 Like
93

As I understand it, Husserl followed Heidegger on this issue to some degree. Even in Heidegger’s early lectures, when he was Husserl’s assistant, he criticized Husserl’s privileging of the theoretical gaze. Husserl, in his earlier days, was against historicism, basically because it threatened atemporal truth. Heidegger, who loved Dilthey, tells his students in a early lecture, in a subtle criticism of Husserl, that

Anxiety in the face of relativism is anxiety in the face of philosophy.

For Heidegger, as I understand him, “truth” as uncovering is not a property of propositions but a name for being itself. Existence is “in” the truth and “in” the untruth at all times. This is light and darkness, or ongoing revelation of the world that can never be compressed into a here and now and final saying. (Yet philosophers, including Heidegger, can’t resist trying, and this itself is a try, you might say.)

94

Yes. I read somewhere recently that Heidegger spoke metaphorically of ‘throttling the old man’ (in reference to Husserl) although I can’t find the reference again. The heuristic I’m working with in based more on ‘The Crisis of the Western Sciences’ and Husserl’s criticism of naturalism. It’s quite different to Heidegger. I’ve never read Being and Time, aside from desultory attempts at the first few chapters, and I feel ambiguous about Heidegger as an historical figure. Less so with Husserl.

95

Sure. I understand. To me Heidegger is like a great painter who also beat his neighbor to death with a crowbar. It does make celebrating the paintings awkward.

More generally, I feel “forced” to talk about “great philosophers” rather than the issues themselves because this is just how humans tend to organize themselves. Kojeve used Hegel as a puppet to present his own philosophy. Plato used Socrates. It’s a way to mitigate the fundamental offensiveness of philosophy as a collision with taken-for-granted common sense.

Yet I think name-dropping also has the more legitimate function of indicating to others that one has read this or that, that one isn’t coming in historically blind. A young would-be-great-painter who never looks at the paintings of others “might” be great but is probably a second-rate accidental repetition.

96

I don’t view the categories as imposed by the subject, though. The categories come about through reflection on the nature of experience. They are “induced” by experience, an experience which is not created by us as cognitive agents, but imposed on us by the nature of things, which includes of course the nature of our bodies and senses.

To refer to the “thing in itself” is simply to signal the realization that there is something external to the body that precognitively interacts with the senses such as to impose on our cognition a world of things of broadly intersubjectively invariant and thus reliable, recognitive character.

That is how I interpret Kant. I see a potential reversal in Kant of the usual ‘empirically real/ transcendentally ideal’ formulation―if we understand that to be the qualification of what is real for us, we can also understand that from an “absolute” perspective the empirical or phenomenal is ideal (dualistically conceptual through and through) and the transcendental or noumenal is real, as in actual in the sense of ‘what really acts’ and is non-conceptual, non-dual.

That is the way I view it and of course I don’t expect agreement and I welcome critique from others.

2 Likes
97

I agree with you here. So I was doing an immanent critique of Kant. My interest in Plato and Saussure is connected to the “ideality” that is prior to “inside” and “outside” as being themselves categories or “ideal articulations” of experience/world.

1 Like
98

Sounds like a Harman sort of but also like how I understand Plato’s chora. Hegel called the subject “pure negativity.” Is this connected ? All that is “given” is transcended in our taking it as given. What gives this given ? There is a pointer within the given that points outside of it, almost paradoxically.

99

Right. But for me the deeper structure is not inside and outside the body. The deeper structure is the forum — a sharing of the world with others through language. So for me the “space between subjects” is “external reality” in its “deep form.” What is behind me, not visible to me, but visible to the person facing me, is a great example of this.

Those born blind provide the sighted with an analogical leap to alien sense organs that make the sighted humans “blind” relative to these postulated alien sense organs. The alien is “in the forum” with a different mode of empirical access to objects in “the (enlarged) space of reasons.” Given that Kant was a strong believer on intelligent life on planets within this solar system, it’s a tempting reading of his authorial intention.

Of course this is only one approach to the darkness implied by the very notion of specified subjectivity.

100

I’m circling back to this question, because it’s important. It’s easy to assume that the faculties of reason and language evolved by natural selection due to the evolutionary advantages provided by them. But it’s still a reductionist account, because it attempts to explain reason in other terms, i.e. as favourable from an evolutionary viewpoint. I think this is a fallacy — possibly a version of the naturalistic fallacy.

This is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. Here he makes the point explicit:

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one’s psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one’s reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside–rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.

This ‘stepping outside’ means to judge the matter according to another criterion, in this case, biological adaptation. Whereas thinking ‘from the inside’ means from ‘inside reason’: it is such and such, because it is rational to think it thus.

Furthermore, the way it is understood by evolutionary naturalism, there’s no intrinsic connection between reason and reality, because reality is the product of physical forces which are ‘blind’ (per Dawkin’s “Blind Watchmaker”). Materialism never tires of telling us that the Universe is devoid of meaning, so how is it that reason has any intrinsic connection to it? Does it have? Or is it simply useful and powerful, in a utilitarian sense? Providing the resources to ‘master the forces that beset us’?

Again, it is a very limited and utilitarian conception of reason in my view.

101

We might say that “mechanical causality” is best “unfolded” in terms of a much larger and richer space of inferential norms.

I can explain, while enacting time-binding responsible selfhood, why I “had to do” what I did,in terms of a physical situation that I expected to unfold according to warranted expectations expressed in terms of “the laws of nature.”

My thread on “the past” is really about our strange situation, where we have theories about the “time before consciousness.” What do these claims mean exactly ? People tend to “imagine the past precisely as unimaginable.” Peirce’s approach is daring. Statements about the past are part of a comportment toward the future. To say that Yellowbeard buried a treasure here long ago is to say that I should expect to perceive treasure, if I dig here, etc. Claims about the past look to be empirical only if interpreted as claims about the future.